Fischer - Gustav Mahler

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G U S TAV M A H L E R 8
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http://avaxhome.ws/blogs/ChrisRedfield
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JENS MALTE FISCHER 6
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GUSTAV MAHLER 8
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T R A N S L AT E D B Y S T E WA RT S P E N C E R 10
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YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 40
NEW HAVEN AND LONDON 41R
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First published in English by Yale University Press in 2011
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9 English translation copyright © 2011 Stewart Spencer
20 Originally published under the title Gustav Mahler: Der fremde Vertraute by Jens Malte
1 Fischer © 2003 Paul Zsolnay Verlag, Vienna
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All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form
3 (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and
4 except by reviewers for the public press) without written permission from the publishers.
5 For information about this and other Yale University Press publications, please contact:
6 U.S. Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.com
7 Europe Office: [email protected] www.yalebooks.co.uk
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
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9 Fischer, Jens Malte.
Gustav Mahler / Jens Malte Fischer.
30 p. cm.
1 ISBN 978–0–300–13444–5 (cl : alk. paper)
2 1. Mahler, Gustav, 1860-1911. 2. Composers—Austria—Biography. I. Title.
ML410.M23F45 2011
3 780.92—dc22
4 [B]
2011011115
5 Set in Minion Pro by IDSUK (DataConnection) Ltd
6 Printed in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group, Bodmin, Cornwall
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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
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9 The Publishers acknowledge the generous assistance of The Hampsong Foundation in the
publishing of this book
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For Thomas Hampson, 7
friend, and great interpreter of Mahler’s music 8
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For the chief goal of biography appears to be this: to present the subject in his
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temporal circumstances, to show how these both hinder and help him, how he
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uses them to construct his view of man and the world, and how he, providing
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he is an artist, poet, or author, mirrors them again for others.
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1
J OHANN WOLFGANG VON G OETHE ,
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From the Preface to From My Life: Poetry and Truth (1811–13)
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Contents 7
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List of Illustrations ix 4
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1 What Did Mahler Look Like? An Attempt at a Description 1 7
2 Small Steps: Kalischt and Iglau (1860–75) 12 8
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3 Studies in Vienna (1875–80) 42 20
4 The Summer Conductor: Bad Hall (1880) 90 1
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5 Emotional Ups and Downs in Laibach (1881–2) 99
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6 For the Last Time in the Provinces: Olmütz (1882–3) 108 4
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7 Presentiment and a New Departure: Kassel (1883–5) 114
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8 The Avid Reader: Mahler and Literature 125 7
9 Becoming Mahler: Prague (1885–6) 140 8
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10 The First Symphony 148 30
11 Life’s Vicissitudes: Leipzig (1886–8) 157 1
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12 Notes on Mahler’s Songs 168
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13 Lowland Dreams: Budapest (1888–91) 178 4
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14 The Conductor 191
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15 The Second Symphony 202 7
16 Self-Realization: Hamburg (1891–7) 208 8
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17 Jewishness and Identity 251 40
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VIII CONTENTS
1 18 The Third Symphony 274

2
19 The God of the Southern Climes: Vienna (1897–1901) 282
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4 20 Mahler’s Illnesses: A Pathographical Sketch 321
5 21 The Fourth Symphony 333
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7 22 Vienna in 1900: Alma as a Young Woman (1901–3) 340
8 23 The Fifth Symphony 385
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24 ‘Nothing is lost to you’: Faith and Philosophy 392
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1 25 The Sixth Symphony 409
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26 Opera Reform – Early Years of Marriage – Mahler’s
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4 Compositional Method (1903–5) 416
5 27 The Seventh Symphony 458
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7 28 The Administrator – Contemporaries – Signs of Crisis (1905–7) 464
8 29 The Eighth Symphony 519
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30 Annus Terribilis (1907) 527
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1 31 Das Lied von der Erde 562
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32 Starting Afresh: New York (1908–11) 568
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4 33 The Ninth Symphony 611
5 34 Crisis and Culmination (1910) 620
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7 35 The Fragmentary Tenth Symphony 662
8 36 ‘My heart is weary’ – The Farewell 666
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37 Mahler and Posterity 691
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List of Abbreviations 707
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4 Notes 709
5 Select Bibliography 734
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7 Index 740
8 Acknowledgements 765
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Illustrations 7
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Rights were not granted to include these illustrations in electronic media. 10
Please refer to print publication. 1
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(between pages 246 and 247) 4
1 Mahler walking at Fischleinboden, near Toblach, 1909. (Österreichische 5
Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) 6
2 Bernhard Mahler. (Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris) 7
3 Marie Mahler. (Médiathèque Musicale Mahler, Paris) 8
4 A postcard showing Mahler’s birthplace in Kalischt, Moravia. 9
(Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; 460.707-B) 20
5 Mahler, 1865 or 1866. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) 1
6 The Main Square in Iglau, Moravia, mid- to late nineteenth century 2
(Muzeum Visočyni, Jihlava, Czech Republic) 3
7 Siegfried Lipiner. (Internationale Gustav-Mahler-Gesellschaft, Vienna) 4
8 Mahler in 1881. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) 5
9 The ‘Zum Höllengebirge’ guest house at Steinbach on the Attersee. 6
(Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) 7
10 Gustav Mahler and his sister Justine, 1899. (Österreichische 8
Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) 9
11 Anna von Mildenburg as Brünnhilde in Wagner’s Die Walküre. 30
12 Selma Kurz, May 1900. (Baron Nathaniel Rothschild, Vienna) 2
13 Mahler’s house at Maiernigg. (Photo by Eric Shane) 3
14 Alma Schindler, c. 1898. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) 4
15 Mahler on his way to or from the opera house, Vienna, c. 1904. 5
16 Mahler triumphs over his predecessor Wilhelm Jahn: a cartoon by Theo 7
Zasche, 1897. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna) 8
17 The Vienna Court Opera House, c. 1900. (Österreichische 9
Nationalbibliothek, Vienna; 233.127-C) 40
41R
X ILLUSTRATIONS
1 (between pages 502 and 503)

2 18 Mahler, Vienna, 1907, photographed by Moriz Nähr. (Médiathèque
3 Musicale Mahler, Paris)
4 19 ‘Reichmann is going too!’ Cartoon of Mahler from the Wiener Zeitung,
5 c. 1902.
6 20 Alfred Roller’s design for the prison courtyard in Beethoven’s Fidelio,
7 mixed technique (1904). (Österreichische Theatermuseum, Vienna)
8 21 Natalie Bauer-Lechner. (Arthur Spiegler, Vienna)
9 22 Detail from Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven frieze, Secession Building, Vienna.
10 (Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna)
1 23 Mahler, Max Reinhardt, Carl Moll and Hans Pfitzner in the garden at Carl
2 Moll’s villa, 1905. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna)
3 24 Alma Mahler with her two daughters, Maria and Anna, 1906 (Österre-
4 ichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna)
5 25 Mahler with his daughter Anna at Toblach, 1909. (Österreichische
6 Nationalbibliothek, Vienna)
7 26 Mahler, New York, 1909, photographed by A. Dupont. (Kaplan
8 Foundation, New York)
9 27 Cartoon from the time of the first performance of the Sixth Symphony
20 in Vienna, Die Muskete, 19 January 1907. (Internationale Gustav-Mahler-
1 Gesellschaft, Vienna)
2 28 Mahler conducting a rehearsal for his Eighth Symphony in the Munich
3 Exhibition Hall, 1910. (Internationale Gustav-Mahler-Gesellschaft, Vienna)
4 29 Mahler, possibly October 1910 on his final voyage from Europe to
5 New York or on the return journey, April 1911. (Internationale Gustav-
6 Mahler-Gesellschaft, Vienna)
7 30 Auguste Rodin’s bust of Mahler (1909). (Brooklyn Museum of
8 Modern Art)
9 31 Mahler’s grave, Grinzing,Vienna. (Österreichische Nationalbibliothek,
30 Vienna)
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What Did Mahler Look Like? 7
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An Attempt at a Description 9
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T IS ONE of the many curious aspects of Alma Mahler’s reminiscences of her 4
I husband that she never attempts to describe his physical appearance. In her
own memoirs she deals with Mahler in a remarkably cursory manner, and yet
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even in the volume nominally devoted to her recollections of her husband we 7
are not told what he looked like. True, she lacked the art of physical description, 8
although she was certainly capable of highlighting certain features, notably 9
in her thumbnail sketch of Alexander Zemlinsky: ‘He was a hideous gnome. 20
Short, chinless, toothless, always with the coffee-house smell on him, 1
unwashed’1 – a sketch of this kind would at least have offered the reader a clue, 2
but Mahler himself is not given a face by her. Readers may make of this what 3
they like. We are obliged, therefore, to rely on other eyewitnesses: 4
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Small in stature, pale and thin: the lofty forehead of his long face framed in 6
blue-black hair, and behind glasses, remarkable eyes; lines of sadness and of 7
humour furrowed a countenance across which an astonishing range of 8
expression passed as he spoke to the various people round him. Here was the 9
incarnation of Kreisler, the arresting, alarming, demoniac conductor envis- 30
aged by the youthful reader of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s fantastic tales.2 1
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Bruno Walter’s first impression of Mahler was entirely typical: this is how many 3
people saw him when they met him for the first time. Time and again the name 4
of Kreisler is invoked by contemporaries attempting to give literary expression 5
to their impressions – and not just their physical impressions. At a somewhat 6
later date, Ferruccio Busoni was similarly – and even more implausibly – 7
compared to Kreisler, even though the two composers bore absolutely no 8
resemblance to one another. None the less, Mahler and Busoni shared a love of 9
Hoffmann, and it is unfortunate that these two great will-o’-the-wisp-like 40R
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figures did not become better acquainted until the very end of Mahler’s life, 41R
2 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 when Busoni was on the ship that brought the fatally ill Mahler back to Europe.
2 Observers who, like the music critic Ferdinand Pfohl, regarded Mahler with
3 scepticism and hostility or at least with profound bewilderment described him
4 as a ‘Lucifer’ figure. Pfohl thought that Mahler looked like someone who had
5 despaired in God and who in consequence had been cast down from the light
6 into the darkness – in particular, Pfohl was thinking of the Lucifer figure of
7 Abadona in Klopstock’s religious epic The Messiah. His description also
8 includes a reference to Mahler’s Jewishness:
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10 What did this Lucifer look like? During his time in Hamburg, his head,
1 tapering to a pyramid-like point, and his oval face still revealed the rounded
2 lines of youth. His gaze from his dark, flashing, Semitic eyes was penetrat-
3 ingly keen, his lids slightly reddened, as is often the case with people
4 who have to do too much reading and who work too much at night. In his
5 appearance, he was small, dainty, elegant; there was a hint of gracefulness
6 about him.3
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8 Numerous other impressions could be cited, all of them surprisingly similar:
9 Mahler was not the sort of person who left different impressions on different
20 people. Time and again we encounter the same characteristics: the small, slim
1 body, the unusually animated features and the nervous, uncoordinated move-
2 ments, including the ‘twitching foot’ that clearly struck every observer and to
3 which we shall shortly return. And just as commentators repeatedly referred to
4 the ‘magic’ of Mahler’s conducting, so they frequently fell back on the term
5 ‘demonic’ when seeking to describe his personality and outward appearance.
6 Not even Bruno Walter, who knew Mahler as few others did, could avoid the
7 term. At the same time Walter added a further Hoffmannesque character to
8 that of Kapellmeister Kreisler: the archivist Lindhorst in The Golden Pot,
9 whom the student Anselmus thinks he can see flying away into the dusk in the
30 form of a vulture.4
1 If we want to move away from the predictable unanimity of these superficial
2 descriptions and probe a little deeper, we need to turn to two texts that bring us
3 much closer to Mahler’s physical appearance. The first consists of the remin-
4 iscences of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, who was Mahler’s closest confidante over
5 a period of many years. (Like Alma Mahler and the composer’s sister, Justine,
6 she will generally be referred to by her first name only in the course of the
7 following narrative.) The other is the preface to the iconographic study of the
8 composer that was published by Alfred Roller eleven years after Mahler’s death
9 under the title The Portraits of Gustav Mahler.5 This last-named volume is
40 rightly regarded as the finest description of Mahler by a colleague and friend
41R who, as stage and costume designer, worked closely with Mahler on his
WHAT DID MAHLER LOOK LIKE? 3
operatic reforms in Vienna. Although Roller got to know Mahler at a relatively 1

late date, he had the advantage not just of knowing him personally over a period 2
of several years but of being able to bring to bear on him the trained eye of a 3
painter and draughtsman, allowing him to register bodies and faces consider- 4
ably more precisely than normal people, who tend to be much less observant. 5
Roller’s descriptions are a stroke of good fortune for those of us who want to 6
know something about Mahler. And if we look at surviving portraits of the 7
composer, which we can do most manageably and comprehensively through 8
Gilbert Kaplan’s Mahler Album,6 we shall come much closer to an under- 9
standing of what Mahler actually looked like. 10
Mahler was unprepossessing, ugly and weak and a twitching bundle of 1
nerves – thus Roller quotes received opinion. All in all, this suggests the 2
picture of a degenerate older Jew from a family marked out by illness and 3
prematurely decimated, very much the sort of person against whom well- 4
meaning friends warned the young Alma Schindler.7 Roller and Natalie offer a 5
different picture, and even if we need to take account of the fact that both of 6
them were writing from the standpoint of affection and friendship, the picture 7
that emerges from Roller – a highly respected colleague, rather than a friend – 8
seems entirely objective and certainly at odds with the usual clichés. True, 9
Mahler was not tall, but this needs to be seen in the context of average heights 20
at the turn of the century, rather than judged by today’s standards; Roller, who 1
was himself very tall, reckoned that Mahler was just 5 feet 3 inches in height. 2
At no point in his life did Mahler tend to corpulence, but was well-propor- 3
tioned and slim, in other words, never gaunt. The first time that Roller saw 4
Mahler swimming – he himself uses the word ‘naked’, which may be taken 5
literally or it may refer to a swimming costume – he was surprised and, indeed, 6
impressed by the masculine proportions of Mahler’s body. His admiration 7
finds expression in a hymnic description of Mahler’s physique, which is inno- 8
cent of all homoerotic feelings but reflects the expert’s appreciation of naked, 9
well-proportioned bodies – as a teacher at Vienna’s School of Applied Arts, 30
Roller was used, after all, to drawing nudes. But his surprise stemmed above 1
all from the fact that like most of Mahler’s circle he had assumed that beneath 2
the voluminous clothes typical of the turn of the century was a spindly little 3
man with no muscles. Roller attests that the forty-year-old Mahler had a ‘flaw- 4
lessly beautiful, powerfully slim man’s body’,8 toughened from his youth by a 5
regular regimen of walking, hiking, swimming and cycling. Mahler had 6
remarkably broad shoulders, narrow hips and straight, muscular legs. His 7
chest, too, was muscular and powerfully bulging, his stomach showed no trace 8
of fat, the musculature being clearly visible. Roller was particularly impressed 9
by Mahler’s well-formed, sun-burnt back, which reminded him of a ‘trained 40
racehorse’.9 41R
4 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Roller’s enthusiastic account gains in credibility when we recall Mahler’s

2 physical activities, which were a source of astonishment chiefly to those who
3 cultivated the picture of an enfeebled ‘neurasthenic’, as observers generally
4 referred to their degenerate and decadent contemporaries. (A satirical
5 couplet, popular at the time, runs: ‘Haste nie und raste nie,/Dann haste nie
6 Neurasthenie’, literally, ‘Never make haste and never rest, and you’ll never
7 suffer from neurasthenia’.) When he was not on holiday during the summer,
8 Mahler would keep in shape by walking long distances every day: whether in
9 Budapest, Hamburg or Vienna, he went virtually everywhere on foot, while
10 outside built-up areas he would stride along at such a brisk pace that few of his
1 companions could keep up with him. In Hamburg he also went cycling, a
2 pursuit he maintained with great enthusiasm over a period of several years,
3 even taking his bicycle on holiday with him. Together with the Austrian writer
4 Arthur Schnitzler, Mahler was one of the pioneers of this form of locomotion.
5 When his sister Justine fell ill after nursing their fatally ill parents, Mahler
6 would carry her, fully clothed (including coat and furs), up and down several
7 flights of stairs to his apartment in Budapest, even though she was taller and
8 heavier than he. As a swimmer, too, he was feared: no one could compete with
9 him when he leapt into the water, swam beneath the surface and then reap-
20 peared some distance from the shore, splashing around and snorting with
1 laughter – a sign that his lungs were exceptionally capacious. When rowing, he
2 would drive his fellow oarsmen to despair as he ignored all their attempts to
3 establish an efficient stroke. His own stroke was far too short and quick,
4 making it enormously tiring, and yet he could maintain this energy-wasting
5 technique over longer periods than those who adopted a more sensible and
6 ergonomic approach. Many of his colleagues report that during rehearsals at
7 the opera house he would run tirelessly between the orchestra pit and the
8 stage, often hauling himself up from the pit to the footlights with the help of a
9 small flight of steps, before leaping back down again. Once he was onstage
30 and needed to show the performers their moves, he could push around even
1 the heaviest Wagner singers as though they were balls of cotton wool. Against
2 this background we can understand Roller’s horror when, at a Lohengrin
3 rehearsal in Vienna in 1904, he saw Mahler furtively clutch his heart after one
4 such exertion.
5 Mahler moved at an allegro furioso. He literally ran up mountains, staying
6 the course till the end, whereas Roller, four years his junior, was unable to
7 keep up with him. Roller attributed to Mahler’s gait an impetuousness
8 bordering on triumphalism. If, in spite of his nature, Mahler had to walk
9 more slowly out of consideration for Alma or other companions who could
40 not walk as quickly, he would place one foot elegantly in front of the other and
41R keep to a narrow path – Pfohl’s reference to ‘gracefulness’ comes to mind here.
But if he could set his own pace, then he would ‘press ahead’, to borrow a 1
favourite phrase from his scores. Pfohl also saw a thrusting movement, 2
Mahler’s chin protruding like a battering ram and his head thrown back, a 3
posture also ascribed to Beethoven. But the most striking aspect of his gait, 4
which was occasionally also observed when he stood still, was the uncon- 5
trolled movement of his right leg. Uncontrolled, but not unnoticed. In his 6
letters to Alma, Mahler himself sometimes referred to this as his ‘Totatscheln’, 7
an onomatopoeic expression of unknown origin used only between the two 8
of them. Anyone unfamiliar with Mahler might gain the impression that 9
this was a conscious use of body language, Mahler stamping his foot on the 10
ground much as someone might bang his fist on the table in order to make a 1
point. But this tic, which Roller called Mahler’s ‘twitching leg’ and which other 2
friends such as Bruno Walter described more discreetly as an irregular way of 3
walking, had nothing to do with such conscious body language. When he was 4
walking, Mahler would take between one and three short steps that would 5
fall out of the regular rhythm, whereas when he was standing still, he would 6
mark time on the spot with his right foot, sometimes quite lightly, but at 7
other times more markedly. He never did so when he was concentrating, 8
notably when conducting, but if his concentration lapsed, the tic might 9
suddenly reappear. That it had nothing to do with anger and indignation is 20
clear from the fact that it was often most pronounced whenever Mahler 1
laughed uncontrollably. He would then clean his glasses, which had become 2
misted over with tears of laughter, and his right leg would take on a life of its 3
own – according to Natalie, it was like a wild boar pounding the earth. 4
Whenever he was out walking and stopped to note down some musical idea or 5
other in his sketchbook, his leg would perform a syncopated rhythm before he 6
started walking again. 7
Roller thought that the origins of this tic – and it is hard to avoid the 8
term – lay in the involuntary movements of Mahler’s extremities during his 9
childhood. (We would nowadays speak of a ‘hyperactive child’.) But Roller is 30
the only writer to report on this childhood phenomenon, which he saw as an 1
early stage of St Vitus’s dance, or Sydenham’s chorea. ‘Chorea minor’, which 2
appears in childhood, is triggered by an infection and may be accompanied by 3
symptoms of rheumatism. The idea of such an aetiology is not entirely absurd 4
as it is fairly certain that Mahler’s heart-valve defect – discovered later – can be 5
traced back to rheumatic fever. ‘Chorea major’, also known as Huntington’s 6
disease, can safely be dismissed in Mahler’s case as its symptoms are 7
accompanied by irritability, insecurity and lack of inhibitions. Be that as it 8
may, it is understandable that to the superficial observer this tic was Mahler’s 9
most noticeable physical trait and that it did much to reinforce the cliché of the 40
composer as neurasthenic. 41R
6 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Roller reports an additional feature that he thought might be connected

2 with Mahler’s ‘twitching foot’: he had sometimes observed the composer
3 standing on one leg in the middle of a room, one hand on his hip, his head
4 resting on his other hand and the foot of one leg placed in the hollow of the
5 knee of his other leg, creating the impression of a flamingo. This impression
6 is reinforced by a number of photographs of Mahler standing either in the
7 photographer’s studio or outside in the open air and revealing his preference
8 for a position in which his left leg was placed nonchalantly against his right leg,
9 either over it or beneath it, a position that is relatively normal when sitting but
10 not so common when standing as it can seem nonchalant or even precious.
1 Mahler can hardly have intended to create this impression. As it is almost
2 always the left leg that grips the right one, holding it firmly and preventing it
3 from twitching, we may not go far wrong in interpreting this position, too, like
4 his standing on one leg, as an attempt – conscious or otherwise – to domesti-
5 cate his tic. We see this posture in a studio photograph dating from Mahler’s
6 time in Budapest. We also see it in a photograph of both Mahler and Justine
7 in Vienna, although here it is the right leg that grips the left one. It is
8 also apparent in a photograph taken during Mahler’s walking holiday to
9 the Fischleinboden near Sexten during the summer of 1907. And, sadly and
20 distressingly, we see the same stance in the very last photograph of Mahler that
1 was presumably taken on board the ship bringing him back to Europe, already
2 terminally ill. In spite of his failing strength, he is once again fully dressed, his
3 face marked by illness, but still adopting the familiar position, leaning appar-
4 ently nonchalantly against the deck rail, resting on a walking stick in his right
5 hand and for the last time assuming the elegant pose that he remained fond of
6 all his life, the ‘gracefulness’ still apparent as a memory of earlier times, while
7 his face shows the listlessness of a man marked out by death.
8 One sign of tenseness was Mahler’s tendency to bite his fingernails, a
9 tendency which in his bachelor days he evidently took to such extreme lengths
30 that he would often bite his nails right down to the flesh so that he drew blood.
1 This was an unattractive habit from which Alma managed with some difficulty
2 to wean him, albeit never entirely successfully.
3 Arguably the most expressive representation of Mahler’s head was Auguste
4 Rodin’s. It shows an extreme example of brachycephalism, an anatomical
5 feature generally not apparent in photographs, whether full-face or profile,
6 as the shape of the skull is concealed by the luxuriant growth of black hair.
7 Alma was inordinately fond of Mahler’s hair, which started to recede only
8 towards the end of his life, growing thinner at the temples and on his crown,
9 while never really turning grey. It was Alma, too, who insisted that the hair
40 on either side of his temples should appear as full as possible in order to
41R make the very narrow skull seem more rounded. But it is clear from the few
snapshots that show him with short hair that he had virtually no exterior 1
occipital protuberance, a peculiarity even more evident in the famous carica- 2
tures of Mahler produced in New York by Enrico Caruso, not only the greatest 3
tenor of his day but also an accomplished draughtsman. The obverse of 4
this ‘absence’ was the massive brow and powerful lower jaw, with its striking 5
chin. In this way even the shape of Mahler’s skull reflected his aspirations 6
both forward and upward: there are very few photographs that show Mahler 7
looking down in thought. On his temples were two protruding veins that 8
Natalie described as his ‘zigzag lightning veins’, which stood out even more 9
prominently whenever he was angry: ‘There can be little more terrifying 10
than Mahler’s head when he’s in a rage. Everything about him burns, twitches 1
and emits sparks, while every single one of his raven-black hairs seems 2
to stand on end separately.’10 His nose was powerfully developed, narrow 3
and noticeably curved – the usual term is ‘hooked’ – and uncommonly char- 4
acteristic, without appearing disproportionate. (In this respect, Mahler’s death 5
mask gives a distorted picture.) His eyebrows were fine and mobile, lending 6
emphasis to his expressive facial features, a point so often described by 7
observers. 8
Particularly striking in photographs of the older Mahler are the deep lines 9
on his face, above all those running down from the sides of his nose to his 20
mouth and that are most pronounced in the final photograph of all, where they 1
convey a sense of the greatest bitterness. But even more exceptional are the 2
lines that run almost vertically down the middle of his cheeks from the cheek- 3
bone to the lower jaw, more pronounced on the right than on the left. It was 4
above all these lines which, together with the clear downward curve of his 5
mouth, gave Mahler’s face its oft-cited similarity to the tragic masks of classical 6
antiquity. The mouth itself was relatively thin-lipped, without, however, giving 7
the impression of being pinched, as it does with his sister Justine, who was 8
definitely disadvantaged from this point of view. Often described as eerie, the 9
mobility of Mahler’s facial expressions is reflected in the fact that in some 30
photographs his mouth seems to have been cut into his face with a knife, 1
appearing narrow and implacable (Pfohl summed this up in a graphic image: 2
‘he eats and devours his lips’11), whereas in other photographs his lips appear 3
full, making their owner seem gentle and forbearing – most movingly in the 4
photograph taken in Amsterdam in October 1909. 5
Apart from his twitching leg and tendency to bite his nails, Mahler had a 6
third habit, albeit not so striking as the other two: he would chew on his 7
cheeks, sucking them in between his teeth, sometimes so violently that the 8
flesh inside his cheeks began to bleed. He often did so when deep in thought. 9
The habit can be clearly seen in the snapshot that shows him in Vienna on his 40
journey between the opera house and his apartment, when he thought that he 41R
8 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was unobserved, although – for whatever reason – he also chewed his cheeks
2 in official photographs.
3 We have already had occasion to refer to photographs of the early Mahler in
4 which the viewer is struck above all by the changing appearance of his beard.
5 The luxuriant beard that Mahler still wore at the age of twenty, undoubtedly
6 in an attempt to appear older than he was, was reduced to a Van Dyke beard
7 in Kassel, becoming a thin moustache in Prague. Mahler continued to have
8 a moustache during his early months in Budapest but then dispensed with
9 facial hair entirely. During the summer he was sometimes too lazy to shave
10 every day and would then have a hint of a moustache that can be seen in the
1 photographs taken in Maiernigg on the Wörthersee during the summer of
2 1905. Alfred Roller reports that one summer he suddenly discovered Mahler
3 with a full beard the colour of iron but with two grey strands running
4 down from the corners of his mouth, but following protests from those around
5 him, Mahler quickly abandoned this experiment. Although there is no
6 photographic evidence to support Roller’s claim, it is none the less entirely
7 plausible.
8 Mahler was short-sighted, something especially clear from the photographs
9 taken during his youth, when he sat for the camera without wearing spectacles.
20 He started to wear glasses when he was eighteen, if not earlier, a rimless pair
1 that now looks positively fashionable. But we soon find him using a pince-nez,
2 too, an arrangement that went on for some time: in private he continued to
3 prefer a pince-nez, but this was impracticable on the conductor’s podium,
4 where for a long time his gestures remained extremely violent, so that here he
5 had to use spectacles. He continued to wear these rimless glasses until the end
6 of his life, further accentuating the shape of his expressive skull. It is impossible
7 to know if their reduced weight made his migraine attacks more bearable or
8 whether he preferred them for aesthetic reasons, but his lack of vanity makes
9 the first alternative more likely.
30 Mahler set little store by decent clothing. During his years as a Kapellmeister
1 he had too little money to afford to buy good-quality clothes, nor did he have
2 the time or inclination to go shopping. Instead, his absent-mindedness and
3 disregard for the ‘trumpery’ of the world encouraged him to neglect his appear-
4 ance, a negligence that extended to his household at least as long as his sister
5 was not living with him. He maintained this attitude even after he could afford
6 to buy better-quality clothes. Initially it was his sister who tried to persuade
7 Mahler to mend his ways, a role subsequently taken over by Alma, who herself
8 dressed with exceptional taste and lavished considerable expense on her
9 wardrobe. Mahler allowed himself to be guided by her at least to the extent that
40 he was now prepared to spend more money on clothes but was not willing to
41R waste time buying them. What Alma did not do for him was not done at all.
Later he had his shirts and nightshirts tailor-made, a practice that was then 1
more common and less expensive than it is now. Contrary to contemporary 2
practice, Mahler wore thigh-length nightshirts, claiming that the longer type 3
was irksome and that he could sleep better when he was a little bit cold. 4
It emerges from a number of surviving photographs that the clothes he wore 5
when hiking comprised a grey rustic suit with waistcoat and a white shirt with 6
a bow tie – there is no question of the carelessness of today’s tourist clothing. 7
If the weather was warm, he would remove his jacket and hang it over his 8
left shoulder, using a piece of string. Mahler was a sun-worshipper who 9
always returned sun-burnt from his summer holidays. To prevent himself from 10
catching sunstroke he would wear a lightweight white cap with a narrow eye- 1
shield, as may be seen on the wonderful photograph of Mahler and his daughter 2
Anna Justine taken in Toblach during the summer of 1909. For shorter walks in 3
summer, he wore ordinary shoes, but for the mountains he preferred more 4
robust mountaineering boots. He was almost always photographed wearing a 5
waistcoat, the only exceptions being the photographs taken in Maiernigg in 6
1905, in which he is seen wearing an open-necked pleated shirt. New coats were 7
carelessly buttoned only at the top, while new hats were forcibly adapted to fit 8
the shape of his skull and soon ceased to look new. For weeks on end he could 9
wander around with the lining of his coat torn, the state of disrepair being a 20
matter of total indifference to him. 1
The extent of his indifference emerges particularly clearly from the famous 2
series of photographs taken at the Vienna Court Opera in 1907. Even in these 3
official photographs, in which Mahler’s bow tie has evidently been tied with a 4
little more care than usual, it is still possible to see a kind of notebook poking 5
out of the top of his breast pocket in at least one of the photographs, while 6
various scraps of paper can be observed peering out of the side pocket of his 7
waistcoat. But this carelessness should not be confused with uncleanliness. 8
Mahler was painstaking about physical cleanliness. With the exception of his 9
badly bitten fingernails and tousled, uncombed hair, no one ever saw him 30
unkempt or dirty. His body had to be clean (he washed himself from head to 1
foot, including his hair, every day), as did his clothing and underwear. The 2
only item of clothing that was genuinely important to him was his footwear. 3
For a passionate walker like Mahler, shoes were the tools of his trade and as 4
such could decide whether or not he was enjoying his walk. The only other 5
item of professional clothing that was subject to his strict control was the tail 6
coat that he wore to conduct. His regard for the composers and the works in 7
his repertory seems to have persuaded him to show his respect in this way. 8
According to Ferdinand Pfohl, Mahler’s laughter could sound remarkably 9
like snarling. Apparently it was never warm-hearted and cheerful but always 40
scornful and harsh. But this seems to reflect the sense of bitterness felt by the 41R
10 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 forgotten fan. Pfohl is equally negative about Mahler’s voice, which is said to
2 have been cutting, cold and grating. His evidence is called into question not
3 least by his claim that Mahler always spoke with a pronounced Austrian accent
4 and even revelled in the more trivial colloquialisms of Vienna’s suburban
5 dialect.12 But this account is contradicted by other reports, which insist that
6 Mahler spoke a pure German free from all dialectal impurities. Only the most
7 sensitive ear could detect Mahler’s Bohemian origins from his pronunciation
8 of the trilled [r], which he articulated as a dorso-uvular trill, rolling it slightly
9 more noticeably than speakers from other regions. Of course, Mahler’s long
10 period of residence in Vienna makes it entirely plausible that he was able to
1 speak a Viennese dialect whenever he wanted to, and it is possible that he culti-
2 vated this folk idiom in Hamburg, where Pfohl got to know him. Mahler’s
3 voice was evidently extremely euphonious, baritonal in colour and capable of
4 carrying some distance, especially when he raised it and shouted across at the
5 stage from his position on the conductor’s podium. On those occasions when
6 he became more animated than usual in private conversation his voice would
7 assume a tenor-like quality, and when he was beside himself with anger, it
8 immediately rose to a higher octave and could become cutting. Those who
9 knew him well could tell whether his anger was feigned, in which case his voice
20 retained its baritonal colouring, or genuine, when his voice rose markedly in
1 pitch. It is a shame that we have no recordings of Mahler’s voice to complement
2 the Welte-Mignon recordings of his piano playing. The technology certainly
3 existed at this time, as there are surviving recordings of the voices of Arthur
4 Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and even Kaiser Franz Joseph, all of
5 whom were recorded in Vienna during the period when Mahler was director
6 of the Court Opera. It was a missed opportunity.
7 Mahler remained Mahler, and his appearance changed only imperceptibly
8 between the thirtieth and fiftieth years of his life. Only in the photographs
9 taken in New York in 1909 do we detect a very slight difference, for here he
30 seems more mellow, an observation confirmed by those of his friends who saw
1 him again at this time. A slight but noticeable increase in weight is reflected in
2 the outlines of his face. But this was only a temporary change, for the following
3 photographs again show Mahler looking tense and, finally, careworn and
4 exhausted by suffering, as he was at the time of his final fatal illness.
5 The legend that Mahler is not seen laughing on any of the photographs of
6 him cannot be sustained, even though the surviving photographs show him
7 smiling at best. Of course, all the surviving images of Mahler are marked by a
8 gnawing seriousness that is unsettling but which is not the same as melancholy
9 or depression. Two snapshots taken in Maiernigg in the summer of 1905 are
40 typical. One of them, which is not posed, shows Mahler playing with his
41R daughter Maria, holding her head and looking almost cheerful, while the
other, posed for the photographer, shows him again with his daughter, but this 1
time he has relapsed into the state of brooding earnestness that the life-loving 2
Alma found so hard to bear. All the more remarkable, and almost touching, are 3
the pictures that show a tender, relaxed Mahler, which is how his surviving 4
daughter Anna remembered him: sensitive, humorous, full of understanding. 5
But few people saw this side of him. The picture that he presented to the 6
outside world was inevitably very different. 7
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41R
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7 Small Steps: Kalischt and Iglau
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(1860–75)
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4 Surroundings and General Ambiance
5
At the end of the eighteenth century the border between the margravate of
6
Moravia, with its capital in Brünn (modern Brno), and the kingdom of
7
Bohemia, with its capital in Prague, ran only a few kilometres north of Iglau
8
(Jihlava), a situation that was still unchanged by the middle of the nineteenth
9
century. A century earlier, both countries had been members of the Holy
20
Roman Empire of the German Nation, whose Habsburg emperor resided in
1
Vienna. To the south, Moravia was bounded by the archdukedom of Austria, to
2
the east by the kingdom of Hungary. Some twenty-five miles to the north-west
3
of Iglau and, as such, part of Bohemia, lay the village of Kalischt (now Kalište),
4
where Gustav Mahler was born on 7 July 1860. By then, the Holy Roman
5
Empire no longer existed, Franz II having ceased to be its emperor in 1806,
6
when, as Franz I, he became the emperor of Austria. By 1815 Austria had
7
assumed the presidency of the German Confederation and by 1848 its emperor
8
was Franz Joseph. The 1848 revolution sent shock waves across the whole
9
Empire, rocking it to its very foundations, while in Hungary the Imperial Diet
30
was dissolved. The following year Hungary declared its independence from
1
Austria but was soon brought back into line. Following the Austro-Prussian
2
War of 1866, the new nationalist and separatist aspirations of the Slavs and
3
Magyars were accommodated within the ‘Ausgleich’ of 1867 (Mahler was then
4
seven years old), which established the Dual Monarchy of Austro-Hungary, a
5
remarkably long-lived construct that survived until the First World War. Under
6
its terms, Austria and Hungary were constituted as independent states enjoying
7
equal rights, a status which in Hungary’s case led to jealousy among the
8
Bohemians and Moravians. The emperor of Austria ruled over the Cisleithan
9
lands, in other words, those lands that lay on the western side of the Leitha river
40
and that included Bohemia and Moravia, while the apostolic king of Hungary
41R
SMALL STEPS: KALISCHT AND IGLAU 13
reigned over the Transleithan lands beyond the Leitha. As stipulated by the 1
constitution of the double monarchy, Franz Joseph remained emperor of both 2
Austria and Hungary: two monarchies, one emperor and one king. A linguistic 3
atlas of the time shows that German was the first language of the majority of 4
the population in north-west and south-west Bohemia, while Czech was the 5
predominant language elsewhere. In the case of Moravia, the north-eastern part 6
of the region, beginning in the area around Olmütz (modern Olomouc), was 7
German-speaking, virtually the whole of the rest of the country preferring 8
Czech. There was, however, a small linguistic enclave where German was 9
spoken close to the border between Bohemia and Moravia approximately 10
halfway along its length: this was the area around Iglau. 1
Some twenty-five miles separate the village of Kalischt from Iglau, a town 2
which, although not large, was none the less important. Mahler’s family moved 3
to Iglau in October 1860, and so it is reasonable to regard Mahler himself as 4
one of its sons. Kalischt was a village on the windswept high plateau, although 5
the immediate countryside was attractive enough. The house in which Mahler 6
was born was a squat, single-storey building not unlike the equally modest 7
house in which Verdi was born in Roncole near Busseto. Much later, when 8
Mahler was in his mid-thirties and was out walking with his close confidante, 9
Natalie Bauer-Lechner, they passed a group of similarly miserable-looking 20
peasant cottages, reminding Mahler of his own origins: ‘Look, I was born in 1
just such a wretched little house; the windows didn’t even have glass in them. 2
There was a pool of water in front of the house. Nearby was the tiny village of 3
Kalischt and a few scattered huts.’1 It emerges from this that the house occu- 4
pied by Mahler’s parents did not even lie in the village itself, assuming that we 5
can speak of a village at all, but was some distance away. The register of births 6
maintained by the Israelitic community at Unter-Kralowitz (Dolní Kralovice) 7
records that on 7 July 1860 a son, Gustav, was born to the tradesman Bernard 8
Mahler (in early documents his first name is often spelt thus, rather than 9
the more usual Bernhard) and to his wife Marie, the daughter of Abraham 30
Hermann and Theresia née Hermann from Ledetsch (were the two related?), 1
at house no. 9 in Kalischt (villages like this one did not have street names). The 2
entry is dated 23 July, the child having been circumcised on the 14th.2 3
The family moved from Kalischt to Iglau on 22 October. It was more than a 4
mere accident that on the previous day the Emperor Franz Joseph had issued 5
a decree ‘To my peoples’, granting them additional rights and in the process 6
allowing Austrian Jews greater freedom of movement. Of course, Bernhard 7
Mahler’s family did not suddenly decide on this date to move house the very 8
next day. As early as February 1860 an imperial decree had made it possible for 9
Jews – including those in Iglau – to acquire property, and the immediate estab- 40
lishment of the most important Jewish institutions, including a synagogue 41R
14 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 destroyed in March 1939, reflects the town’s attractiveness for Jews, who until
2 then had been more or less scattered along the border between Bohemia and
3 Moravia. With some seventeen thousand inhabitants, Iglau was then the
4 second-largest town in Moravia after Brünn. Compared to the six hundred
5 inhabitants of Kalischt, it was a large town, although the yardstick by which we
6 measure such a town has, of course, changed considerably since Mahler’s day.
7 Until 1848 Jews were not allowed to settle in Iglau, but the change in the law
8 encouraged more and more to move there: by 1869 there were already 614, and
9 by the outbreak of the First World War that figure had risen to 1,450, a total
10 that represents some 6.4 per cent of the population.
1 Described in the register of births as a tradesman, Bernhard Mahler traded
2 in alcoholic beverages both in Kalischt and Iglau. He was also a Jew. Mahler’s
3 own Jewish background was to be a lifelong problem for him, and even after
4 his death it has continued to exercise supporters and opponents of his music.
5 It will play a not unimportant role in the course of the following pages.
6 Throughout the nineteenth century and even later, the Jews of Bohemia and
7 Moravia differed from those who lived further to the east in that they did not
8 live in the usual ghettos cut off from the rest of the population. Even in Prague,
9 where the ghetto could look back on a particularly long tradition, this shtetl
20 was no impervious enclave but a particular quarter that was relatively open.
1 The classic picture of shtetl Jews that enjoyed such dubious popularity only
2 after such a picture had largely been destroyed does not apply to the Jews in
3 nineteenth-century Bohemia and Moravia.3 Outside Prague, Bohemia’s Jews
4 lived in small communities in Czech-speaking Central Bohemia and spoke
5 Czech and German in addition to their own Western Yiddish dialect. If the
6 surrounding area was predominantly German-speaking, as it was in the region
7 around Iglau, then this Yiddish dialect would become increasingly assimilated
8 with the language of the region, even if its speakers did not abandon it entirely.
9 In Moravia there were more small, Jewish-dominated towns that were
30 independently administered. Kalischt was simply a small village in which Jews
1 and non-Jews lived together in a largely harmonious way. The area around
2 Kalischt, like that around Iglau – in spite of the barely perceptible border
3 between Bohemia and Moravia, the two virtually formed a single region – was
4 predominantly German-speaking, with the result that Mahler grew up in a
5 Jewish family that spoke German. As we have already noted, he himself spoke
6 standard Austrian, his own particular idiolect notable for its general excel-
7 lence, elaborate sentence structures and lively imagery. It was not, however, the
8 language of the Austrian aristocracy.
9 The Jews of the period sought their livelihood for the most part by working in
40 the textile, brewing and sugar industries, including manufacturing. Typical of
41R their number was Bernhard Mahler and the latter’s father, Simon, who ran a
distillery, selling his produce both on and off the premises. The Jews in Bohemia 1
and Moravia had not only emerged from their ghettos at a relatively early date 2
but had also tried to shake off the remnants of that existence by increasingly 3
assimilating themselves with their non-Jewish surroundings, the stability of their 4
situation helped in no small part by the fact that they had not been uprooted or 5
persecuted since the Middle Ages. Bohemian Jews tended to gravitate towards 6
Prague and for the most part spoke Czech, while Moravian Jews opted for Vienna 7
and generally spoke German. From this point of view, Mahler was more of a 8
Moravian, although he always regarded himself as a German-speaking Austrian. 9
There were proportionately more Jews in Moravia than in Bohemia and there 10
were a number of relatively large Jewish centres there, whereas in Bohemia the 1
Jewish centre of Prague dominated all others. The figures for the period around 2
1850, ten years before Mahler was born, are as follows: in Bohemia there were 3
3 million Czechs, 1.1 million Germans and 66,000 Jews, whereas in Moravia there 4
were 1.3 million Czechs, 600,000 Germans and 38,000 Jews. Here the term 5
‘Jewish minority’ seems particularly appropriate, some 100,000 Jews making up 6
2 per cent of a population of 6.1 million. Prague and Vienna both drew Jews into 7
their sway, which helps to explain why upper-class Jewish families were to be 8
found mainly in Vienna and to a lesser extent in Prague, while the Bohemian and 9
Moravian provinces were the home of middle-class and working-class Jews, 20
including the Jewish lumpenproletariat of pedlars and day labourers. 1
The relaxation of religious ties that can be observed among Central 2
European Jews in general and that went hand in hand with the process of accul- 3
turation with the surrounding non-Jewish world may also be found, of course, 4
among the Jews of Bohemia and Moravia, where it can be seen a whole gener- 5
ation earlier than in Germany. Among the reasons for this is the fact that the 6
Rabbis were badly trained and often incapable of maintaining their congrega- 7
tions’ interest in the Jewish religion by means of compelling arguments and by 8
setting an example for others. Internal migration to the larger towns and cities 9
with their more powerful liberal influences often undermined and finally 30
destroyed the attitudes that had seemed unshakable in smaller towns and 1
villages. In the years around the middle of the nineteenth century the liberal 2
Jews who could have steered this trend in the direction of greater reform played 3
virtually no role in Bohemia and Moravia. Joseph II’s 1781 Edict of Toleration 4
not only bore within it politically expedient considerations alongside its 5
Enlightenment ideas about the equality of men and, hence, of religious denom- 6
inations, it also resulted in a growing tendency towards Germanicization that 7
was in increasingly stark contrast to the first stirrings of Czech nationalism. 8
This led to an increase in anti-Jewish attitudes on the part of that portion of the 9
population that felt itself to be Czech, attitudes that gradually developed into 40
open anti-Semitism. 41R
16 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 All these tendencies were aspects of what might be termed the general weather
2 pattern and were not necessarily equally apparent in every place and at every
3 time. Certainly, they were clearly not such burning issues in Kalischt and Iglau
4 that they left their mark on the day-to-day lives of Mahler and his family. We
5 know relatively little about Mahler’s forebears, although the family can be traced
6 back to the small town of Chmelná in Bohemia, close to the modern town of
7 Dolní Kralovice. Mahler’s great-great-grandfather on his father’s side was origi-
8 nally called Abraham Jacob, in other words, Abraham the son of Jacob. When
9 all the Jews living in the Habsburg Empire were required to assume ‘regular’
10 surnames following Joseph II’s decree of 1787, Abraham Jacob took the name
1 of Abraham Mahler, perhaps because he ground spices, the German verb for ‘to
2 grind’ being mahlen. He also sang in his local synagogue and oversaw the kosher
3 slaughter of animals. Abraham Mahler (1720–1800) thus appears to have been
4 the only previous member of the family to evince any interest in music. He lived
5 with a freeborn peasant by the name of Matous Gilig, and the same was true of
6 his son Bernard. (As with Mahler’s own father, the form ‘Bernard’ was initially
7 more prevalent than ‘Bernhard’.) Bernard Mahler was described as a grocer, a
8 profession pursued by several members of the family. He was Mahler’s great-
9 grandfather. The composer’s grandfather, Simon, was born in Chmelná in the
20 district of Benesov in 1793 and died in Lipnitz (Lipnice) in 1855. Mahler’s grand-
1 mother was called Marie (or Maria) Bondy and was born in 1801. She died at a
2 ripe old age in 1883, also in Lipnitz. Her father, Abraham Bondy, was a butcher in
3 Lipnitz. Simon and Marie Mahler were married without the permission of the
4 state authorities, with the result that their marriage was not legally recognized.
5 Their ten children were not legitimized until 1850.
6 Gustav’s father, Bernhard, was born – illegitimately – at Lipnitz near Deutsch-
7 Brod (Nemecký Brod) on 2 August 1827. That same year Bernhard’s family
8 moved to house no. 52 in Kalischt, where there was an existing distillery that his
9 father-in-law, Abraham Bondy, leased and that Simon Mahler bought in 1828.
30 Here Bernhard learnt everything that there was to know about the business of
1 distilling and selling alcohol, and even as a young man he was already delivering
2 his father’s produce to the surrounding area. Sometimes he had to spend the
3 night in Iglau, in which case he had to report his arrival and departure to the
4 police. (Three such stays are recorded in 1856 and 1858.) It was no doubt during
5 one of these business trips that he met his wife Marie, née Hermann, who was
6 born in Ledetsch on 2 March 1837. Both socially and financially, her family was
7 more successful than the Mahlers. Indeed, her father, Abraham, was evidently
8 a well-to-do businessman and soap manufacturer. Manufacturing soap was
9 certainly more respectable than distilling alcohol. The term ‘soap boiler’, which
40 is occasionally used to describe Abraham, sounds condescending and even
41R comical to modern readers, but it covered a wide range of possibilities, from
simple manual worker to successful industrialist: Abraham belonged to the 1

second group. Brandy distillers and soap boilers – of such stuff are geniuses 2
made. The parents of Mahler’s mother, Abraham and Theresia Hermann from 3
Ledetsch, create a more prosperous impression than his father’s family on their 4
two surviving photographs. 5
Bernhard and Marie married in 1857, Marie bringing to the marriage a size- 6
able dowry of 3,500 florins, which allowed the family to buy a somewhat larger 7
and better house in Kalischt, no. 9 in the town. This was the house in which 8
Mahler himself was born. His date of birth is given in several contemporary 9
documents as 1 and 14 July 1860, but the records of the local Jewish commu- 10
nity help to shed light on this discrepancy: 14 July was the day of Mahler’s 1
circumcision, a ceremony performed by David Kraus of Ledetsch, with two 2
local godparents in attendance, Ignatz Weiner and Anton Kern. The child was 3
born on the 7th. It remains unclear why Mahler’s school reports invariably state 4
that he was born on the 1st, although the simplest explanation is that the 5
numeral 7 – written at the time without a cross-bar, as in modern English – was 6
misread as a 1, an error that was then perpetuated. 7
As we have already noted, Mahler’s grandfather and father were both active 8
as distillers, an occupation frequently found among Jews at this time. It was not 9
a disreputable calling. In an earlier age, it had been a privilege accorded to 20
feudal lords, and even Christians pursued it, not that this prevented them from 1
criticizing Jews for doing so, just as they upbraided them for lending money, 2
often going so far as to accuse Jews of seeking to ruin them by forcing them to 3
consume alcohol. Documents have survived in which attempts are made to 4
defend distilling against such accusations. Bernhard Mahler’s father does not in 5
fact appear to have been very successful as a distiller. According to information 6
given by Mahler to Natalie Bauer-Lechner, it was his grandmother, rather than 7
his grandfather, who contributed to the upkeep of the family by going from 8
house to house selling mercery goods. Possibly deterred by his father’s lack of 9
success in the business, Bernhard Mahler himself turned to distilling only at a 30
relatively late date, having begun his professional life as a carrier, working his 1
way up with what his son described as exceptional resolve. Initially things were 2
not easy for the family. When Mahler was born, the ‘wretched little house’, as he 3
called it, did not even have glazed windows, and even in the refurbished state 4
in which it appears in later photographs, it still leaves a pitiful impression. This 5
does not mean, however, that the family that Bernhard and Marie Mahler 6
started here lived in grinding poverty. Rather, we must assume that they rapidly 7
rose from modest beginnings and were soon enjoying a certain affluence. 8
According to Alma, Bernhard Mahler already owned a distillery in Kalischt 9
and transferred it to Iglau immediately after Gustav’s birth. His firm’s headed 40
paper indicates that he owned a ‘Rum, Punch, Rosolio, Liqueur and Essence 41R
18 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Manufactory’, a fine-sounding name for what was initially a small-scale enter-

2 prise. (‘Rosolio’ or ‘rosoglio’ is the Italian word for liqueur, no doubt indicating
3 a different type of taste from the one conjured up by the French term.) Such
4 businesses were known as liqueur manufactories rather than schnapps distill-
5 eries, not least because the term implied greater respectability. It was also
6 customary at this time to sell the distillery’s produce both over the counter and
7 at a bar attached to the premises. But Mahler was entirely right to protest when
8 the writer Richard Specht referred to his father simply as a ‘publican’ in one of
9 his publications, finding the term ‘businessman’ more fitting.4 When Bernhard
10 Mahler moved to Iglau, he had to reapply for permission to manufacture and
1 distribute his produce. The document in question has survived. He was
2 allowed to manufacture and sell spirits but not to sell them over the counter on
3 account of existing competition. But this permission, too, was granted in 1861,
4 and from then on Bernhard Mahler was able to sell spirits over the counter
5 on the ground floor of the house in which he lived. Other shops were gradu-
6 ally added, Bernhard Mahler’s alcohol production and bar eventually being
7 extended to embrace a whole chain of such establishments.
8 Bernhard Mahler’s choleric temperament repeatedly got him into trouble.
9 On one occasion he sold bread, which he was not allowed to do, and on
20 another he traded in alcohol in places where he was not authorized. He also
1 adopted a very liberal attitude to closing times in his various retail outlets. And
2 he succeeded only with difficulty in avoiding a hefty fine when he insulted a
3 local official. It is not hard to imagine volcanic eruptions within the family
4 circle. Bernhard Mahler’s plans were inventive if not always successful. He
5 tried running a lottery under the over-optimistic name of ‘God’s Blessing’,
6 although the lottery itself signally failed to enjoy the Almighty’s blessing, and
7 it was not until a second such scheme was floated, this time called ‘Luck’, that
8 good fortune smiled on Bernhard Mahler. In spite of all the setbacks and prob-
9 lems that he encountered, he was ultimately successful in his chosen line of
30 business. If we may briefly turn the clock forward: in 1872, when Mahler was
1 twelve, Bernhard Mahler was able to buy the adjoining property at 264
2 Pirnitzergasse from Anna Proksch for 10,000 florins, by no means a small sum
3 of money – almost three times Marie’s dowry, it was the equivalent of over
4 £40,000 at today’s prices. The building had a large courtyard with a barn, and
5 Bernhard Mahler soon built on to the first storey, an extension made necessary
6 by the increasing size of his family. The ground floor was reserved for his busi-
7 ness operations, while the family lived on the first floor, facing the street. The
8 servants occupied the first-floor rooms at the back, overlooking the courtyard,
9 and the floor above was let to another family.
40 The following year Bernhard Mahler evidently felt that the time had
41R come to place his existence in Iglau on a bureaucratically sound footing as
he was still a citizen of Kalischt, living in Iglau virtually as a guest of the town. 1
No one could automatically acquire civil rights in a town simply because they 2
lived there, and not even the ownership of a house was enough. But every 3
citizen of the Empire could apply for such rights after he had lived in a 4
community for ten years, a state of affairs that was extended to cover Jews, 5
too, after 1860. Three years after he was officially entitled to do so, Bernhard 6
Mahler duly applied for these rights, arguing that not only was he a house- 7
holder but that he was also running a successful business. The itinerant 8
schnapps dealer had reached the peak of his middle-class career, his applica- 9
tion being accepted without question. On payment of a large fee he and his 10
family became citizens of Iglau, and later that same year he took up an impor- 1
tant post in the town’s Jewish community, although the exact nature of his 2
function is unclear. 3
For at least a section of the Jewish population, acculturation and the ascent 4
of the social ladder went hand in hand with a veritable thirst for education, a 5
desire for cultural improvement evident from the autobiographical accounts of 6
many Bohemian and Moravian Jews. In particular, those who had attended 7
grammar schools retained a lifetime commitment to the ideal of education and 8
learning. They read more enthusiastically and more intensively than the Czech 9
population and owned a treasured collection of books which in middle-class 20
families was carefully kept in a glass-fronted cupboard in the living room. 1
Central to these small private libraries were generally the German classics, 2
Lessing, Goethe, Schiller and, above all, Heinrich Heine, a writer whom they 3
regarded as one of their own, preferring to ignore his somewhat awkward rela- 4
tions with Judaism. Although it was only in Iglau that Bernhard Mahler was 5
really able to feel a member of the middle classes, he too clearly shared this 6
desire to improve his mind. Mahler himself rarely had a good word to say about 7
his father, and yet he reports that even as a carrier Bernhard used to have books 8
about his person and that he came to be known as a ‘coach-box scholar’. It was 9
only logical, therefore, that his sons would attend a grammar school if at all 30
possible. 1
Bernhard Mahler did nothing to encourage his son’s later rejection of 2
Judaism. From 1873 Bernhard played a role in the town’s Jewish community 3
and from 1878 he was a member of its committee on education, a position that 4
he could scarcely have assumed unless he had been active for some time in 5
municipal affairs. He was on terms of such close friendship with the local 6
cantor that the latter stood godfather to Mahler’s favourite sister, Justine. As 7
always, it was the mother on whom devolved the task of providing her children 8
with a religious education, and she cannot have been negligent in this regard 9
as Mahler received his best mark – ‘very good’ – for religion in his first school 40
report, which qualified the subject parenthetically as ‘Mosaic’. 41R
20 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Our first evidence of Mahler’s musical sensibilities is bound up with the

2 town’s synagogue. He told Natalie Bauer-Lechner, for many years his closest
3 friend, that when he was about three he was taken to the synagogue but inter-
4 rupted the singing of the congregation with shouts and screams: ‘Be quiet, be
5 quiet, it’s horrible!’ He then apparently insisted that they should sing the old
6 Bohemian song, ‘At’se pinkl házi’ (‘The bundle swings to and fro’), even
7 singing it to them first in order to give them the tune.5 So Mahler grew up in
8 a family that embraced the religion of its forefathers. His estrangement from
9 Judaism evidently took place only after he moved to Vienna to study.
10 Mahler also spoke to Natalie about his father’s character and his parents’
1 marriage. His mother did not love his father and barely knew him before they
2 were married. She had had her eye on another man, but contemporary prac-
3 tice demanded that young women be dragged into marriage by their parents
4 and by the tenacity of their suitor. It would not be cynical to claim that, judging
5 by numerous eyewitness accounts, some of the resultant matches were less
6 happy than others. In the case of Mahler’s parents, the marriage certainly
7 seems to have been an unhappy one. Mahler himself claims that his parents
8 were as ill-matched as fire and water, his father being the very epitome of brute
9 obstinacy, while his mother was gentleness itself. There were good reasons for
20 this. Alma also reports that his mother limped from birth, although this is
1 supported by no other testimony. Mahler’s father, conversely, is said by Alma
2 to have been a creature of instinct and a sensualist, brooking no inhibitions
3 in this area.6 In his virtuoso, iconoclastic and, in part, revealing film about
4 Mahler, Ken Russell shows us the father as a debauched lecher lurching from
5 bouts of alcoholism to sexual violations of his female servants, the sensitive
6 little Mahler fleeing his father’s beatings by seeking refuge in nature. A funda-
7 mental point that needs to be made at the outset is that Alma’s reminiscences
8 of her first husband, together with the corresponding passages in her memoirs,
9 need to be treated with the utmost caution. The number of manifest distor-
30 tions and falsifications of the truth is legion, whether the result of calculation
1 or failing memory or the passage of time. Alma based her picture of Mahler on
2 the principle that her own recollections were paramount and that she was
3 writing from the perspective of a survivor who saw herself as a victim. As a
4 point of principle, we shall do better to regard Natalie’s reminiscences as far
5 more substantial and credible as she wrote down Mahler’s remarks immedi-
6 ately after their walks or other encounters. Her later revisions, undertaken at a
7 time when, to her infinite sadness, she and Mahler went their separate ways,
8 seem not to have led to any distortions. To that extent, the portrait of Mahler’s
9 father that is painted by Alma may be questioned.
40 There is no doubt, conversely, that there was a far closer bond between Mahler
41R and his mother than with his father, but this, too, is entirely normal. It was also
entirely normal, unfortunately, that the health of many young women was 1
undermined by a succession of births as rapid as those that we nowadays 2
associate with so-called primitive peoples. It is not entirely certain how many 3
children Marie Mahler bore – this, too, is not unusual, given the state of docu- 4
mentation at this time, especially in lower middle-class families living in rural 5
areas. Gustav was her second son after a brother, Isidor, who was born in 1858 6
and who was only a few weeks old when he died, apparently from an accident. 7
Six children are believed to have died in infancy, although this, too, was by no 8
means exceptional, diphtheria and other infectious diseases having a devastating 9
effect on infant mortality. Apart from Gustav, six children survived. Ernst, who 10
was born in 1862 and to whom Mahler was particularly close, died of a heart 1
ailment in 1875. Mahler’s mother, too, is said to have had a congenital heart 2
defect, so that Mahler’s own problems with his heart, which were directly related 3
to his final fatal illness, may have been hereditary. His sister Leopoldine died in 4
Vienna of a brain tumour in 1889 at the age of twenty-six. According to Alma, 5
she too had been married off to a husband she did not love. Another brother, 6
Alois, emigrated to America, evidently the black sheep of the family. For a long 7
time he had to be supported there, but by the time of his death in Chicago in 8
1931 he was thoroughly respectable, if entirely unknown.7 Mahler’s favourite 9
sister, Justine Ernestine, shared a house with Mahler until he married Alma 20
Schindler. The very next day she married the violinist Arnold Rosé, who was the 1
leader of the Vienna Philharmonic and, hence, of the Vienna Court Opera 2
Orchestra, as well as being the leader of the Rosé Quartet. Justine died in Vienna 3
in August 1938. Although she lived to witness Austria’s annexation by Germany, 4
she was spared its appalling aftermath. Conversely, Justine’s daughter Alma, 5
named after her mother’s sister-in-law, was not spared the horrors of the 6
Second World War. In 1932 she had founded a ladies’ orchestra, the Wiener 7
Walzermädel (literally, the Waltzing Girls of Vienna), that toured the whole of 8
Europe. When Arnold Rosé, by then a widower, emigrated to London in 1939, 9
Alma followed him but returned to the continent for professional reasons, 30
visiting first the Netherlands and then France. She was arrested in Dijon and 1
deported to Auschwitz in July 1943. There she founded a women’s orchestra, her 2
uncompromising stance providing an inspiration for the other women in the 3
orchestra. Mahler’s niece died in Auschwitz in April 1944, probably from food 4
poisoning.8 His favourite brother, Otto, was in Mahler’s view an extremely 5
talented musician. Otto took his own life in Vienna in February 1895. Emma 6
Marie Eleonor, Mahler’s youngest sister, who for a time lived with Mahler and 7
Justine, died in Weimar in May 1933. 8
The town of Iglau, to which the Mahlers moved in 1860 from the more than 9
modest farmstead in Kalischt – it was really no more than a cottage – was quite 40
different from the backwater where Mahler was born. Their first home in the 41R
22 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 town was at Pirnitzergasse C no. 265/4, where they rented first-floor rooms
2 from the house’s owner, Anastasia Kampfova. Although Iglau was known
3 then – and now – as Jihlava in Czech, this name was of little significance as
4 the population spoke mostly German, Czech being the language used by the
5 servants. Iglau was a beautiful, even neat and tidy town clustered around
6 St Jakob’s Church which, situated on a hill, was visible from far around. From
7 there, the streets fell away steeply to the idyllic Heulos valley. The town was
8 surrounded by a double circumvallation and from a military standpoint was
9 regarded as secure. The contemporary historian Christian d’Elvert has particu-
10 lar praise for the town square, also known as the Stadtring, which certainly
1 creates an imposing impression on old maps of the town as well as on photo-
2 graphs. Even today, it remains largely unaltered. On maps it seems positively
3 disproportionate, as its size – more than 400,000 square feet – bears no relation
4 to that of the town but seems to occupy a sixth of its overall area. This
5 jewel in the municipality’s crown was lined by beautiful two- and three-storey
6 private houses, while the square itself contained two fountains and a large statue
7 of the Virgin Mary. There were three suburbs outside the town walls:
8 the Spital-Vorstadt, the Frauen-Vorstadt and the Pirnitzer Vorstadt. The last-
9 named lay to the south of Iglau and was directly connected to the main square
20 by the Pirnitzergasse. As is clear from a town plan dated 1862, the property on
1 the western side of the street nearest the square is a long complex of buildings
2 numbered 266, with numbers 265 and 264 immediately to the south of it.
3 Inasmuch as the respectability of these houses was defined by their proximity to
4 the town centre, we may well be entitled to claim that in moving to Iglau
5 the Mahler family had finally made it.
6 Within the context of the Austro-Hungarian provinces, having made it
7 did not mean living in the lap of luxury. Theodor Fischer, the son of one of the
8 Mahlers’ neighbours, whose father later became municipal director of music and
9 gave harmony lessons to the young Gustav, has left a description of the Mahlers’
30 first apartment in Iglau. The family lived on the first floor, which consisted of a
1 large kitchen, a vestibule and two other rooms. The larger of these two rooms
2 was furnished as a salon, with the usual rep trimmings, a glass display cabinet
3 for ornaments and porcelain and, later, the framed letter according Bernhard
4 Mahler his patent of citizenship in Iglau, an important and valuable document
5 for a Jew who had previously enjoyed far fewer civic rights but who now had the
6 freedom to settle wherever he wanted. The room also contained a bookcase in
7 which the ‘coach-box scholar’ kept works by both classical and contemporary
8 writers, and a grand piano made by the firm of Vopaterny on which Mahler
9 practised his first five-finger exercises. If Theodor Fischer’s memory served him
40 and allowing for misunderstandings, the second room was the communal
41R bedroom for parents and children, in other words, Gustav, Ernst, Leopoldine,
Alois and Justine, making a total of seven, for it was not until 1872 that the 1
family moved next door to 264 Pirnitzergasse, a house which – as is clear from 2
the map of the town – was no wider at the front but which extended further back 3
and presumably provided the family with more space. 4
The former apartment had been rented, but Bernhard Mahler was able to 5
buy the adjacent property, suggesting that he was extremely successful as a 6
businessman and that Mahler’s pride in his father’s status was fully justified. 7
Later renamed the Znaimergasse and now known as Malinovského, the 8
Pirnitzergasse was not a very long street and fell away fairly steeply towards the 9
town wall. The first block, between the town square and a narrow street 10
crossing the Pirnitzergasse at right angles, comprised only five properties, the 1
second block between the side street and the town wall only six more, at which 2
point the world of Iglau came to an end. A surviving photograph shows clearly 3
that the two houses in which the Mahlers successively lived were relatively 4
narrow, being only three windows wide and having only two storeys, whereas 5
the corner house was more imposing and had a Renaissance gable. A photo- 6
graph of the entrance hall has also survived: it shows a dark stairwell with a 7
vaulted ceiling and well-worn stone steps. In the Fischers’ house next door 8
there were abandoned workshops and dark attics calculated to create an eerie 9
impression, and here the children’s maid would tell her charges appropriate 20
fairytales and horror stories, including perhaps the story of the sad song on 1
which Theodor Fischer claims that Mahler’s first real work was based. 2
3
4
A Child in Iglau
5
The first surviving photograph of Bernhard Mahler shows him in the typical 6
attitude of the conquering hero standing beside a table and wearing a coat, 7
with a top hat in his hand. The photograph is so blurred that all that we can 8
really make out is a man in his mid-thirties – it could be about the time of 9
Gustav’s birth. Measured by the size of the table against which he is supporting 30
himself, he appears to be relatively small in stature, a feature inherited by his 1
son. He is also sporting a walrus moustache. But, apart from that, it is impos- 2
sible to make out any other details. A second, later photograph shows a much 3
older man with grey streaks in his beard and tired, almost lifeless eyes. His 4
wife, seen standing by the same table in the same photographer’s studio, is 5
wearing a voluminous black satin dress and looks larger and more compact 6
than her husband. There is as yet no sign here of the heart disease from which 7
she suffered, nor of the exhaustion caused by bringing so many children into 8
the world. If we are to speak of family resemblances, then Mahler clearly looks 9
much more like his mother than his father, not just physically but in terms of 40
the close emotional ties between them. 41R
24 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 The earliest surviving photograph of Mahler himself shows him at the age
2 of about six, dressed in a dark, tight-fitting suit, with a white round collar
3 (Ill. 5). In his right hand, he is holding a lighter-coloured flat hat. On a chair is
4 something that looks like a large sheet of paper or a newspaper but which is in
5 fact a sheet of music that the child is holding firmly in his left hand. Mahler
6 later explained to Natalie Bauer-Lechner his fear of being swallowed up by the
7 intimidating photographic apparatus and of finding himself fixed to a sheet of
8 cardboard behind the camera. Only when his father was similarly
9 photographed without anything untoward happening was it possible to calm
10 the boy. But the unfathomable sadness that all the adults present must have
1 tried to dispel cannot be explained simply in terms of the child’s fear of being
2 photographed and remains deeply disturbing. It is the boy’s dark, deep-set eyes
3 in combination with the corners of the mouth that are turned down as far as
4 possible that characterize his face and that were to remain essentially the same
5 until the end of his life. Mahler’s short-sightedness and the glasses that he wore
6 to alleviate this condition meant that his eyes were not so expressive in later
7 life, but the downward-turning corners of his mouth continued to dominate
8 his features even when he smiled, which he rarely did in photographs. The
9 result is always a smile against a background of sadness or at least of melan-
20 choly reserve. It is an aspect of his expression that Mahler clearly inherited
1 from his mother, even if it was not as pronounced in her case.
2 What kind of a child was Mahler? Alma’s tragically heroic picture of a terri-
3 fied child beaten every day by his father and barked at for being untidy so that
4 he sought refuge in daydreams reflects only one side of his character and
5 behaviour. As with all the facts and explanations that Alma offers for the
6 period before she knew Mahler, it is impossible to decide if they are a truthful
7 reflection of what he said (which is not necessarily the same as the truth) or
8 whether, deliberately or otherwise, she falsified the truth. There is no doubt
9 that Mahler was a particularly sensitive child, although this in itself is hardly
30 surprising. After all, where is the genius of whom it is said that as a child he
1 was rough, unfeeling and lacking in imagination? Whenever his mother was ill
2 in bed, as she often was with a migraine, he would kneel behind her and pray
3 intently, before asking her if she felt any better. In order not to undermine his
4 self-confidence, she would claim that she was already feeling a little better,
5 even when this was not the case. He would then crawl back behind the bed and
6 continue praying in order to complete her recovery.
7 The fact that a sheet of music was pressed into the six-year-old Mahler’s
8 little hand in the photographer’s studio clearly indicates the importance that
9 his family attached to his musical interests. Was Mahler a child prodigy? When
40 judged by the standards of the time, the answer must be no. Mozart was five
41R when he began to write music and six when he first appeared before the elector
of Bavaria as a keyboard virtuoso. By the age of eight he had learnt notation 1

and written four violin sonatas. The young Beethoven received his first 2
keyboard lessons from his father at the age of four or five, but the latter’s 3
limited abilities as a teacher prevented the child from attaining his true poten- 4
tial as a prodigy. In spite of this, Beethoven was still only eight when he was 5
thrust into the limelight at a public concert in Cologne, even though this 6
did not lead to a continuous career. Brahms was ten when he first appeared 7
in public as a pianist, but his piano teacher, Otto Cossel, wisely prevented 8
him from embarking on a career as a child pianist, and it was not until he was 9
seventeen that he wrote his first real compositions. Wagner was even more of 10
a late developer and was sixteen when he first tried his hand at composition, 1
these early works proving far inferior to Brahms’s in terms of their expres- 2
sive power and technical sophistication. Mahler occupies the middle ground 3
between child prodigy and late developer. 4
When judged by the scant evidence that has survived from the period that 5
Mahler spent as a young student in Vienna, we are relatively well informed 6
about his burgeoning feelings for music. He himself clearly attached so much 7
weight to these experiences and to related episodes and anecdotes that he 8
recounted them to Natalie Bauer-Lechner. (Some of them do not appear in the 9
most recent edition of her recollections but only in the autograph copy.9) He 20
himself will not have taken entirely seriously the claim that he gave his first 1
proof of his musical gifts as a new-born infant on the journey from Kalischt to 2
Ledetsch, where he was to be shown off to his grandparents. The two villages 3
were a day’s journey apart, and Mahler screamed so insistently that his mother 4
and father took it in turns to sing to him and rock him, even having to walk 5
alongside the carriage, singing the same song, in an attempt to calm him down. 6
More significant is the fact that at an age when he could barely walk he could 7
already repeat each song he heard and that when he was about three he began 8
to play the accordion: a substitute for the piano, this was then the most popular 9
instrument in this particular part of the world. Mahler’s accordion was 30
presumably a smaller version more appropriate to his age. On it he would pick 1
out the notes of the music he had just heard, acquiring a certain proficiency on 2
the instrument within a short space of time. But the child’s greatest love was 3
band music, which was part of the sound world that left its mark on Mahler’s 4
childhood and adolescence and that it requires little imagination to hear in the 5
marches of his symphonies. Iglau was home to a military garrison, and it 6
appears that its band marched along the Pirnitzergasse before playing in the 7
town square. One morning when Mahler was not yet four years old, he ran 8
after the band, dressed only in his shirt, with his accordion slung round his 9
neck. The neighbours’ wives caught him in their arms, determined to enjoy a 40
good joke at the child’s expense. They set him down on a fruit stall and asked 41R
26 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 him to repeat what the band had just played. Only then, they said, would they
2 take him home, Mahler having in the meantime lost his sense of direction. He
3 did as they bade him, whereupon he was carried back home to his worried
4 parents with a great deal of commotion. On another occasion, when he was
5 already attending school, he stopped to watch a passing band, remaining fasci-
6 nated by the sight and sound of them for so long that he dirtied himself and
7 the smell drove the bystanders away.
8 It was only logical that the accordion should be followed by the piano.
9 Mahler’s acquaintance with this last-named instrument cannot have been as
10 spontaneous as it was in the lives of most other musicians, where the small
1 child might discover the piano in his parents’ music-loving household and
2 coax from it his first enchanted sounds. The Mahler family however – untypi-
3 cally for a lower middle-class household of the period and untypically even for
4 a businessman like Bernhard Mahler – did not own a piano. It required
5 another journey to Ledetsch by the now somewhat older Mahler and his
6 parents to visit his grandparents, whose piano had been banished to the attic –
7 another sign of the marginal role played by music in Mahler’s family. The
8 keyboard of this ‘musical monster’, as Mahler called it, was still so high that he
9 had to raise his hands above his head to reach it. Even so, he managed to pick
20 out a tune on it, causing considerable amazement among the adults down-
1 stairs. This was undoubtedly a special day in Mahler’s life, for his family was
2 finally forced to acknowledge the child’s exceptional talent. His grandfather
3 asked if the instrument gave him pleasure, and a day later it arrived in Iglau
4 on an ox-drawn cart. Mahler must then have been four or five years old. It
5 seems to have been Czech members of a dance band that played in one
6 of his father’s bars who gave him his first lessons on the piano, but a proper
7 teacher was soon engaged in the person of Jan Broz, who was followed by
8 Franz Sturm.
9 By his own account, Mahler made such rapid progress that by the age of six
30 he was in a position to make his first public appearance, when the instrument’s
1 pedals had to be extended by means of wooden blocks so that he could reach
2 them with his feet. There are no surviving records of this concert, and it was
3 not until October 1870, when Mahler was ten, that any notice was taken of
4 one of his public appearances. In 1866 his audience presumably consisted of
5 members of his own family. He himself had no memory of the event but relied
6 on the accounts of other family members, who recalled that at this and similar
7 appearances he did not bow to the audience in the way usually associated with
8 child prodigies but made straight for the piano and began to play. At the end
9 of the performance he would then disappear again without waiting for the
40 applause. He was little more than six when he became a piano teacher in his
41R own right. Even at that early date there were already signs of the implacably
high demands that he made of his musicians as he held his hand close to his 1
pupil’s cheek, ready to cuff him whenever he played a wrong note. As an alter- 2
native, or possibly in addition, the pupil was required to write out the line ‘I 3
must play C sharp and not C’ one hundred times, a method that soon fright- 4
ened off the young Mahler’s first pupil. He was somewhat more successful with 5
his second pupil, even if he was once reduced to running home, howling, to tell 6
his mother: ‘I don’t want to teach the piano any longer to this stupid boy, who 7
plays so badly, no, no, no.’ The five kreuzers an hour that he received for his 8
lessons were his first income as a musician. Never again, however, was he to be 9
active as a teacher, either on the piano or as a conductor or composer – at least 10
if we disregard his detailed work with orchestras and singers. He simply did 1
not have the time for teaching in addition to composition. 2
Mahler dated his first compositions to his sixth year. Although it was subse- 3
quently unnumbered and has not survived, his op. 1 was a curious but entirely 4
typical combination of a polka and an introductory funeral march. At the age 5
of six, Mahler accepted paid commissions as a composer, something he was 6
never to do in later life, his mother having promised him two kreuzers on 7
condition that he did not make any ink blots on the expensive music manu- 8
script paper. Such blots were common at this time as neither the ink nor the 9
pens met present-day standards of quality and reliability. (Nietzsche spent his 20
whole life wrestling with his writing materials.) In fact, Mahler did use one of 1
the very latest safety pens, but he still managed to produce an ink blot in spite 2
of praying to God to help him to avoid such a disaster. He later recalled with a 3
laugh that his faith in God had received a considerable knock as a result of this 4
incident. 5
His op. 2 was another commissioned piece, a song that he wrote for his 6
father, again in the hope of receiving a fee. Somewhat surprisingly, he chose a 7
poem by Lessing, a writer whose works he may have found in his parents’ 8
bookcase. Certainly the author of the two plays The Jews and Nathan the Wise, 9
and a friend of Moses Mendelssohn, was one of the most popular classical 30
writers among German and Austrian Jews. Mahler quoted the poem from 1
memory in conversation with Natalie, who transcribed it as follows: 2
3
Die Türken haben schöne Töchter, 4
die hüten strenge Keuschheitswächter, 5
ein Türke darf viel Mädchen freien. 6
Ich möchte wohl ein Türke sein. 7
Der Liebe ganz ergeben, 8
der Liebe nur zu leben. 9
Doch: Türken trinken keinen Wein, 40
nein, nein, ich will kein Türke sein! 41R
28 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 [The Turks have beautiful daughters who are guarded by strict harem guards,
2 a Turk may woo lots of girls. I’d like to be a Turk. Devoted entirely to love and
3 living for love alone. But: Turks don’t drink wine, no, no, I don’t want to be a
4 Turk!]
5
6 This is how the meticulous Natalie transcribed it.10 In fact, Lessing’s original
7 departs from this transcription at several points:
8
9 Die Türken haben schöne Töchter
10 Und diese scharfe Keuschheitswächter;
1 Wer will, kann mehr als eine frei’n:
2 Ich möchte schon ein Türke sein.
3 Wie wollt’ ich mich der Lieb ergeben!
4 Wie wollt’ ich liebend ruhig leben
5 Und . . . doch sie trinken keinen Wein;
6 Nein, nein, ich mag kein Türke sein.
7 [The Turks have beautiful daughters and these in turn have strict harem
8 guards; he who wants to can woo more than one: I’d like to be a Turk. How
9 I’d devote myself to love! How I’d like to lead a quiet life of love and . . . but
20 they don’t drink wine; no, no, I don’t want to be a Turk.]
1
2 These lapses of memory are relatively unimportant, of course, although it is
3 worth noting that Lessing’s ‘Wie wollt’ ich liebend ruhig leben’ (‘How I’d like
4 to lead a quiet life of love’) becomes ‘der Liebe nur zu leben’ (‘to live for love
5 alone’), one of the central passages from the love duet in Act Two of Wagner’s
6 Tristan und Isolde, a borrowing that neither Mahler nor Natalie nor later
7 readers appear to have noticed. Mahler merely adds that the notion of living
8 for love alone, which is not in Lessing’s original, struck him as terribly poet-
9 ical, prompting Natalie to comment pointedly that this was a remarkable
30 choice of text for someone who had such an ascetic approach to wine and
1 women. Mahler remained a teetotaller all his life, but as far as women were
2 concerned, he was by no means as abstinent as Natalie believed – not that he
3 chose to contradict her on this point.
4 Some of Mahler’s later attempts at composition date from his years at
5 the Vienna Conservatory: a sonata for violin and piano, a nocturne for cello,
6 several solo piano pieces and finally an opera to a text by his closest school
7 friend, Josef Steiner, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben (Duke Ernst of Swabia). What
8 would we not give to have an opera by Mahler, however childish or fragmen-
9 tary! But unfortunately the incomplete Herzog Ernst has not survived, even
40 though it played a crucial role in Mahler’s acceptance to study at the Vienna
41R Conservatory in the autumn of 1875. All in all, the information that is available
to us conveys a picture of a highly gifted child expressing himself with 1

increasing independence as a performer and composer. He was not, however, a 2
precocious child prodigy like Mozart, astounding connoisseurs and artists of 3
the time. It is difficult to judge if there was a basic difference in Mozart’s and 4
Mahler’s gifts or whether it was simply their differing family backgrounds and 5
social circumstances that led their talents to develop at different rates. Perhaps 6
the most decisive difference was that Mozart was supported by his father 7
Leopold, with all the latter’s ambitions and connections, whereas Bernhard 8
Mahler had no musical interests and was taken completely unawares by his 9
son’s talent, a talent repeated in Mahler’s brother Otto, while the other people 10
around Mahler were equally inadequately prepared to deal with such gifts. A 1
cautious comparison between the subsequent development of both composers 2
shows Mozart developing at a markedly slower rate than Mahler, who was 3
twenty when he completed his first version of Das klagende Lied, on which he 4
had already been working for two years. At a similar age Mozart wrote La finta 5
giardiniera. Of course, such comparisons between two compositions that are so 6
remote in time are problematical, and yet it remains a fact that Das klagende 7
Lied reveals a composer in no way inferior to the Mozart of La finta giardiniera 8
either creatively or in terms of its orchestration. 9
Mahler was six when he started school, attending the Imperial and Royal 20
Primary School in the Brünnergasse. He will have started more or less regular 1
music lessons at the same time, initially with Franz Sturm. Later teachers, both 2
at school and elsewhere, included the conductor at the Iglau Municipal Theatre, 3
Franz Victorin, the aforementioned Jan Broz (also known as Johannes 4
Brosch), Wenzel Pressburg, the double-bass player Jakob Sladky and, above 5
all, Heinrich A. Fischer. As stated, the Fischers were the Mahlers’ neighbours 6
in the Pirnitzergasse. Heinrich Fischer was also the music director of the local 7
male-voice choir and the father of Mahler’s childhood friend, Theodor, who 8
many years later published his reminiscences of the composer.11 It was Heinrich 9
Fischer who gave Mahler his first lessons in harmony. The composer later 30
told Natalie that his parents borrowed music scores for him from the town’s 1
lending library, this, too, being a middle-class tradition not least because 2
then, as now, scores were prohibitively expensive to buy. Each week a portfolio 3
of symphonies, salon pieces, sonatas and operatic arrangements would arrive 4
before having to be returned to the library a week later. (This practice also 5
recalls the custom of the ‘reading circle’ that has now almost entirely died out.) 6
These scores filled the child with unparalleled delight, and he would quickly 7
play through them, finding everything equally wonderful. Later, Mahler 8
expressed surprise at his indifference to the fact that some pieces were musi- 9
cally better than others, but he no doubt worked it all out so well that his lively 40
imagination made up for any deficiencies.12 41R
30 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Mahler’s field of vision grew considerably more extended between his sixth
2 and his tenth year of life. Iglau, a town of nearly 20,000 inhabitants, had enor-
3 mous cultural potential. The town’s theatre seated 1,020 and, like many
4 theatres of the time, staged spoken drama, operas and operettas but not ballet.
5 Ten years before Mahler’s birth it had been built into the former Capuchin
6 Church, an act of secularization rich in symbolic significance. Edited by the
7 local prompter, a Herr Borzutzky, the almanach for the Iglau Municipal
8 Theatre for the 1870/71 season lists mainly spoken plays, but the operatic
9 repertory included Bellini’s Norma, Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable, Mozart’s Don
10 Giovanni and Hérold’s Zampa. Two years after the theatre was opened, the
1 Iglau Male-Voice Choir was founded, the years leading up to Mahler’s birth
2 revealing considerable new momentum in the municipal culture of the
3 community. The choir’s motto was ‘Fest und treu, froh und frei’ (‘Steadfast and
4 true, happy and free’). The significance of this and similar associations for the
5 musical life of towns relatively remote from Vienna and Prague cannot be
6 overemphasized. Even Meistergesang had a tradition in Iglau, a singing school
7 having been established in the town as early as 1571. But the Iglau Music
8 Association in which professional and amateur musicians played orchestral
9 music was disbanded in 1862. Nor should we forget performances in St Jakob’s
20 Church. According to Theodor Fischer, its activities included performances of
1 Mozart’s Requiem, Beethoven’s Christus am Oelberge and Rossini’s Stabat
2 Mater, all of them works requiring more than merely amateur enthusiasm to
3 perform them.
4 But the world of music in which Mahler grew up included not only the fore-
5 going official institutions, it covered a much wider range of activities. As we
6 have already seen, the young Mahler was particularly fascinated by military
7 music. The garrison was stationed close to the town’s main church, and there
8 was always an infantry regiment in Iglau, involving the inevitable colourful
9 uniforms in the town square, reveille and tattoo, the shouts and exercise
30 signals and, on special occasions, music played in the town square, the size of
1 which helped to create a particularly magnificent impression. A regimental
2 band normally consisted of eight soldiers. At the front was the conductor with
3 his large stick to beat time, a stick that he would flourish with a great show of
4 virtuosity. Behind him were a trumpet and cornet, then generally a baritone
5 horn and a tuba and, finally, cymbals and two sets of drums. The musicologist
6 Guido Adler, who was a friend and fiercely loyal supporter of Mahler, also
7 grew up in Iglau, although he was five years older than the composer. In his
8 book on Mahler he describes the importance of military music for Mahler’s
9 later career, while the composer’s childhood friend Theodor Fischer addition-
40 ally drew attention to the significance of the dance bands that performed at
41R fairs in Iglau and the surrounding area. Even though children were not allowed
to dance, they could listen until it was time for them to go to bed. The typical 1
Iglau dance band consisted of a string quartet comprising a four-string 2
‘Klarfiedel’, a three-string ‘Grobfiedel’, a viola and a ‘Platschperment’, the latter 3
a small double bass that the player rested diagonally on his upper legs and 4
played with a bow. There was even a traditional local dance, the two-part 5
hatscho, the first section of which was in a relatively solemn 3/4 metre, while the 6
second was a galop in 2/4 time, inevitably reminding us of the polka with an 7
introductory funeral march that Mahler wrote as a child. Theodor Fischer was 8
even reminded of such a hatscho when hearing the third movement of 9
Mahler’s First Symphony. 10
The klezmer music performed by groups of Jewish musicians that is regu- 1
larly associated with Mahler’s childhood is not mentioned at all in eyewitness 2
accounts of this period. The term derives from a Yiddish version of two 3
Hebrew words, klej = ‘tools’, and semer = ‘song’, and means ‘music instruments’. 4
This kind of music is now universally popular, the annihilation and disappear- 5
ance of the Eastern European Jews having belatedly contributed to its popu- 6
larity. Although there is a widespread belief that virtually all Jewish music from 7
the region east of the Elbe was klezmer music, it needs to be stressed that such 8
music was chiefly found among Eastern European Jews, in other words, among 9
the Jews who lived in parts of present-day Poland, Byelorussia, Lithuania, 20
Romania, Moldavia and the Ukraine. The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia 1
should be regarded not as Eastern European but as Central European Jews. 2
The region around Iglau where Mahler grew up was no ‘klezmer area’. This 3
does not mean that there were no Jewish musicians who played at public 4
events and other celebrations, or even individual musicians of Jewish descent 5
who played in bands and brought their very specific clarinet sonorities to the 6
sound world of such a band. There were undoubtedly such musicians in the 7
Iglau area, and the sporadic traces of the world of Jewish music that we find in 8
Mahler’s works and to which we shall return in due course are presumably 9
bound up with such trace elements. However, neither in Mahler’s case nor in 30
that of Guido Adler, who was subjected to the very same influences, can there 1
be any question of the influence of specifically Jewish music. Rather, it is symp- 2
tomatic of the world into which he was born and, more especially, of the world 3
of music at this time that Moravian and Bohemian dance music, the folksongs 4
of the region (which were later to inspire Janác̆ek) and the instrumental 5
mastery of popular Jewish musicians combined to produce a stimulating and 6
exciting blend.13 7
A second photograph of the young Mahler survives from the time when he 8
first appeared as a pianist before a wider public. The features that were later 9
to appear clear-cut and striking are still immature and lacking in definition, 40
while the eyes, which even here seem to suggest short-sightedness, are dreamily 41R
32 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 unfocused and appear to imply introspection rather than peer inquisitively out
2 into the world. Here is the description of Mahler left by Theodor Fischer, who
3 probably knew him better at this time than anyone apart from his own family:
4
5 At school, Mahler was easily distracted and absent-minded – one of his
6 secondary-school teachers called him ‘quicksilver personified’. He was often
7 immersed in his own thoughts, pensive and lost to the world, drawing down
8 on him the censure of his teachers. Even though he was often able to impose
9 his will on his brothers and sisters and playmates, acting in the process like a
10 little tyrant, he was in fact characterized by a superior sense of justice, which
1 could neither commit nor condone unfairness, while at the same time demon-
2 strating forbearance, philanthropy and sympathy with people suffering from
3 poverty and distress.14
4
5 Although Natalie knew Mahler as well as his sisters, even she had difficulty
6 imagining this curious combination of mercurial volatility and dreamy intro-
7 spection in the young composer. She once asked him if he had not been a
8 terribly unruly child, but Mahler insisted that he had spent his whole time
9 daydreaming. This introspection recalls Rückert’s poetic description of himself
20 as being ‘lost to the world’ and clearly goes well beyond anything that might be
1 regarded as ‘normal’ in a child, giving rise to concern and ultimately anger on
2 the part of Mahler’s parents, especially his father. As a boy, Mahler was often
3 so self-absorbed that he had to be physically shaken to bring him back to
4 reality. It was a genuine torment to him to be constantly reminded of this and
5 to be threatened with dire reprisals for not taking such an active interest in the
6 world as other children of his age. ‘You can’t imagine how I was tormented by
7 this,’ he told Natalie:
8
9 And, of course, I felt very guilty at my introspection. Only much later did it
30 occur to me how parents and grown-ups sin against a child that clearly needs
1 this sense of introversion more than anything for its own intellectual devel-
2 opment. As a comic example of my sitting there and dreaming, I was later
3 told that one day when I was a small boy I disappeared, and after they had
4 been looking for me for hours, I was found in the empty pigsty. God knows
5 how I had got there, but since I was unable to open the door, I just sat there
6 calmly, without crying out, until in their despair they finally came looking
7 for me. On hearing their calls, ‘Gustav! Gustav!’, I replied from the pigsty,
8 thoroughly contented, ‘Here I am!’15
9
40 As a child, Mahler was a voracious reader, taking his passion to the same
41R extreme lengths as his interest in music and retaining that addiction until the
end of his life. With the exception of Wagner, Schumann and Berlioz, there can 1
have been no other composer born in the nineteenth century who was as well- 2
read as Mahler. As a child he could forget all other concerns if the right books 3
were to hand. In order not to be disturbed, he once climbed out on to the roof 4
of his parents’ house through the skylight and spent hours up there. As before, 5
search parties were sent out to look for him, and he was finally spotted from 6
the house opposite. His father went up to the attic, trembling with fear and 7
anger but not daring to call to the child in case he fell from the roof in his 8
fright. An hour later, Mahler left his idyllic refuge of his own accord and was 9
greeted by his father with a sound thrashing.16 10
Mahler’s own recollections and those of his childhood companions have 1
left us with a comprehensive picture of the conditions under which he spent 2
these early years. Conversely, we know very little about the period between 3
his starting school and his move to Vienna in 1875. Only with the recent publi- 4
cation by the Iglau Municipal Archives of surviving documents relating to 5
Mahler’s time in the town do we know the dates and raw facts about his time at 6
school.17 7
Mahler first attended school in the autumn of 1866, when he enrolled at the 8
Imperial and Royal Primary School in the Brünnergasse. After three years – 9
the usual period of time spent at such a school – he transferred to the town’s 20
Imperial and Royal Grammar School, or German Grammar School, in the 1
street known as Im Jesuitengarten, where he made an initially promising start. 2
At the end of his first year he was twenty-second out of forty-nine pupils – 3
once again, this was the normal way of indicating a pupil’s position – and 4
he was thus in the middle of his class. Since he had been thirty-first out of 5
fifty-one halfway through his first year, his position had evidently improved. 6
He received his best mark in religion (‘Mosaic’) from Dr Unger: ‘excellent’. 7
Remarkably for a dreamy bookworm, his standard of achievement in physical 8
education was felt to be ‘praiseworthy’, and the same was true of his marks in 9
German. In Latin he was ‘satisfactory’, but in geography and history (taught as 30
a single subject), maths and science, he was only ‘adequate’. The ‘outward form 1
of his written essays’ was described as ‘somewhat careless’. During his second 2
year at the school, his achievements in the gym and on the sports field dropped 3
to ‘adequate’, whereas in the new subject of singing he was said to be ‘excellent’. 4
The musical career of the gifted child first impinged on the world at large on 5
13 October 1870, the date on which Mahler gave his first public recital for an 6
audience that went beyond his family circle, when one of the local newspapers 7
reported that a nine-year-old keyboard virtuoso – Mahler was in fact ten at the 8
time – had appeared at the Municipal Theatre and that he was the son of a 9
local Jewish businessman: ‘The success scored by the future piano virtuoso 40
with his listeners was considerable and did him credit, leaving us wishing only 41R
34 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 that a decent instrument had been placed at his disposal to complement his
2 attractive playing.’18 We do not know Mahler’s programme on this occasion,
3 nor even whether the recital took place in the afternoon or evening.
4 A remarkable episode occurred in the autumn of 1871, when Mahler was
5 eleven. His father enrolled him at the Neustadt Grammar School in Prague,
6 where he lodged with the leather dealer Moritz Grünfeld. It is unclear how
7 Bernhard Mahler came to know this family, still less why the child was sent
8 away to school. Modern readers may baulk at the idea of packing off an eleven-
9 year-old boy to a relatively distant city only a short time after he had started
10 secondary school, but in Mahler’s day this was not unusual. It looks as if he had
1 difficulties at school in Iglau and that for this and other reasons the dreamy
2 child and his strict father were often at loggerheads. The Prague episode ended
3 unhappily, for after six months at the city’s Grammar School, Mahler was
4 sixty-fourth in a class of sixty-four. It also appears that the Grünfelds were
5 uncaring and unloving hosts, although once again we do not know whether
6 Alma exaggerated her husband’s account of the matter. None the less, her
7 report that Mahler was left to go hungry and unshod is certainly impressive,
8 however unlikely it must seem that a child staying with a businessman’s family
9 in Prague was allowed to run around barefoot not only in the street but also at
20 school. We also learn from Alma that Mahler witnessed an incident in the
1 Grünfeld household whose archetypal character not even Freud could have
2 depicted with greater explicitness: unobserved in a dimly lit room, Mahler
3 apparently saw one of Moritz Grünfeld’s sons engaging in brutal sex with a
4 servant girl. Thinking that the woman was being violently attacked, Mahler
5 tried to intervene, only to be brusquely rebuffed by the couple. Whatever the
6 truth of the matter – perhaps Freud would have discussed this episode if he
7 had had more time to speak to Mahler and to analyse him at greater length in
8 1910, for the incident would surely have appealed to him – Mahler’s family
9 noticed that his stay in Prague was doing him no good, and so he returned to
30 Iglau in March 1872, when he was just in time to start the second semester of
1 the 1871/2 school year.
2 In order to complete our account of Mahler’s schooling, we need to antici-
3 pate the events of our next chapter, for his education moved along two parallel
4 lines from the autumn of 1875: from mid-September he studied at the Vienna
5 Conservatory while simultaneously continuing his classes at the Iglau
6 Grammar School. The words ‘Private student’ have been added in a flowing
7 hand in the columns in his school report that should have contained his marks
8 for ‘Manners’ and ‘Diligence’. Two of the thirty-two pupils in his class were
9 external pupils. It is impossible to say how Mahler contrived to pursue these
40 two courses in parallel. His school report makes no mention of any missed
41R classes, so that we can only assume that he presented himself at the Iglau
Grammar School at the end of each semester and did what he could to meet 1
the school’s end-of-term requirements by taking a special oral and written 2
examination that replaced the continuous observation of the other pupils. 3
This twofold burden soon took its toll and by July 1876, when Mahler had 4
completed his first full year as an external student, his marks were still only 5
middling: ‘excellent’ for religion, ‘praiseworthy’ for history, geography and 6
maths, ‘satisfactory’ for science and German, and ‘adequate’ for Latin and 7
Greek. All in all, this was not a bad result for a youth who had just turned 8
sixteen and who, thrown back on his own devices, was studying music in the 9
relatively faraway city of Vienna. 10
But by the end of the first six months of the following academic year, it is 1
clear from surviving records that in the examinations that he sat in February 2
1877 Mahler’s results were no longer quite so respectable. Rabbi Unger was 3
still satisfied with his charge in matters of the Jewish religion, but Herr 4
Pappenberger was disappointed in Mahler’s knowledge of Latin: ‘Grammar 5
barely adequate, written assignment unsatisfactory.’ (The topic was ‘How the 6
Greeks honoured their poets’.) His Greek was scarcely any better, his written 7
examination being ‘barely adequate’ – he got bogged down in his Greek text 8
after only a few lines – although his oral examination was better. In German, 9
too, his written examination was ‘barely adequate’. In this case, Mahler expati- 20
ated on the influence of the Orient on German literature, hardly an easy 1
subject for a sixteen-year-old, and the essay duly peters out in a helpless list of 2
a few relevant names lacking in any overall context. Mahler’s spoken German, 3
by contrast, was ‘satisfactory’. He began his written maths examination with 4
some cheery logarithms, but these quickly gave way to attempts to form mean- 5
ingful sequences of numbers, most of them struck out, the whole exercise 6
condemned by his teacher as ‘inadequate’. 7
All this boded ill for the external school-leaving examination that Mahler 8
sat before the same board on 14 July 1877. In German, he was asked to write 9
on the question ‘What motives persuaded Wallenstein’s various supporters to 30
desert him in Schiller?’, a classical subject in a classical German-language 1
grammar school. It is remarkable that a boy who was later to be so well-read 2
should have had such difficulties in this subject, but this was no doubt due 3
to the lack of imagination on the part of his German teachers at this time. Be 4
that as it may, his approach to the topic was surprising, to say the least. Every 5
teacher, whether at school or university, is familiar with the student who by a 6
process of more or less tortuous reasoning ends up answering a different – and 7
more congenial – question from the one set. None the less, Mahler’s response 8
is certainly one of a kind. Boldly and resolutely he retitles the essay ‘On the 9
motives that persuaded Wallenstein to desert’, eliminating both the general’s 40
supporters and Schiller at one fell swoop. His teacher, Dr Langhals, clearly 41R
36 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 noticed this, leading him to write the words ‘Topic arbitrarily altered’ on the
2 first page of the answer. It made little difference that at the end of his essay
3 Mahler fell back on his knowledge of classical antiquity, spoke of crossing the
4 Rubicon and concluded, pithily, ‘Alea iacta est’. Whether the answer was
5 dictated by dreamy introspection or arrogance, it was still marked ‘inadequate’.
6 Just two months later, Mahler’s teachers at the Iglau Grammar School turned
7 a blind eye on his failings and following a further examination on 12 September
8 1877 judged him ready to proceed to the next stage of his educational career or
9 at least to study music in Vienna – presumably none of them thought him
10 capable of studying a branch of philology. Music was not one of the subjects
1 that was taught at grammar school, and even ‘singing’ had disappeared from the
2 timetable after only one term. Mahler’s schooling had thus come to an end after
3 a fashion. When we consider that an immature youth had been required to
4 grapple with the influence of the Orient on German literature, we shall have no
5 difficulty in seeing that Mahler’s relations with the Iglau Grammar School were
6 very similar to those between Thomas Mann’s fictional anti-hero, Felix Krull,
7 and the penal institution that he was obliged to attend:
8
9 The only circumstances in which I can live presuppose the untrammelled life
20 of the spirit and the imagination, and so it is that my memory of my many
1 years in prison strikes me as being less irksome than my memory of the
2 bonds of servitude and fear induced in my sensitive child’s soul by the appar-
3 ently more respectable discipline of the chalk-white, box-shaped house down
4 there in the little town.
5
6 The final marks that Thomas Mann received on leaving the Katharineum in
7 Lübeck were in fact even worse than those of Mahler, his elder by fifteen years.
8 Almost all were ‘satisfactory’, including his marks in written and spoken
9 German. Both men received their best marks in religion, although in Mann’s
30 case this was still only ‘very satisfactory’. No great writer can have embarked
1 on life with such middling qualifications.
2 What was Mahler like outside school? What impression did he leave on
3 other people, including his friends, his fellow pupils and adults? We know
4 from Theodor Fischer’s reminiscences that he was strong-willed to the point
5 of unruliness but that he was also compassionate by nature. His musical gifts
6 were striking and, indeed, far above the average, although he was by no means
7 treated as a child prodigy. As for his child’s powers of imagination, he later told
8 Natalie that he thought up entire novels to accompany the music that
9 impressed him and that he then recounted these novels to his parents and
40 friends in a mysteriously darkened room in the style of a theatrical perform-
41R ance, sometimes being so taken by his own account that he was moved to tears.
In the case of Beethoven’s Piano Trio op. 121a, for example, which uses a theme 1
from Wenzel Müller’s ‘Ich bin der Schneider Kakadu’ (‘I am Kakadu the 2
tailor’), he devised a narrative recounting the tailor’s whole life and death. 3
Another anecdote illustrates the self-discipline of the older composer, a quality 4
without which Mahler would have been unable to make any progress on his 5
vast compositional output in the face of the administrative and conducting 6
commitments that wore him down. He was waiting outside the school building 7
for the reports to be handed out. His nervousness finally became so unbear- 8
able that he resolved to confront the demon of impatience once and for all. 9
Later he would recall that even this disagreeable moment had passed and that 10
this would help him to possess his soul in patience in future. 1
Mahler made frequent appearances as a pianist during this period. At a 2
concert that he gave in 1872 at the Iglau Grammar School he performed Liszt’s 3
paraphrase of the Wedding March and Dance of the Elves from Mendelssohn’s 4
incidental music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a piece within the grasp only 5
of players with an exceptional technique. And in April 1873 the wedding of the 6
Habsburg Archduchess Gisela and Prince Leopold of Bavaria preoccupied 7
Iglau’s cultural world to an unusual degree, prompting the town to push the 8
boat out: there were services in the leading churches and also in the synagogue 9
(a sign that Iglau’s Jews were keen to demonstrate that they too were loyal 20
subjects of the emperor, a keenness entirely typical of Central European Jewry 1
at this time), a tattoo, soup kitchens and, of course, a concert at the Municipal 2
Theatre. Mahler’s contribution to the concert was the Fantasy on motifs from 3
Bellini’s Norma by Sigismond Thalberg, another famous mid-nineteenth- 4
century piano virtuoso who, like his rival Liszt, was noted for his paraphrases 5
and who had died only relatively recently. That the twelve-year-old Mahler 6
scored a success with so demanding a piece in the presence of the town’s digni- 7
taries is an indication of his considerable talent as a pianist. He was able to 8
repeat the programme a few weeks later at a concert at the Hotel Czap. Even if 9
we have no hard evidence for such a claim, we may none the less assume that 30
his parents and, for a time, Mahler himself envisaged a career as a pianist, a 1
career that could be pursued with a very real sense of purpose, unlike that of a 2
conductor. (No one would have considered for him a career as a composer.) It 3
should also be borne in mind that for two years the piano was Mahler’s main 4
subject at the Vienna Conservatory. (Conducting was not a subject that was 5
taught at this time.) 6
In mid-April 1875 the family was convulsed by an event that affected all their 7
lives: Gustav’s younger brother died of an illness variously described as peri- 8
carditis and hydrocardia. This was a similar diagnosis to that accorded to 9
Mahler’s illness in 1911, namely, endocarditis. In both cases, the lack of a cure 40
in the form of antibiotics meant that the illness was fatal, especially where the 41R
38 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 heart was already diseased. We do not know how healthy Ernst Mahler was as
2 a child or whether his mother’s heart condition was inherited by some of her
3 children. But the number of heart conditions in the Mahler family is certainly
4 striking. Ernst was bedridden for a long time, and Mahler seems to have kept
5 his brother company, reading stories and talking to him. A famous passage in a
6 long letter that the nineteen-year-old Mahler wrote to his friend Josef Steiner
7 reveals the close connection between his memories of his brother and his
8 work on his early opera, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, the hero of which shared
9 his brother’s first name. Mahler must have come across this character from
10 Swabian history either through the anonymous late medieval Volksbuch or
1 through the tragedy by the widely read Romantic poet Ludwig Uhland. Ernst
2 was around five when he became duke of Swabia. Placed under the guardian-
3 ship of his mother, Gisela, whose second husband became the Emperor Konrad
4 II, the young Ernst rebelled against his stepfather. Twice he was defeated by
5 Konrad, and twice he broke his promise to submit to him. On the third occa-
6 sion he sided with his best friend, an outlawed vassal, and was killed in battle at
7 the age of only twenty. The motif of unconditional love between friends must
8 have had a powerful appeal for the young Mahler, while that of the prematurely
9 deceased youth provided a link with his own similarly named brother:
20
1 Then the pallid shapes that people my life pass by me like shadows of long-
2 lost happiness, and in my ears again resounds the chant of yearning. – And
3 once again we roam familiar pastures together, and yonder stands the hurdy-
4 gurdy man, holding out his hat in his skinny hand. And in the tuneless
5 melody I recognized Ernst of Swabia’s salutation, and he himself steps forth,
6 opening his arms to me, and when I look closer, it is my poor brother; veils
7 come floating down, the images, the notes, grow dim.19
8
9 Several aspects of this passage are notable. First, there is the identification
30 of Duke Ernst with Mahler’s brother, both of whom died young, and both of
1 whom had a talent for friendship. Here the planned opera and the death of
2 Mahler’s brother several years earlier merge to form a single image. And,
3 second, there is the remarkable way in which Mahler ‘stages’ the whole
4 episode. It is no accident, for example, that he uses the phrase ‘veils come
5 floating down’, a highly theatrical stage direction. And Mahler is evidently
6 thinking in terms of music theatre: the hurdy-gurdy man, taking time off from
7 his appearance in the final song of Schubert’s Winterreise, is evidently playing
8 a melody from Mahler’s opera. We do not, however, know what point Mahler
9 had reached before he broke off work on the score.
40 With the best will in the world, it is impossible for us to form a coherent
41R or detailed picture of Mahler between the ages of ten and fifteen, a period of
decisive importance in terms of his own development, as it is in that of any 1

individual, and yet we do have some powerful sketches that may contribute 2
towards such a picture. Mahler was a sensitive child gifted with a lively imag- 3
ination, a clear propensity for music and considerable talent as a pianist. At the 4
grammar school that he attended in Iglau he clearly failed to live up to his 5
father’s expectations and struck observers as being dreamy and lacking in 6
concentration, things his unhappy stay in Prague did nothing to alter. The 7
family’s large brood of children evidently suffered from precarious health, 8
although we do not know whether Mahler himself was regarded as a sickly 9
child. It would be wrong to imagine him hiding away behind the piano, wide- 10
eyed and puny, like some prototypical Hanno Buddenbrook. Even as a child he 1
seems to have been physically tough, with the almost superhuman energy that 2
characterized him as an adult and which right up to the onset of his final fatal 3
illness enabled him to a large extent to compensate for his genetically weak 4
constitution. At all events, his childhood friend Theodor Fischer confirms that 5
he always won the games they played together, be it ‘cops and robbers’ or whip- 6
ping a top. Bernhard Mahler must have realized that he could not look to his 7
son to succeed him in his distillery. And yet, in spite of his son’s successes as a 8
pianist, Bernhard lacked the knowledge and imagination to see any alternative 9
career for him. For this, an independent authority was needed. 20
In 1875, during his summer holidays, Mahler visited some family friends 1
who lived near Caslau, a small town some eight miles north of Iglau and, as 2
such, halfway between Iglau and Prague. He went there with Josef Steiner, his 3
closest friend after Theodor Fischer, and must have spent a few days on the 4
Ronow estates. Together with another neighbouring farm by the name of 5
Morawan, this was one of the places that Mahler could still recall in great detail 6
many years later. Although we do not know exactly where and with whom 7
Mahler stayed, a surviving letter indicates that he must have been in Ronow for 8
a few days and that there seems to have been a Herr Steiner here, perhaps 9
Josef ’s uncle. The latter drew the attention of Gustav Schwarz, the local 30
steward, to the phenomenal pianist from Iglau. So isolated were such estates 1
that talented performers who could entertain their audiences were always 2
extremely welcome. Together with other inhabitants of the estate, the lady of 3
the manor – she was presumably a widow – was able to enjoy Mahler’s piano 4
playing, and it was Schwarz who set the course for Mahler’s subsequent career, 5
thus becoming arguably the most decisive figure in what was one of the most 6
momentous years of his life. Gustav Schwarz evidently understood something 7
about music – certainly more than Bernhard Mahler – and once he had heard 8
the youth perform, it was clear to him that here was a musician whose talent 9
deserved encouragement. But far from leaving it at that, Schwarz now took the 40
initiative. We know all this from Mahler’s first surviving letter, which he wrote 41R
40 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 to Gustav Schwarz on 28 August 1875.20 Mahler must have made it clear to

2 Schwarz that it would not be enough for him to return to Iglau and say to his
3 parents: ‘There’s a gentleman at Ronow who thinks I should study music!’
4 Let us not forget that Mahler had only just turned fifteen and was still at
5 school: then, as now, the examinations that he sat there would be of decisive
6 importance for the rest of his life.
7 Not even Gustav Schwarz could have been as irresponsible as to advise
8 Mahler to abandon his schooling and become a pianist, but he none the less
9 seems to have taken an unusual interest in the boy. Not only did he write to
10 Bernhard Mahler, he also responded to the youth’s urgent entreaties and trav-
1 elled to Iglau to convince Bernhard of the need to act. Mahler had asked
2 Schwarz to do so, comparing his father with one of the characters in Gottfried
3 August Bürger’s ballad The Wild Huntsman who is pulled in different direc-
4 tions by two knights. Schwarz was needed to urge Bernhard Mahler in the
5 right direction. (Mahler speaks of ‘our project’, suggesting something of a
6 conspiracy between him and Schwarz.) In fact, Mahler twists the meaning of
7 Bürger’s ballad as the good knight warns the count against everything he
8 thinks of doing at the instigation of the wicked knight, but his warnings fall on
9 deaf ears. In the case of Mahler’s father, by contrast, the point was not to warn
20 him but to encourage him to allow his son to study music in Vienna as there
1 was no conservatory in Iglau where music could be studied to an advanced
2 level. We can hardly blame Bernhard Mahler for harbouring the sort of doubts
3 that his son faithfully reports in his letter to Schwarz, namely, that Mahler
4 would neglect his school work in Vienna and might fall into bad company, for
5 a fifteen-year-old was still a child at that time, just as he is now. It says much
6 for Schwarz’s powers of persuasion that Bernhard Mahler gave his permission
7 for his son to go to Vienna. (As usual at this time, Mahler’s mother had little
8 more than an advisory role to play in such decisions.) He did, however, place
9 a provisional barrier in the way of such a move: Schwarz was no expert in the
30 field of music, and so Bernhard Mahler demanded that such expertise should
1 first be sought.
2 Things now moved quickly, not to say precipitately. Schwarz arrived in Iglau
3 on 4 September, and the new academic year at the Vienna Conservatory was
4 due to begin in mid-September. Speed was of the essence. It must have been
5 only a few days after the 4th that Schwarz once again intervened to help set the
6 young Mahler on the right path. He drove with him to Baden just outside
7 Vienna in order to call on Julius Epstein, a pianist of some renown, who since
8 1867 had taught at the Conservatory run by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde
9 in Vienna and who had also edited Schubert’s piano sonatas. It is clear from a
40 contemporary caricature that he also had a reputation as a talent scout. In
41R 1911, immediately after Mahler’s death, Epstein, by then almost eighty, was
asked by a Viennese newspaper to recall his young piano pupil, and Epstein 1
responded with a remarkably precise account. But he recalled being visited 2
only once at the Conservatory by Bernhard Mahler and his son, whereas 3
Schwarz, equally precisely, remembered taking Mahler to see Epstein in 4
Baden. Their two accounts differ in another respect, too. Schwarz reports that 5
Epstein was not especially taken by Mahler’s piano playing and pricked up his 6
ears only when Mahler played him some of his own compositions, whereas 7
Epstein remembered exactly the opposite: the piece of his own composition 8
that Mahler played did not impress him, but he was in no doubt that he was in 9
the presence of a born musician. ‘He won’t be taking over your distillery,’ he 10
allegedly told Bernhard Mahler. Whatever the truth of the matter, Julius 1
Epstein and Gustav Schwarz managed to persuade Bernhard Mahler to allow 2
his son to study music and to do so, moreover, at one of the leading conserva- 3
tories in Europe, that of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna. It 4
appears that lodgings were soon found for Mahler because Bernhard owned 5
several apartments in the Viennese suburb of Fünfhaus (today the 15th 6
district). From the autumn of 1875 until the autumn of 1877 the young Mahler 7
seems to have lived there. 8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3 3
4
5
6
7 Studies in Vienna
8
9
(1875–80)
10
1
2
3
4 Vienna in the 1870s
5
The Vienna of 1875 that greeted the fifteen-year-old provincial youth who,
6
bashful and proud only of his talents as a musician, had fallen out of the family
7
nest in Iglau at an unusually early date, was completely unlike the Vienna of
8
1897, when, confident of his coming victory, Mahler arrived in the city from
9
Hamburg to take up one of the leading posts in the musical life of Europe and,
20
hence, of the world. Just as Mahler’s own situation in 1875 could hardly have
1
been more different from that in 1897, when the thirty-seven-year old was
2
unrivalled as a conductor and administrator, only his gifts as a composer
3
having as yet failed to achieve the acclaim for which he strove, so the city itself
4
changed irreversibly during this period. True, the changes that took place were
5
not as radical as those that had been observed between 1850 and 1875, but
6
important coordinates had shifted perceptibly. As a result, hand-me-down
7
opinions on ‘Vienna around 1900’ will not bring us any closer to an adequate
8
understanding of Mahler’s twofold ‘conquest’ of the city. We may begin, there-
9
fore, by attempting to sketch a portrait of the city in which the young Mahler
30
arrived on the threshold of his adolescence.
1
Shortly after the end of the Second World War, Hermann Broch wrote an
2
essay, ‘Hofmannsthal and his Age’, which in spite of a number of unevennesses
3
remains one of the most readable analyses of late nineteenth-century Viennese
4
culture, not least because Broch himself knew certain of its aspects at first hand.
5
In it, he examined the city’s culture from an architectural standpoint and found
6
it one of the most pitiful in the whole history of the world.1 The false splendours
7
of the Neo-Baroque, Neo-Renaissance and Neo-Gothic buildings that typified
8
this age of eclecticism had borne within them the essentially incompatible char-
9
acteristics of constraint and pomp, stifling oppression and security, and a
40
poverty that was concealed behind a wall of wealth. Certainly, the stylistic
41R
STUDIES IN VIENNA 43
endeavours of these decades reveal the most remarkable mixture of rationalism, 1

individualism, historicism, Romanticism, eclecticism and scepticism, a mixture 2
that was not to be seen again until the end of the twentieth century, a period 3
nebulously described as ‘post-modern’. In the light of post-modernism, histori- 4
cism is now viewed with greater tolerance than was shown by a purist like 5
Hermann Broch, who was writing in the wake of Adolf Loos and Karl Kraus. In 6
spite of this, his diagnosis remains remarkable. The more uninhibited was 7
society’s espousal of technological progress not only in Vienna and Austria, but 8
elsewhere too, all the greater appears to have been the need to conceal and tran- 9
scend it by means of theatrical gestures, spoken drama and opera being the 10
leading media of the age. Vienna regarded itself as the centre of the arts in 1
the German-speaking world, but, as Broch convincingly demonstrates, it was 2
above all a city of ornament. In its extravagant traditionalism, it confused 3
art with decoration and as a result became a museum, decline in a world of 4
poverty leading in Broch’s view to a persistent vegetative state, whereas decline 5
in a world of great wealth leads inexorably to the museum. Ornament was 6
not a Viennese invention but determined the stylistic attitude of the entire 7
age, whether it was known nationally and regionally as the Gründerzeit or the 8
Second Empire. For its Austrian variant Broch used the mocking term 9
‘Backhendl’ Age, an expression which, even if he did not coin it, he none the less 20
helped to popularize. (The word means ‘fried chicken’, the dish in question 1
being regarded as the height of culinary affluence in Biedermeier Austria.) 2
Between 1860 and 1890, ornament characterized the domestic interiors of 3
the upper middle classes throughout central Europe, cheaper imitations trick- 4
ling down into the middle classes and soon typifying their interiors, too. The 5
over-ornateness of the fabrics used and the finish of the armchairs and of 6
curtains that barely let through the daylight, the imitation Renaissance light 7
fittings and pediments above the doorways, the uncomfortable chairs whose 8
proud description as ‘old German’ only with difficulty concealed the fact that it 9
was impossible to sit on them for any length of time without damaging one’s 30
posture, the important part played by reproductions of large-scale paintings, 1
few individuals apart from eminent painters and financiers being able to afford 2
the originals, and the unscrupulous sway of advisers who, initially known as 3
decorators, later came to be called interior designers – all this was influenced by 4
the burgher’s attempt to leave his mark on every corner of his home and to 5
occupy every niche, suggesting to his visitor that the latter had no right to be 6
there at all. By the turn of the century, opposition had arisen to this over-ornate 7
style of interior decoration in the form of the Vienna Secession, the Vienna 8
Werkstätte, art nouveau, ‘Modern Style’, Jugendstil and, later, the Bauhaus. The 9
most mordant critic of this decorative and ornamental art was the Viennese 40
architect Adolf Loos, who in 1898 inveighed against all this tawdriness: 41R
44 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 The artisan was now expected to make Greek, Romanesque, Gothic, Moorish,
2 Italian, German, Baroque and Neoclassical cupboards and chairs for his
3 clients depending on their intellectual beliefs. Even worse: one room was to be
4 furnished in one style, the next room in another. . . . The decorator – that
5 worthy individual who in an earlier age had busied himself with the stitching
6 needle and stuffed mattresses now washed his hair, donned a velvet jacket and
7 a dangling necktie and became an artist. He removed the word ‘Upholsterer’
8 from his firm’s hoarding and described himself instead as an ‘interior deco-
9 rator’. It sounded impressive. With that there began the reign of the interior
10 designer, a reign of terror that continues to haunt us to this day.
1
2 The doyen of interior designers in Vienna at this time was Hans Makart. He
3 had been born in Salzburg in 1840 and studied with the Munich history
4 painter Karl von Piloty, arriving in Vienna in 1869 and in the fifteen years that
5 were left to him – he died at the age of forty-four, probably as the result of
6 syphilis – becoming the leading representative of both the age and the city. By
7 1875, the year in which Mahler first arrived in Vienna, Makart had achieved
8 the first high point in his career in the capital, painting the portraits of the
9 most prominent women from high society and commanding fees that eventu-
20 ally approached those demanded by Franz von Lenbach, whose financial
1 demands were the yardstick by which every self-respecting portraitist of the
2 period was judged. But as an entrepreneur and entertainer Makart outdid
3 Lenbach and all the others. As the Viennese art critic Ludwig Hevesi observed
4 around 1900, Makart’s skills as an artist were inferior to those of his contem-
5 poraries, including Böcklin, Menzel, Lenbach and Klinger, but in dissemi-
6 nating the insane notion of ‘tawdry beauty’ he was second to none. Makart
7 took over from his mentor Karl von Piloty the tendency to cover entire
8 walls with history paintings that anticipate the monumental formats of the
9 twentieth-century cinema, but he surpassed him in his titillating depiction of
30 female flesh and in this respect he influenced those members of the Vienna
1 Secession who had otherwise turned their backs on him. Hevesi’s ‘dream of the
2 optic nerve’ was an epidermal dream, Makart being the Rubens that Viennese
3 society of the 1870s and 1880s truly deserved.
4 In 1879, while the young Mahler was working on Das klagende Lied, Makart
5 was organizing the celebrations to mark the silver wedding of the Austrian
6 emperor and his wife. With twenty-nine floats and thousands of participants,
7 the procession was a three-dimensional re-enactment of Makart’s monu-
8 mental painting, The Entry of Charles V into Antwerp of 1878, a sophisticated
9 mixture of art and life, the scantily clad women and girls whom Charles
40 received in Antwerp in 1520 being lent the features of well-known beauties
41R from Vienna’s salons. Most provocatively of all, Makart turned himself into the
tacit focus of the pageant, wearing dark blue velvet and riding a richly 1
caparisoned horse, thereby suggesting an analogy between himself and 2
Charles V. The homage intended for the imperial couple was thus redirected at 3
the prince of art, whom the crowds greeted with cries of ‘Long live Makart!’ By 4
taking to its furthest extreme a skilfully organized exoticism and historicism 5
Makart became, as it were, the interior designer of a whole ornamentally 6
obsessed world. His studio style also came to influence interior design in 7
general. Every afternoon his studio near the Ringstraße was open to visitors, 8
while the evenings were given over to the famous studio parties in which 9
the old salon culture was taken to megalomaniac extremes. Guests included 10
not only Makart’s fellow artists, Piloty and Lenbach from Munich, but also 1
Wagner, who during a visit to Vienna in 1875 made a point of calling on 2
Makart. Others who looked in included the actress Sarah Bernhardt and the 3
architect Gottfried Semper, another friend of Wagner’s, while the limelighters 4
of Viennese society and (would-be) leading figures from the worlds of art, 5
science and politics jostled for attention. Makart’s studio reminded critical 6
contemporaries of an Oriental bazaar, and it became the setting for constant 7
rearrangements of armour, chairs, busts, animal skeletons, musical instru- 8
ments, polar-bear skins and the by now emblematic Makart bunches of dried 9
reeds, autumnal leaves, palm fronds and wheat sheaves. His studio was a 20
masked ball frozen in time, while the orgy of ornament that it embodied was 1
reminiscent of a still life, and for good reason: Makart’s masked balls were the 2
high point of the Viennese season. No parties in the city could be more elegant, 3
more timely or more sophisticated, not least because Makart was by now a 4
wealthy man and a strikingly generous host. 5
A phenomenon like Makart was probably possible only in the Vienna of this 6
period. ‘Happy the man who forgets what can’t be changed’ – this line from 7
Johann Strauß’s Die Fledermaus reflected the hedonistic frenzy of an entire 8
city, at least to the extent that property conditions allowed the population to 9
pursue such a lifestyle at all. By the end of the 1850s, the death of the elderly 30
field marshal Josef Radetzky and the announcement that the city was to be 1
redeveloped and expanded brought to an end the age of ‘good old Vienna’ that 2
had survived from the Josephinian era – or at least it did so for more sensitive 3
observers. To the superficial onlooker the Habsburg Empire seemed an island 4
of stability. Contemporaries who preferred to turn a blind eye to the true situ- 5
ation continued to identify with Franz Joseph, who was born at Schönbrunn 6
in 1830 and who came to power in December 1848 at the age of only eighteen. 7
By the time of his death at Schönbrunn in November 1916 at the age of eighty- 8
six, he had ruled for sixty-eight years, a period that undoubtedly attests to a 9
remarkable degree of stability, and yet it would be wrong to infer from the 40
longevity of the monarch and of his constitution and system that all was well 41R
46 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 with the wider picture. By the mid-1870s there were already signs that the
2 foundations were no longer as secure as they seemed to be at first sight. The
3 country’s humiliating defeat by the Prussian army at Königgrätz in 1866 was
4 still a recent memory, while the old rivalry between Austria and Prussia had
5 now been replaced by inner tensions within the dual monarchy’s multiracial
6 state. Robert A. Kann, one of the leading historians of the Habsburg Empire,
7 has summed up the years between the Congress of Vienna in 1814–15 and the
8 Austro-German dual alliance of October 1879 in terms of stasis, decline and
9 stabilization, for all that this last-named stage was merely temporary, the term
10 itself ignoring the fact that, as we shall see, the crisis did not simply end in
1 1879. The period began with the Habsburg Empire regaining its former posi-
2 tion as an important European power, a position it owed more to its place in
3 the field of political tension between East and West than to its purely military
4 might. It was none the less a position of some strength, only Russia and Great
5 Britain being more powerful at this time. But by 1879 Austria had fallen to fifth
6 position in the rankings, having been overtaken by Germany and France. The
7 alliance of 1879 saw Austria effectively taking refuge beneath the umbrella of
8 a country that had triumphed over the dual monarchy in 1866 and over France
9 in 1871, the Franco-Prussian War famously leading to the establishment of the
20 German Reich. In terms of the country’s internal politics, these years also
1 witnessed a transition from the final throes of enlightened absolutism to a
2 constitutional government that was a direct result of the – failed – revolution
3 of 1848 and of political and economic liberalism. But the liberalism of this
4 period soon went into decline, with far-reaching consequences not least for the
5 role of the Austrian Jews whose assimilation and acculturation had owed
6 much to the triumph of liberalism. The emergence of political anti-Semitism
7 in the years around 1879 was no accident, but was bound up with the end of
8 the age and with the waning of liberal influence.
9 The year 1879 brought with it the political defeat of the liberals in the
30 Austrian half of the dual monarchy, and from now on the tone was set by more
1 radical forces in the form of the Christian Socialists and Social Democrats,
2 by the Pan-Germans among the Austro-Germans who sought union with
3 Wilhelminian Germany and by the Young Czechs in Bohemia and Moravia
4 who were the most striking manifestation of the new nationalism that was an
5 important factor in the dual monarchy’s dissolution. Not only was there a
6 particular brand of Czech nationalism, there were similar forces at work in
7 Slovakia, Romania, Italy, Croatia, Slovenia and Serbia. All these separatist and
8 nationalist movements benefited from the consequences of the Ausgleich of
9 1867, which was itself a direct consequence of the defeat of 1866. This agree-
40 ment established the basic rules of the dual monarchy that were to be effort-
41R fully upheld until 1918. Under the terms of this arrangement, two independent
states – Austria and Hungary – were constituted along the lines of a single 1
entity under a single ruler who functioned in Austria as emperor and in 2
Hungary as king. The two states’ common concerns included foreign policy, 3
defence and the budget, at least to the extent that this affected their common 4
interests. In the main, therefore, their shared concerns were foreign policy and 5
defence. There is no doubt that the Ausgleich helped to underpin the hege- 6
mony of the Magyars and Austro-Germans, a linguistic, cultural and organi- 7
zational supremacy that took little account of the Czech population whose role 8
had none the less been important from both a cultural and a historical point 9
of view. In this way the seeds were sown for the centrifugal forces that were 10
soon to emerge within the dual monarchy. The dual alliance of 1879 merely 1
expressed the fact that German-Hungarian hegemony was now properly 2
acknowledged and consolidated in the monarchy’s relations with the outside 3
world, a guarantee against the increasingly vociferous demands of Pan-Slavism 4
to which the nationalists among the Slav population naturally lent a willing 5
ear. And yet in spite of this, the decline of the monarchy was by no means 6
inevitable. Commenting on the situation in the years around 1879, Robert 7
Kann writes that ‘in Austro-Hungary there was still the possibility of peaceful 8
constitutional and social change, assuming only that appropriate national and, 9
above all, social reforms were implemented. These opportunities were for the 20
most part missed.’2 1
Vienna’s role as the Austrian capital and as home of the emperor was consti- 2
tutionally established by 1848, but this does not mean that the city found its 3
role an easy one to play. In the eyes of many leading thinkers, Vienna had 4
proved far too progressive during the 1848 revolution, a hotbed of subversive 5
aspirations and a haven for refractory students and Jewish agitators – a good 6
deal of Vienna’s later anti-Semitism can be traced back to the myth of the 7
powerful Jewish involvement in the subversive activities of 1848, a myth that 8
lived on in countless malicious caricatures. The aristocracy had no wish to see 9
their city as the home of people who could not be trusted, and Schönbrunn 30
was in any case outside the city’s confines. According to Friedrich Hebbel, 1
Prince Friedrich Schwarzenberg is said to have remarked that it was a shame 2
that when Prince Alfred von Windisch-Graetz retook Vienna from the insur- 3
gents, he did not burn down the whole of this ‘den of iniquity’, but the emperor 4
was resolved ‘to turn Vienna, that great machine room of the bureaucratic 5
mechanism, into the true centre of the monarchy, towering above all other 6
capitals in terms of its outward appearance too’, to quote an official release. 7
Such a transformation required far-reaching changes to the physical form of 8
the city. A plan of 1844 shows a crowded city enclosed within fortifications that 9
were surrounded in turn by an almost circular glacis of open, untilled land that 40
was suitable for country walks but which also served a military purpose as it 41R
48 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was impossible for any attacker, including the Turkish armies of an earlier age,
2 to approach the city walls undetected. Beyond the glacis, however, settlements
3 had sprung up like a belt around the city, and it was only a question of time
4 before these suburbs merged with the city centre. This development was
5 resisted by the army, in whose eyes the Turks had now been replaced as a threat
6 by the revolutionary inhabitants of the suburbs. But in 1857 the emperor
7 refused to be dissuaded any longer and appointed a commission to enlarge the
8 city. In giving the go-ahead to build on the glacis, the commission effectively
9 created the Ringstraße and its whole culture: even now, the Ring continues to
10 be lined with the key buildings that embody the Austria of Franz Joseph and
1 that still allow us to see very clearly where the city’s defences once stood and
2 where the glacis began.
3 Vienna’s Ringstraße remains the clearest symbol of the early years of the
4 dual monarchy. In 1875, when the young Mahler arrived in the city, it was still
5 far from complete. A competition to design the street had been held in 1858,
6 and during the next seven years this road was duly built. Some 6.5 kilometres
7 in length and 57 metres wide, it was officially opened on 1 May 1865. Between
8 1869 and 1888 – a relatively short space of time, when we recall the size of
9 the task and the building techniques of the period – the State Opera, Natural
20 History Museum, Museum of Art History, Votive Church and New University,
1 the Stock Exchange, the Parliament and the Town Hall were built to plans
2 by many of the leading architects of their day, including August Siccard von
3 Siccardsburg, Eduard van der Nüll, Gottfried Semper, Karl von Hasenauer,
4 Heinrich von Ferstel and Theophil Edvard von Hansen. Inspired by the
5 prevailing spirit of eclecticism, each building reproduced a different style, all
6 of them together representing the stylistic history of humankind or at least
7 attempting to do so: the Town Hall was imitation Gothic, the Burgtheater
8 faux early Baroque and the University was in the style of the Renaissance,
9 while the Parliament building set out to present an image that was simultane-
30 ously Greek, noble and classical. The present-day observer will have no diffi-
1 culty in understanding what appalled the generation of Adolf Loos and the
2 Secessionists about this theme park avant la lettre. But we must not forget the
3 many residential houses on the Ringstraße, private homes that did more than
4 merely meet the needs of the upper classes and the aristocracy – the majority
5 of these houses were to be found in the Schwarzenbergplatz, close to the street
6 where Mahler lived when he later became director of the Court Opera. Many
7 of the other buildings were blocks of flats for the middle classes provided by
8 the liberally minded town council.3
9 The monumental buildings along the Ringstraße were the liberal bour-
40 geoisie’s way of celebrating its own achievements, dating, as they did, from
41R the heyday of liberal influence on Austrian politics. The historian Heinrich
Friedjung, who was himself a child of the age of liberalism, saw in the 1
Ringstraße a reminder of generations of ordinary Viennese men and women 2
who, effortfully and at the cost of great self-sacrifice, had once helped to shape 3
the face of the city in spite of adverse conditions. Now power was placed in the 4
hands of the middle classes, at least in part, and this transfer found expression 5
in the redevelopment of Vienna, the social and aesthetic values of liberalism 6
being literally carved in stone. By the time that the Ringstraße was completed, 7
it was already a monument to an era that was drawing to an end. Barely 8
finished, it was already old-fashioned in the eyes of its critics, or else it was 9
felt to bear witness to a false view of the world and of life in general. Some 10
observers complained that the Ringstraße was too untraditional, having sacri- 1
ficed the venerability of tradition to the needs of a sybaritic lifestyle. Others, 2
including modernists such as the leading architect Otto Wagner, who was later 3
to leave his mark on the city, felt that it was little short of mendacious to 4
conceal modern civilization behind the fake stylistic walls of the past. But the 5
tragedy of the Ringstraße and its culture lay above all in the fact that the liber- 6
alism that had brought it into being was already in decline both politically and 7
economically, while continuing to celebrate its own achievements on an archi- 8
tectural level and seeming as if it would continue in power for ever. It had no 9
answer to the question of nationality or to the social problems of the day. 20
Not least as a result of various electoral reforms, the right to vote was now 1
extended to members of the population who were traditionally hostile to the 2
interests of the liberal bourgeoisie and upper classes. The elections held in the 3
wake of the reforms of 1873 brought serious losses to the liberals for the first 4
time in their history, and by 1879 the liberals had lost their majority in the 5
lower house and became the party of opposition in a country governed by 6
Eduard von Taaffe. The party’s subsequent defeat in the elections of 1897 7
sealed the fate of liberalism as a political force that had been worn away by the 8
reactionary Christian Socialists on the one hand and by the workers’ move- 9
ment on the other. There is a profound symbolism to the fact that the year that 30
witnessed the end of liberalism also saw Mahler’s return to Vienna as director 1
of the Court Opera. After all, it was liberalism that had made possible his own 2
acculturation as the son of provincial Jewish parents. And it is no coincidence 3
that at the same time that he was taking up his office in Vienna as the first high 4
point of his career, an anti-Semitic campaign was to be launched against him 5
that was to dog him until his departure for America in 1907. Not only did the 6
liberals lose the 1897 elections, but the year was also notable for the election of 7
the anti-Semitic Karl Lueger to the important post of mayor of Vienna, a post 8
he continued to fill until his death in 1910. 9
Let us return to the mid-1870s. In 1873, some two years before Mahler began 40
his studies in Vienna, two events had taken place that marked the culmination 41R
50 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 and crisis of liberalism and of contemporary attitudes to life. The first was the
2 Vienna World Fair, the second the collapse of the stock market, with all its
3 long-term consequences. It is no exaggeration to claim that 1873 and, in conse-
4 quence, the years between 1875 and 1880, which appear to us now in the wan
5 light that still penetrates the dust stirred up at the time and that were so deci-
6 sive in determining the young Mahler’s future development, were the fulcrum
7 on which the age’s sense of security was supported and that once that support
8 had been removed, the age was incapable of recovering its sense of equilibrium.
9 This sudden reversal in the country’s fortunes can be reduced to just two dates:
10 the World Fair opened on 1 May 1873, and the stock exchange crashed just a
1 week later, nadir following apogee with extraordinary, positively portentous
2 speed. The Vienna World Fair was the fifth in the series of twelve that had
3 begun in London in 1851 and that ended in Paris in 1900. Originally intended
4 as a mere display of a country’s achievements, these exhibitions increasingly
5 became a way of measuring its self-assurance, pontifical masses for the secular
6 religion of the nineteenth century, namely, progress, a measure based on the
7 liberal beliefs of the middle classes. In 1870, when Franz Joseph gave his
8 blessing to the ambitious plans for a World Fair in Vienna, one of his ulterior
9 motives had naturally been to increase the prestige of the monarchy, a move
20 desperately needed in the wake of the military defeats of 1859 and 1866. Not
1 least, it was an opportunity to show off the Ringstraße to the rest of the world.
2 The Prater was chosen as the site for the exhibition, which was symbolized by
3 a gigantic rotunda that was 108 metres in diameter and 84 metres in height and
4 which the Viennese, in a typical mixture of dismissal and affection, referred to
5 as the ‘Gugelhupf ’. The increasing tendency to speculate in buildings and land
6 that had started with the Ringstraße, and that had by now become a typical
7 phenomenon of the time both in Austria and elsewhere, was encouraged by the
8 World Fair. It was hoped that as soon as the exhibition opened, everything that
9 had been built on credit would pay for itself overnight. Virtually all the city’s
30 large luxury hotels date from this period. They include the Imperial on the
1 Ringstraße, which was converted from a former ducal palace. As the guiding
2 principles of liberalism, culture and education were central to the exhibition’s
3 programme. In the event, the exhibition itself was still unfinished at the time of
4 its official opening, while the crowds of visitors expected during its first few
5 weeks remained obstinately absent, a state of affairs for which the poor weather
6 and the astronomically high cost of hotel rooms were conjointly to blame. The
7 result was that many a castle in the air came crashing to the ground. A week
8 later 110 insolvencies were reported on the stock exchange, a further 120 the
9 following day, ‘Black Friday’, 9 May 1873. By the time that the exhibition closed
40 in November, it had managed to turn round its fortunes, but its reputation
41R continued to be dogged by the events of six months earlier. As if Vienna had not
suffered enough misfortune, cholera broke out in the city in July 1873, resulting 1
in almost three thousand deaths, a figure that had been thought impossible in 2
such a civilized age and in so progressive and modern a city. The impact of the 3
epidemic on visitors from abroad does not need to be spelt out. 4
The events of 9 May 1873 were described by a journalist of the time as ‘the 5
big crash’, probably the first – but certainly not the last – time that such a term 6
had been used in financial circles. It was soon taken over into other languages. 7
The economic boom of the years around 1870 seemed deceptively secure: 8
there were excellent harvests in the dual monarchy, but poor ones elsewhere in 9
Europe; the rail network had doubled in size within a matter of only a few 10
years (it was during this period that the first trains arrived in Iglau); and the 1
engineering, iron and construction industries all enjoyed a period of rapid 2
growth. The building boom in Vienna required banking services and finance 3
companies, resulting in a broad stratum of capitalists and gentlemen of leisure, 4
who in turn invested their new-found wealth in extremely lucrative ways and 5
who could afford to buy the more luxurious houses on the Ringstraße or in 6
almost equally magnificent squares and streets: these were the Rothschilds, the 7
Königswarters, the Epsteins, the Todescos, the Gomperzes and the Springers. 8
The fact that some of them were Jewish merely fuelled the anti-Semitism that 9
stemmed from the stock market crash. The lower house of Parliament 20
contained many men who had won money and influence during these years. 1
Rumour had it that the lower house was a public limited company whose 2
board was run by the ministry. ‘Railways are not built with moral sentiments’ 3
was another popular saying of the time, reflecting the fact that the views on 4
morality of an older generation who had been conditioned by the revolution 5
of 1848 had been rendered obsolete by the frenzy of the Gründerjahre. The 6
World Fair with its catastrophic opening was by no means the only cause of the 7
stock market crash. Rather, hopes that it would prove a success had only 8
delayed the consequences of a lengthy period of excessive speculation. 9
A single set of figures is enough to indicate the extent to which the market 30
had become overheated and how it was already cooling down: during the boom 1
years between 1868 and 1873, seventy new banks were founded in Vienna, 2
whereas only eight of these banks were still in business in 1883. Of course, this 3
great crash was far from being a local phenomenon, as the seismic tremors in 4
Vienna affected the whole of Europe or, rather, the psychological impact of the 5
explosion in Vienna caused buildings run up for speculative gain to come 6
crashing down all over the Continent. The greatest upheavals were caused in 7
the neighbouring Reich that had only recently been created in a spirit of high- 8
minded optimism. The boom of the Gründerjahre gave way to a general feeling 9
of depression, the low point of which was not reached until the end of the 1870s 40
but whose repercussions were felt throughout the 1870s and 1880s. At the time 41R
52 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 there were no economic models to explain such events, causing all that
2 happened to seem all the more mysterious and threatening. Economic histo-
3 rians tell us that from today’s perspective the raw facts and data are not enough
4 to explain the tremendous consequences of these events, but this is not what
5 mattered. What mattered was the dull sense of a deep depression, and this
6 feeling of depression led in turn to the real thing: the irrational ways in which
7 stock markets react today can give us an idea of such mechanisms without
8 any need for a great depression. Economic historians argue that it was only in
9 1896 that a new upturn in the country’s fortunes began. In Vienna and in the
10 Austrian provinces, in Kassel and in Prague – in short, wherever Mahler spent
1 these decisive years of his life and where his musical abilities and wishes were
2 shaped alongside his whole outlook on life and on the world – the 1870s and
3 1880s were marked by a profound sense of insecurity, by a lack of trust in the
4 optimism that had hitherto sustained the belief in progress, by a constant eye
5 on possible social unrest and by an ideological dynamism and aggression that
6 found expression in increasingly radical political extremism, including the
7 political anti-Semitism that raised its ugly head at the end of the 1870s, one
8 of its principal arguments being the Jews’ alleged complicity in the economic
9 crisis of 1873. And, without wishing to draw premature parallels, it is hard
20 to deny that Mahler’s music is marked by the juxtaposition of extreme
1 triumphalism and a profoundly shaken sense of self-assurance, especially the
2 early symphonies whose seeds were sown at this time.
3 It is no accident that Johann Strauß’s Die Fledermaus opened at the
4 Theater an der Wien on 5 April 1874 and that its internationally celebrated
5 lines, ‘Happy the man who forgets what can’t be changed’, were first heard
6 less than a year after the great crash. And yet the basic idea behind the work
7 is not Viennese at all. In 1872 Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, two libret-
8 tists best known for their exceptionally successful collaboration with Jacques
9 Offenbach, had written a comedy, Le Réveillon (the title refers to a midnight
30 supper party traditionally held on New Year’s Eve), for Paris’s Théâtre du
1 Palais-Royal. In turn, Le Réveillon was based on an 1851 farce, Das Gefängnis
2 (The Prison), by the popular Berlin playwright Roderich Benedix. Karl
3 Haffner and Richard Genée adapted the text for a Viennese audience, and by
4 the end of 1873 – the year of the stock market crash – they were able to entrust
5 it to Johann Strauß, who allegedly set it to music in the space of forty-two days.
6 Quite apart from its international acclaim – in spite of the absence of reliable
7 statistics, Die Fledermaus is regularly said to be the most successful work
8 ever written for the musical theatre – it is hard to imagine a more striking or
9 more obvious expression of the brilliance and tawdriness of the Gründerjahre
40 in Vienna. Strauß’s operetta is a mixture of irresistible champagne-driven
41R verve, a rampant male sexuality apparently untouched by the fear of sexually
transmitted diseases, and female attempts to emulate their menfolk. The prin- 1
cipal male character is like something out of a fairytale: Eisenstein, a young 2
gentleman of leisure, convincingly embodies the age’s oft-cited ability to lead a 3
carefree existence on the strength of a private income. As such, his life is safe 4
from economic crises and the very opposite of that led by those who had lost 5
their entire fortunes and been hoisted by the petard of their own speculations. 6
Eisenstein, too, is hoisted by his own petard, but only by way of a joke: he 7
manifestly does not have to worry about his fortune, which allows him to 8
pursue the most lavish of lifestyles. 9
It is enough to consider the sets for the opening act in the Viennese 10
première: they show the home of a relatively young man who clearly does not 1
need to work – he is described in the cast list as a ‘man of independent 2
means’ – but who none the less has a vast fortune at his disposal and who can 3
afford to maintain a splendid villa ‘in a spa resort near a big city’, to quote the 4
libretto. Presumably, then, the action takes places in Baden bei Wien, as the 5
city can only be Vienna. No one does an honest day’s work in Die Fledermaus, 6
even the prison governor evidently having nothing to do, while his plenipoten- 7
tiary in the prison, the jailer Frosch, is permanently tipsy. And alcohol, with its 8
amnesiac effects, certainly reigns supreme in a world addicted to pleasure. At 9
Prince Orlofsky’s party, held in another luxury villa in this ‘slum district’, the 20
guests all hail champagne as ‘the crowned head of the entire land’. And yet it is 1
also made clear at this party, if only covertly, that however attractive all this 2
may be, it is still transient: pleasure is no more permanent than the boom of 3
the Gründerjahre. In the almost unbearable melancholy of the ‘Brüderlein und 4
Schwesterlein’ chorus, it is brought home to us that enjoyment is as short-lived 5
as the euphoria of the early 1870s: ‘Laßt das traute Du uns schenken, für die 6
Ewigkeit, immer so wie heut’, wenn wir morgen noch dran denken!’, literally, 7
‘Let’s confer on each other the familiar “you” for all eternity, just like today, as 8
we still think about it tomorrow’ – eternity lasts only this one night. And with 9
their unsettling sentimentality the opening words of this chorus inevitably 30
reminded Viennese listeners of another song, this one sung by Youth to 1
Fortunatus Wurzel in Ferdinand Raimund’s Das Mädchen aus der Feenwelt, 2
oder Der Bauer als Millionär (The Girl from the Fairy World, or The Peasant 3
as Millionaire), before Wurzel adds his voice, turning it into a duet: ‘Brüderlein 4
fein, Brüderlein fein, mußt mir ja nicht böse sein! Scheint die Sonne noch so 5
schön, einmal muß sie untergeh’n’ (‘Dear little brother, you shouldn’t be cross 6
with me! Though the sun still seems so fair, it still has to set.’). ‘Through such 7
a potent lack of seriousness,’ wrote Hermann Broch: 8
9
Viennese frivolity acquired that special note that distinguished it from that of 40
every other city, a note lacking in all aggression but bringing together the 41R
54 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 whole audience in a spirit of delightful thoughtlessness and quintessential

2 Gemütlichkeit. Of course, such sentiments also contained a grain of wisdom,
3 Gemütlichkeit and wisdom traditionally going together: the end may be
4 nigh, but that end is willingly accepted. And yet it was the wisdom of the
5 world of operetta, and in the shadow of the approaching end it acquired a
6 ghostly presence, becoming Vienna’s high-spirited apocalypse.4
7
8
Young Mahler and his Friends
9
10 The Vienna Conservatory was already a well-respected institution in the
1 city’s musical life even before Mahler began his studies there in September
2 1875. It was neither a municipal nor a state-run institution but a private
3 college managed by the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde, the city’s most impor-
4 tant musical institution based on private initiative, its magnificent building
5 containing what remains one of the finest concert halls in the world –
6 indeed, the Viennese themselves claim that the Musikvereinssaal has no equal.
7 Situated near the Karlsplatz and within a stone’s throw of the Ringstraße, the
8 Musikverein had been designed by Theophil von Hansen, one of the leading
9 architects of the Ringstraße, and, three years in the building, had been offi-
20 cially opened in 1870, the Conservatory being housed in one of its wings.
1 Although it received financial support from the privy purse, it was essentially
2 a private organization, and like all conservatories of every period, it employed
3 a whole range of teachers, some of them better than others. It had been
4 founded as long ago as 1821, when its first director had been Antonio Salieri,
5 no less, but it was not until 1909 that it acquired the status of a state-run insti-
6 tution, thereby becoming the forerunner of today’s University of Music and the
7 Performing Arts. The Vienna Conservatory was not quite as highly regarded
8 as its counterpart in Leipzig, which at this date was arguably the world’s finest
9 music college, but it still had a whole series of famous teachers on its books. Its
30 director was the violinist and conductor Joseph Hellmesberger Senior, whose
1 pupils included Leopold Auer and Arthur Nikisch and who was famous for his
2 wit. Although he accused his professor of harmony, Robert Fuchs, of plagia-
3 rism, Fuchs was evidently a good teacher whose pupils numbered not only
4 Mahler himself but also Franz Schreker, Alexander Zemlinsky (an early rival
5 of Mahler’s for the hand of Alma Schindler), Jean Sibelius and Franz Schmidt.
6 Julius Epstein – the man who officially discovered and fostered Mahler’s
7 talent – was the best known of the Conservatory’s piano teachers but, however
8 good he may have been, it was his misfortune that there was an even better
9 piano teacher working in Vienna at this time, albeit only privately, Theodor
40 Leschetitzky, whose pupils included Paderewski and Schnabel. The institute’s
41R principal composition teacher was Franz Krenn, who also taught Mahler but
whom history has judged unfavourably, his views and methods being criti- 1
cized for being too backward-looking. It seems as if the more liberal Fuchs 2
introduced greater compositional contraband into his harmony classes than 3
was officially permitted. Anton Bruckner, finally, gave organ lessons at the 4
Conservatory in addition to his classes at the University. 5
Leaving aside Mahler’s three-month stint as conductor in Bad Hall during 6
the summer of 1880, his first continuous stay in Vienna lasted six years, from 7
September 1875 to the summer of 1881, at which point he took up a post in 8
Laibach (Ljubljana). This six-year period, between the ages of fifteen and 9
twenty-one, is a decisive phase in the life of any artist and, indeed, of any indi- 10
vidual. Unfortunately, these are also the worst-documented years in Mahler’s 1
life, so that we have no choice but to attempt to reconstruct them on the basis 2
of other, disparate sources. There were in fact two phases to Mahler’s educa- 3
tion in Vienna, each of them associated with a different circle of friends. The 4
first such circle, and the more intimate of the two, was made up of Mahler’s 5
fellow pupils from the Conservatory and provided him with a specifically 6
musical stimulus, whereas the second was more important in terms of his 7
general outlook on the world and resulted from his contacts with the circles 8
associated with Siegfried Lipiner and Engelbert Pernerstorfer. 9
Mahler’s circle of friends at the Conservatory initially consisted of no 20
more than four or five individuals, some of them more interesting than 1
others, but all in all a good indication of Mahler’s ability to attract important 2
people of his own age. The individuals in question were Anton Krisper, Rudolf 3
Krzyzanowski and, to a lesser extent, his brother Heinrich, Hans Rott and 4
Hugo Wolf. It is also possible that Mahler briefly made the acquaintance of 5
the mezzo-soprano Rosa Papier at this time. She later became a well-known 6
member of the Vienna Court Opera and, following her early retirement on 7
health grounds, a distinguished singing teacher whose pupils numbered Anna 8
von Mildenburg. She also exerted considerable influence on Vienna’s musical 9
scene, helping in no small way to bring about Mahler’s appointment as director 30
of the Court Opera. The wife of the pianist Hans Paumgartner, she was the 1
mother of Bernhard Paumgartner, later to become well known as a Mozart 2
scholar and as president of the Salzburg Festival. For a time, this group of 3
friends was very small, an unsurprising state of affairs as Mahler was looking 4
for something like a substitute family in the city. Epstein took considerable 5
interest in the boy and could play the part of a fatherly friend, but he inevitably 6
had little time for the lad from Iglau, quite apart from his understandable 7
reluctance to show undue preference for any one particular student. Of greater 8
importance were friends of Mahler’s own age: Wolf was born in the same year 9
as Mahler, Hans Rott was two years older, Anton Krisper three years older, and 40
Rudolf Krzyzanowski a year older. In comparison to today’s state-run colleges 41R
56 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 of music, the Vienna Conservatory was a tiny institution, so that students of

2 different ages very soon met on its various courses.
3 Anton Krisper came from Laibach, where he had been born into a well-to-
4 do family of businessmen. He matriculated at the Conservatory in 1876 but
5 remained there for only two years before moving to Leipzig and enrolling at
6 the city’s University, where he read musicology. He is said to have written an
7 opera during his youth, but no such work has come down to us. He was more
8 successful academically, his dissertation on ‘Art Music in Terms of its Origins,
9 Development and Consequences’ being praised by one of the leading figures of
10 the as yet young discipline of musicology, Hugo Riemann. The multitalented
1 Krisper later studied mining and worked as an engineer. He died in a sanator-
2 ium near Graz in 1914, evidently as the result of some venereal disease, and
3 was buried in Laibach. His friendship with Mahler is documented in a series
4 of important letters written between 1878 and 1880, but thereafter the two
5 friends lost contact. It seems that Krisper also played the cello, with Wolf as his
6 accompanist.
7 Mahler was closer to the brothers Rudolf and Heinrich Krzyzanowski than
8 he was to Krisper. The younger of the two brothers, Rudolf, died, like Mahler,
9 in 1911, only a few weeks after his friend. He was evidently highly gifted as a
20 musician, equally talented not only as a violinist and pianist but also as an
1 organist and as a composer. The close links between Rudolf Krzyzanowski and
2 Mahler were reciprocal, and the two men’s paths frequently crossed in later life.
3 Mahler did much to help his older friend, especially when the latter’s career as
4 a conductor got off to a shaky start. The Krzyzanowski family came from Eger.
5 Rudolf ’s elder brother, Heinrich, was born in 1855 and was enrolled not at the
6 Conservatory but at the University, from where he graduated in German
7 Studies in 1877, his teacher being the eminent Germanist Richard Heinzel.
8 After teaching in a series of grammar schools, he married and moved to
9 Germany, working as a freelance writer in Starnberg, Munich and Berlin. His
30 short story Im Bruch was published in 1885. He later moved back to Vienna,
1 where he worked as a private tutor, for a time supported by Mahler, and
2 lectured on literary topics. By the 1920s he was living in the Tyrol. During
3 Mahler’s early years in Vienna, the Krzyzanowski brothers appear to have been
4 his closest friends.
5 The two composers among Mahler’s early friends are far more fascinating
6 figures than Krisper and the Krzyzanowskis – fascinating but also problemat-
7 ical. When Hans Rott’s Symphony in E major of 1878/80 received its first
8 performance in Cincinnati in 1989, more than a century after it had been
9 written, the event was little short of a sensation. Experts and – following
40 further performances and some gramophone recordings – the public at large
41R recognized that this hour-long symphony, the final movement of which alone
lasts almost twenty-five minutes, is a key work in the evolution of the ‘New 1
Symphony’, representing, as it does, an attempt to make a fresh start in the field 2
of the symphony that was then being tilled by Bruckner and Brahms. The most 3
famous exponent of this new style was none other than Mahler himself, and it 4
is to him in fact that we owe the term ‘New Symphony’. Even at a first hearing 5
it was obvious to many listeners that there were astonishing similarities 6
between the musical language of Rott’s one and only symphony and that of 7
Mahler’s First, which was not composed until 1885–8, in other words, at least 8
five years later than Rott’s work. It also gave pause for thought that Rott and 9
Mahler studied at the Vienna Conservatory at exactly the same time. A remark 10
that Mahler made about Rott to Natalie Bauer-Lechner now received greater 1
attention. Mahler had taken the score of Rott’s symphony with him on holiday 2
during the summer of 1900 in order to see whether it was worth performing 3
at one of the Vienna Philharmonic’s concerts: 4
5
What music has lost in him is immeasurable. His First Symphony, written 6
when he was a young man of twenty, already soars to such heights of 7
genius that it makes him – without exaggeration – the founder of the New 8
Symphony as I understand it. It is true that he has not yet fully realized his 9
aims here. It is like someone taking a run for the longest possible throw and 20
not quite hitting the mark. But I know what he is driving at. His innermost 1
nature is so much akin to mine that he and I are like two fruits from the same 2
tree, produced by the same soil, nourished by the same air. We would have 3
had an infinite amount in common. Perhaps we two might have gone some 4
way together towards exhausting the possibilities of this new age that was 5
then dawning in music.5 6
7
Mahler also mentions a number of anecdotes about Rott’s activities as organist 8
at the Piarist Monastery in Vienna, where he played for a pittance in return for 9
free accommodation. Mahler remembered seeing a string of sausages hanging 30
on a nail in his room, like a kind of a wreath. He would eat them one by one 1
in order to appease his hunger. He ostensibly lost his post when the monks 2
accused him of stealing their books. 3
Rott was born in Vienna in 1858, the son of an actor. He enrolled at the 4
Conservatory in 1874, a year before Mahler, and studied the organ with Bruckner, 5
harmony with Hermann Grädener rather than Fuchs and composition with 6
Krenn. Like so many others, Rott was introduced to Wagner by Bruckner and in 7
this way became a member of the Vienna Academic Wagner Society about which 8
I shall shortly have more to say. He also attended the first Bayreuth Festival in 9
1876. Bruckner held Rott in high regard and was deeply shaken by his early death 40
in 1884. It is reported that he spontaneously took up the cudgels for Rott 41R
58 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 when the latter was defeated by Mahler in the Conservatory’s competition for
2 composers. It seems probable that Rott submitted the opening movement of his
3 symphony, while Mahler’s entry was a movement from a lost piano quintet.
4 Mahler, who had not previously been smiled on by good fortune, was awarded
5 the first prize, while Rott was laughed out of court by the jury that awarded
6 the prize. The normally shy Bruckner is said to have leapt to his feet and
7 exclaimed: ‘Don’t laugh, gentlemen, you’ll hear great things about that man!’
8 Because of Rott’s premature death, Bruckner’s prophecy did not come true, but
9 Rott’s surviving symphony shows that the older composer was right. In another
10 conversation with Natalie, Mahler confused this competition with a later one
1 when he unsuccessfully submitted Das klagende Lied for the 1881 Beethoven
2 Prize. The jury on this later occasion included Brahms, whom Mahler later came
3 to respect but who was regarded at this time as a traditionalist with no time for
4 the ‘New Symphony’ and a positive loathing of all that smacked of Wagner and
5 Bruckner. Mahler was guilty of exaggeration when he later blamed this jury for
6 plunging him into the wearying career of an opera conductor as a means of
7 earning his living, instead of writing an opera called Rübezahl and making his
8 breakthrough as a composer.
9 Legend has it that Brahms was also responsible for blighting Rott’s career
20 but in a far more serious way than was the case with Mahler. Rott entered his
1 name for the 1880 Beethoven Prize, submitting not only his complete First
2 Symphony but also a Pastoral Prelude that remained unperformed until 2000.
3 In the run-up to such awards, composers were expected to call on the
4 members of the jury to pay them their respects. And so Rott dutifully went to
5 see Brahms, but if we may believe his account of their meeting, he received a
6 brusque rebuff. Brahms is said to have commented ‘You cannot possibly have
7 written this yourself ’ – a remark that may even have been intended as a
8 compliment. Profoundly depressed, the unsuccessful Rott tried in vain to
9 obtain work as an organist, but the only post that he was offered was as a
30 choral conductor in Strasbourg, and he did not want to leave Vienna. In late
1 October 1880 he reluctantly boarded a train to Strasbourg. Symptoms of
2 pathological nervousness and extreme eccentricity that had evidently been
3 apparent for some time now came to a disastrous head, and when a fellow
4 passenger tried to light a cigar, Rott is said to have threatened him with a gun,
5 claiming that smoking was strictly forbidden on the train as a certain Johannes
6 Brahms – the name meant nothing to the smoker – had filled it with dynamite.
7 Rott was removed from the train and taken back to Vienna, where he spent the
8 last four years of his short life in a series of psychiatric institutions. He was
9 only twenty-five when he died in June 1884, apparently from tuberculosis,
40 although it is possible – if impossible to prove – that venereal disease and the
41R resultant mental imbalance were to blame.6
It seems unlikely that Rott and Mahler were close. Heinrich Krzyzanowski, 1
who was a close friend of both men, maintains that it was Rott in particular 2
who preferred to keep his distance as he was jealous of Rudolf Krzyzanowski, 3
Rott’s own best friend who was also a very close friend to Mahler. Heinrich 4
offers a particularly striking account of the very different impression left by 5
Rott and Mahler as they walked along the street together, the former blond, 6
immensely tall and tending to corpulence, while the short, swarthy, fidgety 7
Mahler lolloped along beside him, his long coat trailing on the ground.7 It 8
remains unclear why Mahler did not perform Rott’s symphony after he had 9
taken the trouble to examine the score in the summer of 1900. We cannot say 10
whether he harboured doubts as to its immaturity or whether he was taken 1
aback by the similarities with his own early works and wanted to avoid any 2
discussion about an unduly obvious debt. Be that as it may, the relationship 3
between Rott and Mahler remains a remarkable phenomenon, but the rumour 4
that has begun to circulate since its rediscovery that Mahler’s early works are 5
clearly modelled on Rott’s one and only symphony is without foundation. 6
True, there are surprising points of agreement in terms of both composers’ 7
tone of voice, but such similarities may also be observed between Brahms and 8
Friedrich Gernsheim, between the young Wagner and Meyerbeer, and 9
between the young Schoenberg and Wagner. In the case of Rott and Mahler, 20
they may perhaps go even further than this and provide eloquent proof of the 1
fact that both composers were able to achieve similar results because they 2
shared common goals and had both been influenced by Bruckner and Wagner. 3
None the less, it is impossible to ignore Hans Rott in any account of Mahler’s 4
development as a composer, while Rott’s music undoubtedly merits our atten- 5
tion for its independent qualities. 6
At least as remarkable is the relationship between Mahler and Hugo Wolf. 7
Here, too, it is difficult to speak of a close friendship between the two adoles- 8
cents, even though both were in very close contact and even shared an apart- 9
ment. Both men were born in 1860, Mahler being some four months younger 30
than Wolf. Wolf hailed from Windischgrätz (now Slovenjgradec), a very small 1
town in what was then southern Styria with a large Slovene population. Both 2
men were fifteen when they arrived in Vienna from the Austrian provinces, 3
where their musical talents had attracted attention at a very early date. They 4
appear to have got to know one another in Robert Fuchs’s harmony class at the 5
Conservatory, although their initial contacts were desultory, and it was not until 6
later that their acquaintance deepened, a development that had presumably 7
taken place by the summer of 1877, when they probably began to share rooms. 8
Both men regularly attended performances at the Court Opera as standees, and 9
both became fanatical Wagnerites. Wolf first saw Tannhäuser at the Vienna 40
Court Opera in November 1875 and in the middle of December he even 41R
60 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 managed to obtain an audience with Wagner, who was then staying at the
2 Hotel Imperial, a meeting on which he reported with great enthusiasm in a long
3 letter to his parents, even if Wagner politely but firmly declined his invitation to
4 look at his compositions. Wolf became a lifelong Wagnerian, taking over his
5 hero’s anti-Semitism in addition to his aesthetic ideals. Mahler, too, became an
6 inveterate Wagnerian but did not share his idol’s anti-Semitism, although he
7 could certainly have done so in the form of Jewish self-hatred. As we shall later
8 have cause to note, it is a remarkable fact that he never once mentions Wagner’s
9 anti-Semitism, even though he was not unaware of the anti-Jewish sentiments
10 that were rampant at this time and of which he was a principal victim. The cult
1 of Wagner played an important role in Vienna’s cultural life, leaving a mark on
2 Mahler that went far beyond mere questions of musical taste.
3 Wagner had been a frequent visitor to Vienna, not least at the time of the
4 1848 revolution, when the city had been a hotbed of unrest. Strangely enough,
5 it was Johann Strauß who introduced Wagner’s music to Viennese audiences
6 when he conducted excerpts from Tannhäuser and Lohengrin at a concert in
7 1853. From then on, Wagner’s works were a staple of the repertory, provoking
8 the same violent responses for and against them as those found throughout
9 the rest of the world of music. The first performance of Lohengrin at the
20 Kärntnerthor-Theater in 1858 helped to consolidate Wagner’s reputation in
1 the city in spite of the embittered resistance of the critic Eduard Hanslick, who
2 had begun his career as a Wagnerian only to become his most powerful and
3 intransigent adversary. There were also plans to give the first performance of
4 Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna Court Opera in 1861, but in the event they
5 came to nothing, and it was not until four years later that the work was finally
6 unveiled in Munich. Conversely, the concerts that the composer organized in
7 Vienna to replace the aborted première proved immensely successful but
8 could not prevent Wagner, who had temporarily found refuge at Penzing in the
9 city’s suburbs, from having to flee Vienna in March 1864 in order to escape
30 from his creditors. From Vienna he travelled to Stuttgart, where he was finally
1 tracked down by an emissary of King Ludwig of Bavaria, who invited him to
2 Munich, an unsuspected high point in his career that was not, however, to last.
3 Quite apart from events such as these, Wagner was from then on a regular
4 talking point in aesthetic and even political discussions in Vienna. By 1875,
5 when Mahler and Wolf arrived in the city, a critical point had been reached in
6 these discussions, leading in part to Wagner’s breakthrough in the capital, for
7 between March and May the composer had conducted three concerts of his
8 own works in the city, followed in the autumn of that year by a return visit to
9 superintend productions of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin at the Court Opera. (It
40 was on this occasion that Wolf called on Wagner.) It was the Court Opera’s new
41R director, Franz Jauner, who had made it possible for Wagner to be crowned the
new king of opera in Vienna after all the botched opportunities of the past. 1
True, Jauner was no Wagnerian, but he knew the merits and drawing power of 2
Wagner’s operas and was firmly resolved to help them achieve their break- 3
through at the Court Opera, an aim in which he and his successor Wilhelm 4
Jahn were successful. By 1883/4 all the composer’s works from Rienzi onwards 5
were in the Court Opera repertory, while the house’s principal conductor, 6
Hans Richter, was closely associated with Bayreuth. Singers from the Court 7
Opera also appeared on Bayreuth’s Green Hill. 8
It was against this background that Wolf and Mahler grew up, Mahler’s later 9
cultivation of a sparer production style and his reassessment of Wagner’s music 10
during his period as director being inconceivable without this phase from 1
1875 to 1883. But Wagner’s works were also explosive in terms of musical 2
politics. Brahms had moved to Vienna in 1862 and taken over the running of 3
the city’s Singakademie, finally settling there in 1868 and becoming artistic 4
director of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde from 1875 to 1878. (As we 5
have already seen, it was in this capacity that he sat on various committees 6
and competition juries.) A late developer, he had yet to complete his First 7
Symphony, but thanks to his great choral works, his First Piano Concerto, Alto 8
Rhapsody, lieder, chamber works and piano music he was the most famous 9
composer then living in Vienna, a European figure who, although a native 20
of Hamburg, was already being claimed by the Austrians. Brahms was also 1
regarded as a ‘conservative’ composer (this is not the place to argue the merits 2
of such an assessment) and hence as one of the figureheads of the party that 3
opposed the ‘musicians of the future’, as members of the New German School 4
were often called. This antagonism had come to the fore at the latest by 1860, 5
when a Berlin newspaper published a declaration by a handful of signatories 6
informing the world that they could ‘only deplore and condemn as contrary to 7
the most fundamental essence of music the products of the leaders and disci- 8
ples of the so-called New German School’. Among the protest’s signatories 9
were Brahms himself and his friend Joseph Joachim, the most famous German 30
violinist of his day. Only a short time earlier a whole series of musicians and 1
music critics under Liszt’s organizational and intellectual aegis had coined 2
the term ‘New German School’ with reference to themselves, going on to 3
form an association which from 1861 was known as the Allgemeiner 4
Deutscher Musikverein. They viewed themselves as the party of progress and 5
felt that they could overcome the hegemony of Viennese Classicism only by 6
abandoning traditional sonata form and symphonic form in the conservative 7
sense of those terms and by espousing new forms of expression, namely, the 8
Wagnerian music drama and programme music. (The symphonic poem 9
played an important role here, and it is no accident that Berlioz and his 40
Symphonie fantastique were much touted by Liszt.) 41R
62 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Wagner was a great deal more controversial than Berlioz, so that after
2 1860 an individual’s attitude to Wagner helped to clarify his or her position:
3 progressives were expected to revere Wagner, Liszt and Berlioz, while reac-
4 tionaries were convinced of the unsurpassable greatness of Mendelssohn and
5 Schumann, and they composed in the style of Brahms. (This is a highly
6 abbreviated and simplified account of a complex situation.) As a naïve child of
7 his age, Bruckner was involuntarily caught in the crossfire, his idolatrous
8 admiration for Wagner and use of multiple trombones instantly aligning him
9 with the New German School, without leaving any scope for a more subtle
10 analysis of his music. In Vienna, Eduard Hanslick and Ludwig Speidel, the
1 city’s two most powerful critics, lent their weight to the ‘Brahmins’, as Brahms’s
2 supporters were called, their interventions invariably proving intelligent, witty
3 and effective.
4 Until the mid-1870s, it seemed unlikely that Wagner would ever gain a
5 foothold in the Austrian capital, a state of affairs apparently confirmed by the
6 unfortunate events of the last twenty or thirty years. But the situation then
7 changed, the Wagnerians having a great advantage over their adversaries: at
8 least to the extent that they were musically inclined, all who regarded them-
9 selves as progressive, whether socially, politically or morally, and all who felt
20 that they were still young or at least behaved as if they were must necessarily
1 side with the New Germans and, hence, with Wagner. As a venomous music
2 critic, Wolf lost no opportunity to unleash torrents of abuse on Brahms,
3 summing up the positions of the two armies on the occasion of an all-Liszt
4 concert: ‘On the one hand, youth, intelligence, idealism, judgement, enthu-
5 siasm, conviction; on the other, obtuseness, frivolity, lack of principles,
6 ignorance and arrogance.’ It was as simple as that. Many other young music
7 enthusiasts adopted an equally black-and-white view of the situation, and this
8 is certainly true of Mahler, who can scarcely have heard a note of Wagner’s
9 music in Iglau. He soon became one of Wagner’s most fanatical followers, and
30 we may well be right in assuming that it was in this way that he became friendly
1 with Wolf or, more accurately, became Wolf ’s ally in matters Wagnerian. In her
2 memoirs, Alma has given a colourfully embroidered account of the lives led by
3 Mahler, Wolf and Rudolf Krzyzanowski in the room that they rented together.
4 All three, she writes, were sensitive to noise. When one of them was composing
5 and needed to use the piano, the others had to wander the streets and on one
6 occasion even sleep outside on a bench in the Ringstraße. They are also said to
7 have played through Götterdämmerung from the vocal score – this was no
8 doubt around the time of the first performances of the work in Vienna in
9 February 1879 – and to have made such a noise singing and playing the second-
40 act Vengeance Trio for Brünnhilde, Gunther and Hagen that they were given
41R immediate notice to quit.
There was also an institutional side to the Wagnerian enthusiasms of 1

Vienna’s young musicians: it was known as the Viennese Academic Wagner 2
Society and was founded in 1872 by Guido Adler, later to make a name 3
for himself as a musicologist and as one of Mahler’s most unquestioning 4
supporters, and by the sixteen-year-old Felix Mottl, later a distinguished 5
Wagner conductor. They were reacting to the fact that in keeping with its name, 6
the Conservatory did not include Wagner’s music in its syllabus. Indeed, it 7
could hardly have done so, given the influential Brahms’s aversion to Wagner. 8
(Conversely, Wagner felt only an irrational loathing of Brahms. On the one 9
occasion when Nietzsche brought a Brahms score with him to Wagner’s home 10
in Bayreuth, he was greeted with open contempt.) But the Wagnerian enthu- 1
siasm of Vienna’s young musicians also had a distinctly political aspect to it. 2
Criticism of Wagner came above all from the liberal camp, not least on account 3
of his anti-Semitism, while that same anti-Semitism made him all the more 4
popular with certain of his supporters, among whom we must unfortunately 5
number Wolf. These same supporters also held Pan-German ideas which, in 6
terms of party politics, inevitably implied allegiance to the German nationalist 7
party. It was not necessary, of course, for all who harboured German nationalist 8
beliefs in Austria to become Wagnerians, but Austria’s Wagnerians necessarily 9
thought in terms of German nationalism, Mahler himself later being one of 20
the few exceptions. German nationalist views had evolved in the wake of the 1
German Confederation and the Frankfurt National Assembly of 1848/9 and 2
implied a Pan-German empire under Austrian rule. Following Prussia’s victory 3
in the war of 1866 and the establishment of a German Reich without Austria, 4
German nationalist attitudes became radicalized in Austria. After 1871 the 5
majority of those who held such beliefs no longer demanded that Austria 6
be incorporated into the German Reich as this would have been tantamount 7
to acknowledging Prussian hegemony and the end of Austria as an inde- 8
pendent nation. Rather, they believed in the overwhelming superiority of all 9
things German in matters of language, culture and national sentiment within 30
the multiracial dual monarchy, with the result that they looked down with 1
contempt on other sections of the population who spoke different languages 2
and who were felt to be racially different. In turn, their contempt was bound up 3
with political attempts to express this sense of superiority on a political and 4
constitutional level. For the German nationalists there could never be any 5
question of reconciliation with the Magyars or even with the Czechs. 6
By the end of the 1870s Georg von Schönerer had worked his way up to the 7
position of leader of the German national movement, and by 1882 he had 8
formulated a programme in Linz with Adler and Pernerstorfer, both of whom 9
went on to become prominent Social Democrats and whom we shall meet 40
again as members of Siegfried Lipiner’s circle of friends, which also included 41R
64 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Mahler. But when Schönerer began to promote anti-Semitism as an essential

2 doctrine of the German national movement, he lost increasing numbers of
3 supporters, a development that turned the German Nationalists, some of
4 whom called themselves ‘Pan-Germans’, into a right-wing party. It is clear that
5 although Mahler, unlike Otto Weininger, never became a Jewish anti-Semite,
6 he sympathized with German national ideas, at least for a time. Wagner was
7 the musical and political hero of all young Austrians with German national
8 views. In their eyes, his music and his music dramas were a superior, ultra-
9 modern art form, in addition to which they were German in the sense that
10 Wagner himself had defined that term, most notably in his essay ‘What is
1 German?’. Elsewhere, in his series of articles ‘Religion and Art’, Wagner advo-
2 cated vegetarianism, which Wolf and Mahler both espoused for a time. But
3 Mahler may ultimately have found the German nationalism and anti-Semitism
4 of the Viennese Academic Wagner Society too much to stomach, for it is clear
5 from surviving documents that by 1879 he had already resigned his member-
6 ship as part of a concerted action that also included Anton Krisper, Rudolf
7 Krzyzanowski and Hans Rott, but not Wolf, who remained true to his beliefs
8 until the end of his life.
9 It is no disrespect to Rott to argue that Wolf was the most important
20 composer whom Mahler encountered prior to Richard Strauss. As with Strauss,
1 relations between the two men remained problematical, but in Wolf ’s case they
2 additionally ended on a shrilly discordant note. Does this suggest that Mahler
3 was incapable of accepting compositional greatness in anyone other than
4 himself? In the case of Wolf, there is something to be said for this claim,
5 whereas with Strauss we know that he ungrudgingly recognized the importance
6 of a work like Salome, no doubt in part because he himself no longer had any
7 ambitions in the field of opera. Although Wolf was still describing Mahler as his
8 ‘friend’ in a letter that he wrote to his parents in 1879, the first cracks in his
9 relations with him may already have appeared in the autumn of that year when
30 the two of them discussed their plans for an opera on the subject of Rübezahl,
1 a legendary giant from the Riesengebirge on the boundary between Silesia
2 and Bohemia. It seems that they failed to reach an agreement on the subject.
3 According to Mahler’s version of events, as recounted by Natalie, Wolf had told
4 him about his plans for an opera, to which Mahler had responded by insisting
5 that the subject could be treated only as a comedy. True, Wolf ’s only completed
6 opera, Der Corregidor, is a ‘comic’ opera, although the humour has never
7 managed to achieve its desired effect with every section of its audience. But
8 with the best will in the world, Wolf was incapable of imagining Rübezahl as a
9 subject for a comedy, a conviction shared by the present writer, too. Fired by the
40 conversation, Mahler, however, spent the next week committing a libretto to
41R paper. When the two friends next met – and it is significant that in discussing
these events with Natalie, Mahler referred not to ‘my friend’ but to ‘your 1
friend’ – Mahler asked Wolf how he was getting on with Rübezahl. Wolf 2
reported that he had found some interesting material in the library, whereupon 3
Mahler triumphantly drew his finished libretto from his pocket, causing Wolf 4
to fly into a rage and declare that Rübezahl was now dead to him as an opera.8 5
From the summer of 1880 onwards, there is no real trace of any further contact 6
between the two composers. Mahler had in any case left Vienna, whereas Wolf 7
remained in the city. No letters appear to have passed between them. Alma 8
claims that the two men later met by chance in Bayreuth and walked past each 9
other with no more than a cool word of greeting, but we have no means of 10
knowing whether this account is correct. That their relations left a deeper mark 1
on both parties than this pitiful end to their contacts might otherwise suggest 2
emerges from a number of other pieces of evidence. 3
Wolf ’s nervous breakdown as the result of a syphilitic infection appears to 4
have been triggered by a meeting with Mahler in September 1897, nearly 5
twenty years later. (This statement of fact implies no apportionment of blame.) 6
Mahler was already running the Vienna State Opera as Wilhelm Jahn’s repre- 7
sentative and had expressed an interest in Der Corregidor. Almost certainly he 8
saw the difficulties involved in staging what remains a problematic piece, but 9
he also recognized the merits of Wolf ’s hugely ambitious opera and felt an obli- 20
gation to his former friend. But when Wolf called on him in the hope that a 1
production could quickly be mounted, Mahler was obliged to put him off, 2
arguing that the house’s schedule, for which he was not responsible, prevented 3
the piece from being staged in the foreseeable future. (The work had received 4
its first performance in Mannheim in June 1896, only months after its comple- 5
tion.) Wolf had pinned all his hopes on Mahler and found it impossible to 6
accept his reasons for not staging the work. In addition, it seems that the two 7
men argued over Anton Rubinstein’s opera The Demon, which Mahler may 8
well have held in higher regard than Der Corregidor. As Dietrich Fischer- 9
Dieskau has pointed out in his life of the composer, Wolf was already in an 30
agitated state of mind caused by his incipient paralysis when he turned up in 1
Mahler’s office at the Court Opera on 18 September 1897.9 Mahler was 2
evidently forced to draw his attention to the work’s shortcomings, and the two 3
men parted on a note of acrimony. Alma claimed that as soon as he was 4
outside, Wolf started to shout that he was Mahler and director of the Vienna 5
Opera, whereupon he was restrained on the Ringstraße, but her account 6
appears to be exaggerated. More reliable witnesses state that Wolf hurried to 7
Mahler’s rooms in the Auenbruggergasse claiming that he was director of the 8
Vienna Opera and demanding admittance from the cook, who slammed the 9
door in his face. He then invited his closest friends to his rooms to play 40
through his latest opera, Manuel Venegas, for them. As he was doing so, he 41R
66 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 started to cry uncontrollably in a scene that Thomas Mann took over in

2 describing Adrian Leverkühn’s breakdown in Doktor Faustus. Wolf then deliv-
3 ered himself of a prepared speech directed at the staff of the Court Opera,
4 taking tremendous delight in showing Mahler the door. According to an alter-
5 native account, Wolf went to see the tenor Hermann Winkelmann and likewise
6 declared that he was the Court Opera’s new director. Winkelmann retorted
7 that this title belonged to Mahler, whereupon Wolf mysteriously whispered
8 that he had ‘already got rid of Mahler’. The day after these events, Wolf was
9 taken by friends to a private psychiatric hospital under the pretext that as the
10 Court Opera’s new director he had to be introduced to the lord chamberlain.
1 ‘So you’re playing games with me,’ Wolf presciently told his doctors when they
2 admitted him to the clinic.
3 Mahler, too, was not unaffected by these events. In his reminiscences of the
4 composer, the writer on music Ernst Decsey – significantly enough, Wolf ’s
5 first major biographer – recalls visiting Mahler’s country retreat at Maiernigg
6 on the Wörthersee. As a keen champion of Wolf, Decsey naturally brought the
7 conversation round to his idol, who at this date, around 1900, was still alive,
8 immured in a psychiatric institution in Vienna. Decsey was understandably
9 taken aback when in no uncertain terms Mahler questioned whether Wolf ’s
20 songs, including ‘Weylas Gesang’, had any artistic merit. He claimed not to be
1 able to find in them any of the basic rules of composition, namely, the state-
2 ment of a theme and its working out. A song, he insisted, should be character-
3 ized by singing and by music, not by the word-setting, which is of course
4 paramount in Wolf. Mahler grew increasingly agitated, striking his open palm
5 with his fist and refusing to calm down. Decsey left under the clear and no
6 doubt correct impression that ‘Wolf was a sore point with him’.
7
8
Conservatory and University
9
30 We are now more familiar with the world in which the fifteen-year-old
1 distiller’s son from Iglau found himself in 1875. It would be foolish to assume
2 that from his first day in the city, Mahler conquered cultural Vienna and felt at
3 home in every corner of this vast city. Rather, we should imagine a young boy
4 from a town of nearly twenty thousand inhabitants finding himself in a city
5 with a population that had just passed the one million mark – until then, the
6 largest city he had known was Prague, an experience he had found profoundly
7 disturbing. The term ‘culture shock’ is entirely appropriate here. We do not
8 know all the details of Mahler’s life during this period – with a few exceptions,
9 his surviving letters do not predate 1879 – but certain conclusions are none
40 the less possible. According to the matriculation register of the ‘Conservatory
41R for Music and the Performing Arts of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde
in Vienna’ (to give it its official title), Mahler’s main subject was the piano, 1
which he studied, of course, with his paternal patron Julius Epstein. The same 2
register gives no indication of Mahler’s subsidiary subjects, but we know that 3
he studied harmony with Robert Fuchs and counterpoint and composition 4
with Franz Krenn. (We should not forget that at the same time Mahler was 5
attempting to complete his course as an external pupil at the Iglau Grammar 6
School.) But the University’s records also show that when he completed his 7
studies at the end of the 1877/8 academic year Mahler’s main subject was no 8
longer the piano but composition, which he had been studying with Krenn. It 9
is unclear why he changed courses in September 1877, but it cannot have been 10
because of his inadequacies as a pianist for in the competition held in 1876 he 1
won first prize for his performance of a Schubert sonata. A few days later, on 2
1 July 1876, he also won the first prize in composition for the opening move- 3
ment of a quintet. There is no indication that he fell out with Epstein, and so 4
his decision to change courses was presumably a reflection of his increasingly 5
apparent interest in composition. 6
And with whom did Mahler study conducting? The answer is simple: with 7
no one, for at this date conducting was not taught at any conservatory or 8
college of music. When Peter Heyworth once asked Otto Klemperer how a 9
conductor learnt to conduct, Klemperer replied: ‘What one can teach and what 20
one can learn is so minimal that I could explain it to you in a minute.’ And 1
Shaw’s famous comment, in Man and Superman, that ‘He who can, does. He 2
who cannot, teaches’, could also be applied to conducting. The most gifted of 3
Mahler’s ‘disciples’, Bruno Walter, who was a whole generation younger than 4
his mentor, studied conducting at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin, but this 5
was in 1890, by which date such courses were gradually being set up. They 6
eventually included all the canonical aspects of the discipline that remain part 7
of such courses even now: continuo, score-reading, the ability to play from a 8
full score, the theory of musical form, composition and instrumentation. 9
Otherwise, young conductors learnt their trade almost in passing by means of 30
chorus and orchestral rehearsals with conservatory orchestras, accompanying 1
singers and, most important of all, attending concerts given by the leading 2
conductors of their day – Walter’s great model was Hans von Bülow. Mahler 3
managed to achieve all this without attending a class in conducting, just as 4
Walter would have done. Conductors acquired the tools of their trade not only 5
by watching the great conductors of their age, which in Mahler’s case meant 6
Bülow, Nikisch, Strauss and, to a lesser extent, the somewhat stolid Hans 7
Richter, but also, and above all, by gaining practical experience in the 8
provinces. The young Mahler could hone his skills on the screeching violins 9
and croaking bassoons in Bad Hall and Laibach, where technical shortcomings 40
in his stick technique were not so immediately apparent and could quickly be 41R
68 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 remedied. By the time that he arrived in Kassel at the age of twenty-three, he

2 was already fully proficient as a conductor, documentary evidence from this
3 period leaving us in no doubt on the matter: here was a conductor who meas-
4 ured everything by the standards of the works that he was interpreting, driving
5 not only his comrades-in-arms but also any refractory adversaries in the
6 orchestra to the very limits of their often modest abilities, persuading them to
7 go along with him, however reluctantly, and sweeping his audience along with
8 him. There is no doubt, too, that from first to last he felt a sense of profound
9 inadequacy in the face of the great works by other composers, a feeling that
10 frequently left him terminally depressed.
1 Financially speaking, Mahler was better off than many of his fellow pupils.
2 (Given their youth, the word ‘pupil’ seems more fitting here than ‘student’.) In
3 financing his studies, he even demonstrated considerable astuteness, just as at
4 a later date the otherworldly Mahler could show great cunning in monetary
5 matters. It emerges from a request that he made for financial help during his
6 second year at the Conservatory and that refers back to an alleged application
7 from the previous academic year that he had told the authorities that his family
8 was starving and had asked for half his school fees to be remitted, leaving them
9 with a bill of only sixty florins, which could be paid in instalments: ‘My father
20 is not in a position to support me, still less to pay my school fees.’ To put it
1 mildly, this was less than the truth. Four years earlier, Bernhard Mahler had
2 bought one of the better houses in Iglau and was clearly in a position to finance
3 his son’s studies, but presumably he had no wish to do so as he was still not
4 convinced that his investment in a career in music would ever pay for itself. On
5 this occasion, the application was successful, no doubt in part because Epstein
6 added a note, guaranteeing that the fees that had not been remitted would be
7 paid in full. Like many of the other pupils at the Conservatory, Mahler also
8 earned some extra money by giving piano lessons – not only the subject at
9 which he himself was best but also the one most sought after by the sons and
30 daughters of the upper middle classes. According to Mahler’s childhood friend
1 Theodor Fischer, who was currently studying law at the University of Vienna,
2 Mahler was also well regarded as an accompanist and worked with young
3 singers and violinists in need of a pianist. That he additionally performed in
4 the Bösendorfersaal suggests that he also accompanied established artists. On
5 one occasion, at least, the dreaminess that we recall from his days in Iglau must
6 have reasserted itself as we find a Polish violinist having to stamp his foot to
7 remind his accompanist of his duties.
8 But there was also an incident that may well be related to Wolf ’s enforced
9 departure from the Conservatory at some date during the 1876/7 academic
40 year. According to the latest writings on Wolf, the Conservatory’s director,
41R Joseph Hellmesberger, received a letter that contained an unequivocal threat
on his life and that was signed ‘Hugo Wolf ’. Wolf was apparently not respon- 1
sible for the letter, but when he went to see Hellmesberger and tried to defend 2
himself, the director is said to have screamed at him: ‘I want nothing more to 3
do with you. You are no longer attached to the Conservatory.’ It is more than 4
possible that Wolf, who was even smaller than Mahler and barely 5 feet 1 inch 5
in height but as vicious as a terrier, refused to be intimidated but expressed his 6
anger in no uncertain terms, an anger that is fully understandable if the 7
signature was indeed forged. (On the other hand, such was Wolf ’s character 8
that it is entirely possible that he was the author of the letter.) This seems to be 9
the only plausible explanation for a remarkable letter that Mahler wrote to 10
Hellmesberger. Undated, it contains nothing that would allow us to place it in 1
any wider context, but perhaps it was the result of a spontaneous gesture of 2
solidarity over which Mahler had then had second thoughts: 3
4
I very much regret my overhasty decision and make so bold as to ask you to 5
ignore my ill-considered action and allow me to return to the Conservatory. 6
I shall endeavour to deserve this favour by my unremitting hard work and by 7
satisfying not only you yourself, Herr Director, but the other teachers, too.10 8
9
The two prizes that Mahler won during his first year at the Conservatory were 20
a considerable boost to his self-esteem, and on 12 September 1876, when he 1
was still only sixteen, he organized a benefit concert at the Hotel Czap in his 2
native Iglau, the beneficiary being the local grammar school where he was still 3
a pupil – the gesture was no doubt much appreciated. Mahler did not appear 4
on his own but brought with him two violinists from the Vienna Court Opera 5
Orchestra, Eugen Grünberg and August Siebert, and his friend and fellow 6
student, Rudolf Krzyzanowski, who played the viola. The programme was a 7
demanding one and shows that Mahler could now rely on his technique as a 8
pianist, for Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy is a technically challenging piece, as 9
are the Chopin Ballades, one of which he also played on this occasion. But the 30
concert additionally featured two of his own works, a lost violin sonata and a 1
piano quartet – or possibly only a single movement from such a piece, in which 2
case it may have been his first surviving composition, a movement headed ‘Not 3
too fast. Resolutely’ and dating from 1876/7. 4
Although Mahler’s first year at the Conservatory may have been successful, 5
his second year clearly turned out to be more problematical. For the first time 6
in his life, Mahler appears to have undergone a kind of crisis, albeit one whose 7
nature and causes remain a mystery. This was presumably the year in which he 8
abandoned his studies, only to resume them very soon afterwards, while his 9
admissions register also reveals certain irregularities in his studies. On the one 40
hand, he was allowed to continue his classes at the Iglau Grammar School, 41R
70 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 while on the other he had difficulties with his course in counterpoint. While
2 winning another first prize for the piano, he performed poorly in counter-
3 point, arriving late for the examination that he was required to resit, failing to
4 complete the exercise and being unable to submit any course work, a failure
5 that he attempted to cover up by submitting what his examiners dismissed as
6 the ‘first part of a fictitious piece’, with the result that they refused to allow him
7 to compete for the composition prize. It was around this time, too, that Mahler
8 failed his school-leaving examination in Iglau, passing it only at the second
9 attempt. In a priceless letter that he wrote to Julius Epstein and that relates
10 specifically to these events and to Mahler’s embarrassing setback in Iglau,
1 we see the first instance of his stylistic grasp of Romantic irony in the sense
2 understood by Schlegel and Jean Paul – the latter an author for whom Mahler
3 retained a lifelong affection. To the multifarious demands that were being
4 placed on the seventeen-year-old youth and that included the attractions of
5 the big city, Wagnerism and the evenings that he spent at the Opera, the
6 piano lessons that he was giving and his duties as an accompanist and, finally,
7 his workload at the Conservatory and the classes that he was concurrently
8 following at the grammar school in Iglau, Mahler reacted not with despair but
9 with irony:
20
1 Your ‘Well-Tempered Highness’ will excuse me if I modulate from the gentle
2 adagio of my feelings through the dissonance of my anger to a wild finale,
3 which is to be played moltissimo rubato. [Mahler is alluding here to his Piano
4 Quartet of 1876, the first movement of which includes the performance
5 marking ‘moltissimo rubato and impassioned’ towards the end.] The fact is
6 that my entry in the leavers’ concert here in Iglau was a few bars too late or,
7 rather, I arrived a few days too late so that I have not been able to take the
8 examination and have had to put it off for two months. None the less I hope
9 to complete the homework that you set me for the vacation and to do so,
30 moreover, to your complete satisfaction.11
1
2 For a seventeen-year old, this is a remarkably polished letter demonstrating
3 a real satirical wit, so that it is easy to understand why, according to a number
4 of his friends, Mahler for a time considered a career as a writer rather than
5 as a musician. But, just as we saw with his letter complaining about his father’s
6 alleged poverty, young Mahler was not over-punctilious about the truth: he
7 had not arrived too late for his examination in Iglau but had simply failed it, a
8 point he clearly preferred not to disclose to his revered teacher. Although we
9 should not attach too much importance to this, we shall have repeated occa-
40 sions to note that whereas Mahler applied only the strictest moral standards to
41R himself and others and that he generally came up to those standards, he was
willing for tactical reasons to play fast and loose with the truth and to manip- 1
ulate facts and figures, the better to achieve his desired goals. 2
Before examining the rest of Mahler’s period of study in Vienna, about which 3
we know so little, and before taking a closer look at the circle around Siegfried 4
Lipiner, we must take another step back and consider Mahler against the back- 5
ground not only of Wagner and Brahms but also of Brahms and Bruckner, for 6
it was these three composers – together with Johann Strauß, of course – who 7
dominated the musical world of Vienna in the 1870s and who impregnated the 8
air that Mahler and his friends breathed. We have already given a brief account 9
of the battle lines between the Wagnerians and the ‘Brahmins’. On the one hand 10
was progress, the ‘new’ and an aesthetic outlook bound up with expression, 1
on the other, reaction, the ‘old’ and a formal aesthetic culled from Eduard 2
Hanslick’s opusculum On the Beautiful in Music. (The fact that Hanslick was 3
Wagner’s most bitter critic helped even the most slow-witted observer to see the 4
situation clearly.) And whereas the progressives promoted the symphonic poem 5
and music drama, the party of reaction sought to perpetuate the Beethovenian 6
form of the symphony, chamber music and lieder of a kind that had been tradi- 7
tional since the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The allegedly 8
academic and dry-as-dust Brahms had many friends, especially among the 9
older generation, but he also had many enemies, most of whom belonged 20
to a younger generation. It was left to Schoenberg in his 1933 lecture ‘Brahms 1
the Progressive’ to point out that the Wagner-Brahms alternative was not 2
in fact a genuine one and that it was more sensible to speak of ‘Brahms and 3
Wagner’: 4
5
It is the purpose of this essay to prove that Brahms, the classicist, the 6
academician, was a great innovator in the realm of musical language, that, in 7
fact, he was a great progressive. . . . Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss had 8
been the first to clarify these concepts. They had both been educated in the 9
traditional as well as in the progressive, in the Brahmsian as well as in the 30
Wagnerian philosophy of art. Their example helped us to realize that there 1
was as much organizational order, if not pedantry in Wagner as there was 2
daring courage, if not even bizarre fantasy in Brahms. 3
4
And Schoenberg goes on to demonstrate by means of a series of detailed exam- 5
ples that Brahms’s music contains a vast amount of intricate motivic writing, 6
but also a marked economy in his handling of complex material coupled with 7
clear logic and imagination. Without eschewing beauty and emotion, Brahms 8
had shown the creative forces that could be unleashed by his detailed treat- 9
ment of the musical material, by wrestling with ideas and with that material 40
and by the technique of ‘developing variation’ that may strike the listener as a 41R
72 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 conceptual process. Brahms ‘the progressive’ ushered in a period of progress in

2 the direction of an absolute musical language that Schoenberg himself claimed
3 finally to have put into practice.12
4 On the other hand there was Bruckner. Or perhaps it would be more accurate
5 to describe Bruckner as occupying a place apart, for the opposing camp was
6 home to Wagner and the ‘New Germans’. Brahms had no time for Bruckner
7 and even less understanding, notoriously dismissing his works as ‘symphonic
8 boa constrictors’. To the extent that Vienna’s critics were almost all on the side
9 of Brahms rather than that of Wagner and the New Germans (although this
10 dualism was less marked among the general public), Bruckner, who had dedi-
1 cated his Third Symphony to Wagner, was misinterpreted as a Wagnerian and
2 showered with scorn and contempt. Mahler himself was present when the Third
3 Symphony was given its first performance in Vienna on 16 December 1877 and
4 saw Bruckner suffer one of the worst setbacks of his career. He was not only the
5 composer of the work but was also obliged to conduct it, when the planned
6 conductor, Johann Herbeck, for some years the director of the Court Opera and
7 the principal conductor of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde’s concerts, had
8 died unexpectedly in the October of that year. The first performance of the
9 Third Symphony turned out to be a disaster, the audience laughing and shouting
20 protests, before leaving the hall in droves during the work’s final movement, a
1 ‘Farewell Symphony’ of a kind hardly envisaged by Haydn. ‘Let me out,’ a tearful
2 Bruckner is reported to have exclaimed, ‘people don’t want to know about
3 me.’ In his review of the performance, Hanslick made no attempt to spare the
4 composer’s feelings: the symphony, he wrote, sounded as if Beethoven’s Ninth
5 had been crossed with Wagner’s Die Walküre and then been trampled underfoot.
6 Some two years later an arrangement of the symphony for two pianos was
7 published. It was the work of Mahler and Rudolf Krzyzanowski, who had
8 received the commission at some date during 1878. It was a great honour for a
9 barely eighteen-year-old youth, and the first time that his name had appeared on
30 a piece of music. Mahler and Krzyzanowski were among the youngest and at the
1 same time the closest admirers of Bruckner, a point that Mahler himself repeat-
2 edly emphasized. In a letter probably written in 1902, he dated his contacts with
3 Bruckner to the years between 1875 and 1881, in other words, the exact period
4 when he was studying in Vienna. He insisted that in spite of claims to the
5 contrary he had never been a ‘pupil’ of Bruckner but was ‘one of his most enthu-
6 siastic admirers and publicists’.13 In comments that were not intended for public
7 consumption, conversely, we find a more critical attitude to Bruckner on
8 Mahler’s part. In around 1900 he told Natalie fairly bluntly: ‘If it were up to me,
9 I should scarcely perform any Bruckner at the Philharmonic concerts, which are
40 so limited in scope and intended only for the best: one really cannot expect an
41R audience to listen to these scraps of music and appalling absurdities, for all that
they are often interrupted by divine ideas and themes.’14 And when Mahler 1
heard the Ninth Symphony in Salzburg in August 1906, he wrote to Alma: ‘The 2
work is the last word in absurdity. Salzburg was a-tremble with enthusiasm. It 3
was a kind of musical midday snack in Bavarian style.’15 4
If Mahler adopted an increasingly critical view of Bruckner that we could 5
sum up as ‘wonderful themes inartistically developed’, then his attitude to Brahms 6
and his music changed from austere reserve to great respect, while falling short 7
of genuine enthusiasm. As a Wagnerian and an advocate of Bruckner’s music, 8
Mahler was the born enemy of Brahms or at least he should have been. But this 9
was not the case. In later years, when Brahms was already an old man, the two 10
composers grew closer as human beings, Mahler frequently visiting the older 1
man at his summer retreat at Bad Ischl. Although he assured Natalie that these 2
visits were of limited appeal as they failed to provide him with any intellectual or 3
professional stimulus, he justified them by claiming that the elderly composer was 4
anxious to avoid all intellectual exertion that did not flow directly into his work. 5
But Mahler’s respect for Brahms’s music increased as he grew older. From an early 6
date he concentrated on the symphony to the virtual exclusion of all other genres, 7
tending to the ‘Brahmin’ camp in his rejection of the symphonic poem and music 8
drama, for all that he felt a spiritual affinity with the former, at least in his first 9
two symphonies, whereas his commitment to the latter went no further than 20
performing such works in the opera house. It would never have occurred to him 1
to write a violin concerto, and when he heard a performance of the Brahms 2
concerto in Berlin with the composer’s friend Joseph Joachim as the soloist, he 3
almost literally exploded with anger: ‘How can anyone write anything as ante- 4
dilvuian as a violin concerto?’ he asked Natalie. ‘It’s Zarathustra’s tightrope walker 5
flogging himself to death and ready to be buried.’16 And yet, as Schoenberg indi- 6
cated, Mahler was able to be both a Wagnerian and a Brahmsian at one and the 7
same time, no doubt because, like Schoenberg, he recognized the progressive 8
features in Brahms’s music, a point that emerges with particular clarity from a 9
comparison between Bruckner and Brahms that took place – presumably in the 30
early 1890s – within the context of a discussion with his brother Otto. Otto 1
argued simplistically that with Bruckner the content was greater, whereas with 2
Brahms the form was more perfect. Mahler countered this by insisting that: 3
4
In order to judge a work you have to look at it as a whole. And in this respect, 5
Brahms is indisputably the greater of the two, with his extraordinarily 6
compact compositions which aren’t at all obvious, but reveal greater depth 7
and richness of content the more you enter into them. And think of his 8
immense productivity, which is also part of the total picture of an artist! With 9
Bruckner, certainly, you are carried away by the magnificence and wealth of 40
his inventiveness, but at the same time you are repeatedly disturbed by its 41R
74 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 fragmentary character, which breaks the spell. I can permit myself to say this,
2 because you know how deeply I revere Bruckner in spite of it, and I shall
3 always do whatever is in my power to have his works played and heard.17
4
5 But, as principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic, he exercised this
6 power only hesitantly and without any real sense of inner conviction.
7 Mahler’s intellectual curiosity, which he retained throughout his life,
8 extended far beyond the world of music. His father’s example as a ‘coachman-
9 scholar’, the classical authors in the family’s bookcase and his knowledge of
10 history, literature and philosophy, which he picked up at school alongside all
1 the cramming, sometimes putting down unintentional roots, all exercised his
2 young mind. The Conservatory could offer no counterpart to this or provide
3 him with any intellectual stimulus as it was too much of a training ground for
4 future musicians, with too narrow a syllabus. Mahler had scarcely passed his
5 school-leaving examination, albeit at the second attempt, when his intellectual
6 energy drove him to the city’s University, where he enrolled in September 1877
7 at the age of seventeen.18 During his first term there it was mainly German
8 language and literature that he studied – interestingly, he read Middle High
9 German language and literature with Richard Heinzel, later adding courses in
20 philosophy, history and the history of music. It appears, too, that he studied
1 harmony with Bruckner, although this was later deleted from his University
2 records. As an institution, the University of Vienna enjoyed a considerable
3 reputation, although the lecturers in the courses that Mahler attended were not
4 necessarily adept at firing the young hothead’s interests. At all events, Mahler
5 was already following completely different courses by his second term: clas-
6 sical sculpture, the history of Dutch painting and the ‘philosophy of the history
7 of philosophy’, which he studied with Franz Brentano, who was the nephew of
8 the poet Clemens Brentano and arguably Vienna’s leading teacher in the field
9 of the humanities. And yet here, too, Mahler’s appetite was evidently not
30 whetted, for he failed to register for any course at all for what would have been
1 his third term at the University. Instead, he took a year off, resuming his course
2 only in the autumn of 1879, when he read archaeology, European history of the
3 Napoleonic Age and the ‘history of music since the death of Beethoven’. In this
4 last-named subject, his teacher was none other than Eduard Hanslick, who had
5 founded the tradition of musicology in Vienna, occupying a chair that was still
6 called ‘Aesthetics and the History of Music’ and that was later to be filled by
7 Mahler’s friend and champion Guido Adler.
8 The very choice of subjects that Mahler studied indicates the wide range
9 of his interests, while also attesting to the fact that the University and the
40 subjects on offer there ultimately failed to satisfy him. His intellectual energy
41R needed to find other outlets and open other valves. His closest friends at the
Conservatory were shortly joined by two further groups of acquaintances, 1

the first of which was Vienna’s Literary Club, an organization concerned with 2
everything not directly bound up with music and, as such, likely to be of 3
interest to a young reader like Mahler. Friends such as Rudolf Krzyzanowski, 4
Rott and Wolf had been interested only in music, whereas the Literary Club 5
consisted of three young people closely associated with Mahler’s Moravian 6
homeland: his cousin Gustav Frank, who was attending the Academy of 7
Fine Arts in Vienna and whom Theodor Fischer described as an ‘engraver’; 8
Theodor Fischer, who was the son of Iglau’s director of music and later the 9
well-heeled president of the district court and who has left us such a colourful 10
account of Mahler’s childhood; and, finally, Emil Freund, who on leaving 1
the Iglau Grammar School was similarly studying law at the University of 2
Vienna and who was to remain Mahler’s confidant and lawyer until his death. 3
Unfortunately we have absolutely no idea what literary topics the Iglau Four 4
discussed. In his reminiscences, Fischer reports only that ‘at our meetings 5
there were debates on literary questions and the issues of the day; they gener- 6
ally ended in our walking the streets for half the night, when in a spirit of 7
romantic effusiveness we would abandon ourselves to the spell cast on us by 8
the wonderful moonlit buildings of old Vienna.’19 9
If the Literary Club was a loose continuation of the literary enthusiasms of 20
grammar-school pupils fired by Romantic interests, the second circle in which 1
Mahler found himself – probably from the autumn of 1879 – was of incompar- 2
ably greater importance, affecting the whole of the rest of his life. Certainly, it 3
was more important than the University and, intellectually speaking, more 4
important than his friends at the Conservatory. This was the Pernerstorfer circle, 5
a group that in Mahler’s case could also be called the Lipiner circle. Mahler was 6
a member of it, on and off, until 1883, when he finally left Vienna to take up his 7
post in Olmütz. These three years and the circle itself were the most crucial of all 8
in terms of Mahler’s literary and philosophical formation and his whole outlook 9
on life, so that a lengthy excursus is more than justified, not least because Lipiner 30
was of tremendous importance in Mahler’s life, first in the years leading up to the 1
breach following his marriage to Alma Schindler, and again in the final years of 2
Mahler’s life. (The fact that Alma Schindler was born in the autumn of 1879, at 3
the very time that Mahler was becoming involved in the Lipiner circle, also 4
serves to underline the generation gap between Mahler and his wife.) 5
6
7
The Lipiner Circle
8
The history of the Lipiner circle predates Mahler’s entry into it,20 beginning, as 9
it does, in March 1867, when a group of grammar-school pupils from the 40
Schottengymnasium in Vienna formed an association that called itself the 41R
76 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Telyn Society, its fine-sounding name inspired by the word for an ostensibly
2 Celtic form of harp played by the old bards of Britain – the Ossianic fabri-
3 cations of James Macpherson had not yet entirely lost their impact. The
4 members of the Telyn Society were interested not only in literary history but
5 also in politics, their name implying that they were picking up a tradition that
6 was Germanic in its wider sense. In doing so, they were emphatically not
7 appealing to the Nibelung myth, which Wagner was then in the process of
8 reviving. (The first performance of his Ring had yet to take place.) Wilhelm
9 Jordan’s epic version was only just starting to appear in print and had found
10 only a small audience in Austria. If the pupils at the Schottengymnasium knew
1 about the Nibelungenlied, it was because one of their teachers, Hugo Mareta,
2 was an enthusiastic champion of the poem. However powerful Wagner’s
3 impact may have been on Vienna’s young academics and intellectuals some ten
4 years later, there must have been some other point for them to latch on to in
5 the 1870s. Celtic culture was thus a kind of preparation for the Nibelungenlied.
6 But the idea of German nationalism was none the less a driving force behind
7 the formation of this club. Austria had just been defeated by Prussia, making a
8 Pan-German solution no more than a distant prospect, so that the increasingly
9 apparent attempts to revive Celtic national feeling in Britain in the years
20 around the middle of the century evidently encouraged a similar movement in
1 Austria. The founder members of the Telyn Society were all destined to play
2 important roles in Austrian society and history, but they were also important
3 for Mahler. They included Victor Adler, the son of a wealthy Jewish busi-
4 nessman, Salomon Adler, who had come to Vienna from Prague and who later
5 became one of Austria’s leading Social Democrats; Max von Gruber, the son of
6 one of the pioneers of otology and later a famous hygienist who conducted
7 important research in the field of typhoid infections; and Heinrich Friedjung,
8 who went on to become a historian and a central figure in the Austrian
9 German National Party, only to find himself excluded from it on account of his
30 Jewish descent and additionally discredited as a historian for not checking the
1 reliability of historical sources that turned out to be inauthentic. Last but not
2 least was Engelbert Pernerstorfer. Unlike his fellow pupils, he came from a
3 poor background and was the son of a tailor. Together with Adler, he went on
4 to found the Austrian Social Democratic Party. First, however, he became a
5 German Nationalist, an affiliation that followed naturally from his member-
6 ship of the Telyn Society. It needs to be emphasized, however, that these young
7 German nationalists had not yet signed up to an anti-Semitic agenda, not least
8 because such a move would have been problematic in view of Adler’s and
9 Friedjung’s Jewish origins. The Telyn Society came to reflect a very special
40 blend of Germanocentric and German national thinking, Socialist fantasies,
41R sympathy with the Paris Commune and solidarity with the fate of the
emerging proletariat. This mixture of nationalism and socialism, both of 1

which were still in their infancy, inevitably led most members of the Telyn 2
Society to embrace German national ideas, only Pernerstorfer and Adler going 3
on to espouse the cause of social democracy. If social democracy in Austria 4
was always more nationalistic than in Germany, it was because of these origins. 5
By the time that the members of the Telyn Society had left school and 6
gone on to university, their adolescent infatuation with Celtic and Germanic 7
Romanticism had waned, and the Welsh telyn soon lost its significance. All its 8
members were considerably older than Mahler, Adler having been born in 9
1852, Pernerstorfer in 1850. But they all remained in close contact and in 1872 10
founded a ‘Reading Society of Viennese German Students’, with the emphasis 1
on ‘German’. With the exception of the usual student societies, this was the most 2
important student organization in Vienna in the 1870s, and certainly the most 3
intellectually influential. One of the few University professors to exert any 4
authority over this small group of student intellectuals was Lorenz von Stein, 5
whose brilliant writings straddled the disparate disciplines of economics, poli- 6
tics and sociology, and included Socialism and Communism in Present-Day 7
France and a handbook on sociology. Adler and Pernerstorfer played leading 8
roles in the Reading Society, which soon evolved into far more than a mere 9
continuation of the Telyn Society under another name. By 1874 Adler was its 20
librarian and Pernerstorfer its secretary. Its members discussed not only the 1
theories of Darwin but also the philosophy of Schopenhauer, debating the 2
differences between them on the basis of a sensationalist tract of the time, 3
Carl von Rokitansky’s The Solidarity of All Animal Life. Adler’s diaries contain 4
lengthy notes teeming with concepts such as ‘fellow suffering’, ‘world suffering’ 5
and ‘weltschmerz’ – it comes as no surprise to learn that only a few years later 6
many of these young people felt drawn to Wagner and to his religion of 7
compassion as expressed in some of his late essays such as ‘Religion and Art’ of 8
1880 and in Parsifal. It is also clear why Mahler, too, should have been attracted 9
to this group. Thanks not least to the additional influence of Dostoevsky, 30
Mahler subscribed all his life to a personal religion of compassion. Socialism, 1
German nationalism and the interest in compassion and solidarity that predis- 2
posed a number of these students to pin their colours to the Social Democratic 3
mast led them far away from the liberal spirit that still dominated the age but 4
whose roots were already cankered. In this way the Reading Society came 5
within the purview of the authorities and at the end of 1878 was disbanded as 6
politically suspect. From this point of view it was entirely logical that its 7
members, including, at a later date, Mahler too, should have stumbled across 8
the writings of Nietzsche and done so, moreover, at an exceptionally early date. 9
We need to remember that Nietzsche’s first full-length publication, The 40
Birth of Tragedy, had first appeared in 1872 and that it had met with little 41R
78 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 interest except in specialist circles and among Wagnerians. It says much for the
2 perceptiveness of Vienna’s student population that one of their number, Josef
3 Ehrlich, had already made contact with Nietzsche by April 1876 and expressed
4 his enthusiasm for the philosopher’s Untimely Meditations, the fourth and final
5 one of which – ‘Richard Wagner in Bayreuth’ – was about to appear. The main
6 members of the Reading Society had been very much waiting for Nietzsche,
7 even though he was neither a German nationalist nor a writer noted for a
8 particular interest in the religion of compassion, but his radical philosophy
9 was now struggling to emerge from the cocoon of his Untimely Meditations.
10 Vienna’s students must have made a second attempt to get in touch with
1 Nietzsche the following year, for in June 1877 we find Erwin Rohde writing to
2 the philosopher and mentioning a student whom he had met in Vienna and
3 who had introduced himself as a member of what Rohde called the ‘Nietzsche
4 Society of Vienna’. The student, Rohde claimed, had sent Nietzsche a copy
5 of a book titled Prometheus Unbound, the very title of which was a flattering
6 tribute to the Basel Professor of Classical Philology, for the title page of The
7 Birth of Tragedy had included a vignette depicting the unbound Prometheus.
8 Nietzsche received the book only after some delay, for it had been sent to his
9 mother’s home in Naumburg and only from there was it forwarded to the
20 philosopher, who was currently on holiday at Rosenlauibad. But his reaction
1 on finally reading it was entirely positive, and in his reply we find him telling
2 Rohde that the poem had provided him with ‘a day of true celebration’ and that
3 its author must be a veritable ‘genius’. The name of this genius was Siegfried
4 Lipiner.
5 Who was this Siegfried Lipiner, who was to become Mahler’s leading
6 authority on all intellectual matters? The son of Jewish parents, he had been born
7 in Jaroslav in Galicia in 1856 and had moved to Vienna in 1871, completing his
8 schooling at the city’s Leopoldstadt Grammar School in 1875 – the Leopoldstadt
9 was then the quarter with the largest Jewish population in Vienna. He officially
30 matriculated at the University in the autumn of 1875, although he had already
1 attended a number of lectures there, his main interests being philosophy, litera-
2 ture and religion. (Meanwhile, Mahler, his junior by four years, was beginning
3 his studies at the Conservatory.) He wrote Prometheus Unbound when he was
4 only eighteen, and the volume was published, with a dedication to Heinrich
5 Laube, in 1876. During the summer of that year Lipiner moved to Leipzig to
6 hear Gustav Theodor Fechner lecture – another writer who exerted a powerful
7 influence on Mahler, a point to which we shall return in due course. On his
8 return to Vienna, Lipiner interrupted his studies, and it was not until some time
9 later that he completed a doctorate with the promising title of ‘Homunculus:
40 A Study of Faust and Goethe’s Philosophy’, the text of which appears not to have
41R survived.
Contact with Nietzsche did not develop along the lines that Lipiner must 1
secretly have hoped. But at all events it seems likely that it was Lipiner who 2
drew Mahler’s attention to the early writings of a philosopher whose name 3
cannot have been known in his home town of Iglau. Indeed, it is even question- 4
able whether it was familiar in circles attached to the University of Vienna. As 5
Mahler himself was later obliged to admit, Lipiner had an annoying way of 6
insinuating himself into other people’s lives. Just as he later reproached Mahler 7
for seeing Alma Mahler, whose immaturity he considered unworthy of his 8
friend, so he demonstrated considerable arrogance in attempting to advise 9
Nietzsche on where to live and spend his holidays. This was something that 10
Nietzsche loathed, and not even his closest friends were allowed to interfere in 1
this area of his life. But Lipiner was merely a distant admirer who was much 2
younger than the philosopher, and so he was kept at a distance. It seems not to 3
have troubled Nietzsche that Lipiner was Jewish – he had a markedly ambiva- 4
lent attitude to Jews but was certainly not anti-Semitic like Wagner, feeling only 5
a loathing of anti-Semites such as his later brother-in-law Bernhard Förster. 6
For reasons that remain unclear, Lipiner forfeited Nietzsche’s sympathies even 7
though the latter continued at least for a time to acknowledge the younger 8
man’s significance. But within a year it was all over, and by August 1878 we 9
find Nietzsche writing to his mother and sister: ‘A letter from Lipiner, long, 20
significantly speaking for him, but of unbelievable impertinence towards me. I 1
have broken free from my “admirer” and his circle – and I can breathe freely 2
again. His future development is very close to my heart, I am not confusing him 3
with his Jewish characteristics, about which he can do nothing.’21 But Nietzsche 4
was unable to maintain this tolerant attitude towards Lipiner, and when the 5
latter sent him his Renatus six months later, his reaction was brief and to the 6
point: it was a ghastly aberration. Thus the personal contacts between Lipiner 7
and Nietzsche came to an end, although Lipiner’s lifelong enthusiasm for the 8
philosopher remained unaffected by all this. 9
Much the same happened to Lipiner when he visited Bayreuth. He was intro- 30
duced to Wahnfried by Malwida von Meysenbug, the principal intermediary 1
between Nietzsche and Wagner. As with Nietzsche, Lipiner tested the water by 2
sending one of his writings, in this case his lecture ‘On the Elements of a 3
Renewal of Religious Ideas in the Present Day’, which he had delivered at the 4
Reading Society in January 1878 and which he had then had printed at his own 5
expense. The lecture bore clear parallels with some of the ideas that Wagner 6
himself was to express more fully in ‘Religion and Art’ in 1880, although 7
Lipiner had of course read Schopenhauer and the earlier writings of Wagner 8
and had combined them with Nietzsche’s ideas, so that it is no surprise to find 9
that Wagner and his wife were much taken by the lecture. In September 1878 40
Lipiner finally had an opportunity to meet the Wagners at Wahnfried. The 41R
80 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 conversation naturally revolved around his lecture and the ideas on religion
2 that were then preoccupying Wagner, as well as touching on the writings
3 of the anti-Semitic academic Paul de Lagarde. It seems that differences in
4 their views were already apparent at this stage and that the Wagners were
5 evidently dismayed by certain ‘Israelite’ elements in Lipiner’s view of religion, a
6 point on which they differed from Nietzsche. Three days later – 23 September
7 1878 – Lipiner was invited back to Wahnfried, and on this occasion another
8 contentious subject came up: socialism. As we have seen, socialist ideas were
9 rife among Vienna’s students, but Wagner had long since suppressed his past as
10 a revolutionary, and so he had little time for Lipiner’s socialist sympathies. The
1 power of such a movement could lie only in destruction, Wagner insisted,
2 adding that constructive ideas were always childish. His tone was even more
3 intemperate when Lipiner returned two days later and tried to draw attention
4 to inconsistencies in Schopenhauer’s thinking. Wagner became ‘very heated’ in
5 his discussion with the young disciple from Vienna, although he afterwards
6 regretted his outburst and tried to make it up with Lipiner, but the latter had
7 already left town. This was Lipiner’s only visit to Bayreuth. He later sent a
8 number of his books and articles to Wahnfried, but Wagner was no longer
9 interested. Anyone who revealed Jewish aspects in his view of religion or who
20 supported socialism and criticized Schopenhauer had emphatically forfeited his
1 respect and was clearly of no further use to him as a disciple or propagandist.
2 Wagner’s outright hostility towards Jews inevitably played a decisive role in this.
3 Lipiner twice had an opportunity to draw closer to the two men whom he
4 regarded as the most illustrious minds of their day, but in spite of starting out
5 from a strong position, both attempts ended in disaster. It is difficult to know
6 whether it was because of these setbacks that his initial triumphs, both inspired
7 and inspirational, ended in the gloom of obscurity. In 1881 he found a niche for
8 himself as librarian to the German Senate, later becoming the library’s director,
9 but he published very little. In 1891 he converted to Protestantism. His monu-
30 mental magnum opus, written under the influence of his newly discovered
1 Christianity, was to be a trilogy on the life of Christ, but although he is believed
2 to have completed several drafts of it, he later destroyed them all. Only a
3 prologue, Adam, has survived and was published posthumously. His knowledge
4 of Polish helped him to translate two works by the Polish national poet Adam
5 Mickiewicz, one of which, ‘Todtenfeier’, impressed Mahler enormously and left
6 its mark on his Second Symphony. Lipiner also wrote a libretto for an opera on
7 the subject of Merlin for the Viennese composer Karl Goldmark, who was
8 immensely successful in his own day. But after that Lipiner fell silent. Only after
9 his reconciliation with Mahler, about which we shall have more to say in due
40 course, did he write a touching poem to mark the composer’s fiftieth birthday.
41R It was called ‘The Musician Speaks’. He died on 30 December 1911 after a
lengthy struggle against cancer of the larynx, only months after the death of the 1
man with whom he had been such a close friend during the promising years of 2
his adolescence. 3
The phenomenon of a writer who causes a stir with an early work but then fails 4
to live up to expectations – although the expectations may also be false – is 5
certainly not unknown in the history of literature. There are also writers who 6
enjoy a tremendous reputation as intellectual heroes or scintillating conversation- 7
alists or respected authorities within a small and exclusive circle, a reputation that 8
is not reflected by their published works. The Schwabing magus of the turn of the 9
century, Alfred Schuler, was one such writer and was additionally comparable 10
to Lipiner in that he too tended towards spiritualism and the occult. Lipiner’s 1
published writings seem unimpressive today but appear, rather, to be high-flown 2
and even half-baked, and yet readers familiar with late nineteenth-century litera- 3
ture will have little difficulty in identifying typical features of this style and in 4
understanding why Nietzsche was so impressed. At a time when Nietzsche’s 5
impact was virtually non-existent, Lipiner took up and developed one of the ideas 6
in The Birth of Tragedy, in which Nietzsche had proposed his own interpretation 7
of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound and expressed the hope that Prometheus’s 8
subsequent release would come from the unleashing of the Dionysian element 9
in Wagner’s works. Lipiner is by far the earliest and at the same time the most 20
monumental instance of the impact of the early Nietzsche on circles other than 1
those of classical philologists and Wagnerians. Nor is there any doubt that he was 2
the earliest writer to respond poetically to Nietzsche’s thinking and to give epic 3
expression to those ideas, a development particularly welcome to a thinker who 4
could make nothing of the dramas of his day. As for the content of his epic, 5
we can do worse than quote from an enthusiastic review by Johannes Volkelt, 6
professor of aesthetics at the University of Vienna and an influential figure in the 7
Pernerstorfer circle: 8
9
The evolution of humanity, its titanic struggle for self-emancipation, its fall 30
from what it thought were the heights of absolute intellectual freedom into 1
the depths of lawlessness and inhumanity, the mind’s ability to rouse itself 2
from this state of degradation and its victorious flight to the ultimate goal of 3
true freedom and reconciliation – it is this that the poet places before our 4
mind’s eye with his broad brushstrokes. 5
6
Lipiner’s Prometheus symbolizes humankind’s rebellious self-awareness, while 7
the figure of Christ represents our attempts to overcome every urge towards 8
individuation. When Nietzsche looked at this more closely, he cannot have 9
been pleased by what he saw, and to the extent that Lipiner’s next work, his 40
epic poem Renatus, which appeared in 1878 with a dedication to Malwida von 41R
82 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Meysenbug, reflected identical ideas, it is not surprising that Nietzsche was

2 now convinced that his hopes in Lipiner had been misplaced. Indeed, had he
3 looked more closely at Prometheus Unbound in the first place and not allowed
4 himself to be blinded by the belief that he had found his first disciple, both
5 men would have been spared their later sense of disillusionment.22
6 Be that as it may, Mahler was profoundly influenced by Lipiner, which is why
7 the foregoing excursus was so necessary. Nor was Mahler alone in attesting to
8 Lipiner’s remarkable impact. Writing in the aftermath of Mahler, Bruno Walter
9 offers us a much more succinct description:
10
1 Siegfried Lipiner, a rather short man with Zeus-like curly blond hair, a full
2 beard of the same colour, and radiant blue eyes, was a poet endowed with
3 vision, force, and eloquence. Carried away by a topic of conversation, by a
4 memory, or by a picture, he was likely to be ‘seized with the spirit.’ On such
5 occasions, a wealth of thoughts and wisdom, improvised, but perfect in form,
6 would flow from his lips.23
7
8 Another leading member of the Reading Society, Richard Kralik, has also left
9 a lively portrait of Lipiner in his recollections, a portrait that reflects his
20 charisma while at the same time revealing that not everyone felt it in the same
1 way. Kralik later made a name for himself as a dramatist, poet and cultural
2 historian. In 1905 he founded the Grail Alliance, an organization which,
3 Teutonic and anti-Jewish, was intended to revitalize Catholicism and which
4 drew heavily for its ideas on Wagner’s regeneration essays. Recalling the late
5 1870s, Kralik had the following to say about Lipiner:
6
7 His first work, Prometheus Unbound, very quickly made his name better
8 known and even famous. It was held out as a foil to Goethe’s Faust. We – his
9 friends – did not entirely understand it, but we were uncommonly impressed
30 by it, not least because its author was able to declaim it and comment on it in
1 such fiery, self-confident terms. It was not easy for anyone in our circle to
2 escape from the spell of this superior idealism. Even sceptics such as the
3 poetess Betty Paoli called him a prodigy, albeit not without a hint of irony.
4 But a minority among us considered his poetry to be fabricated, inauthentic,
5 unoriginal, a ‘schoolbook gone mad’, as one keen and critical mind expressed
6 it. In short, it was vapid, hollow and meaningless.24
7
8 It is unclear whether Kralik himself belonged to this minority, although his
9 anti-Semitic outlook may well have influenced his views. At all events, it is
40 remarkable that the negative epithets applied here to Lipiner were later taken
41R over word for word and applied to Mahler by contemporary critics. Deriving
from one of Wagner’s favourite arguments in his essay ‘Jews in Music’, they 1
stemmed from the belief that Jews were incapable of any kind of creative 2
endeavour. Unsurprisingly, Kralik refers to Mahler only a few pages later and 3
mentions his membership of the Lipiner circle, dismissing his music in iden- 4
tical terms. (Conversely, Kralik’s son Heinrich later became one of Mahler’s 5
great apostles in Vienna.) Quite apart from the failure of Lipiner’s career as a 6
poet, at least as far as its public manifestation was concerned, it is important to 7
note that as the germ cell of the Reading Society and like the Telyn Society 8
before it, the Pernerstorfer circle held ideas clearly bound up with cultural 9
reform. The materialism and laissez-faire liberalism that had dominated 10
Austrian culture since the middle of the century were now to be offset by 1
root-and-branch reforms, starting with the country’s culture. 2
In Nietzsche the Pernerstorfer circle had chosen the most eloquent advocate 3
of this critique of liberal ideas. This group of Viennese students, which Mahler 4
joined in 1879, enthusiastically accompanying their strident German national 5
songs on the piano, was the first in Europe to take a real interest in Nietzsche, 6
going beyond the individual responses to the philosopher’s early writings on the 7
part of a handful of solitary freethinkers and in that way forming one of the very 8
first ‘Nietzsche Societies’. German national thinking found a strange bedfellow in 9
the desire for social justice in a future reformed society. Indeed, there was an 20
element of ‘national socialism’ about this outlook, long before this nexus of 1
ideas evolved to such devastating effect. It is no surprise to find a large number 2
of young Jews sharing these aspirations, for the sort of willpower advocated 3
by Nietzsche could also imply abandoning their unwanted Jewishness and 4
embracing a loftier idea of humanity which, no longer bedevilled by ‘race’ and 5
religion, would come into being in the wake of their assimilation and accultura- 6
tion. From this point of view, one can understand why Wagner’s idea of regen- 7
eration, as championed in his essays of the years around 1880, found so many 8
admirers and advocates among Jewish intellectuals and artists, the anti-Semitic 9
implications of his writings being wilfully ignored or at least trivialized as the 30
waste products of a process of fermentation. When Wagner’s essay ‘Religion 1
and Art’ appeared in the Bayreuther Blätter in 1880, it had a tremendous 2
impact in Vienna, too, especially among members of the group associated with 3
Pernerstorfer and Lipiner. The vegetarianism that Wagner preached in this essay 4
suddenly became de rigueur, and for a time Mahler, too, became a committed 5
vegetarian. As with Wagner himself, however, the enthusiasm proved short- 6
lived: an acquaintance of his reports seeing him tucking into a joint of meat with 7
horseradish sauce at a restaurant in Budapest. The parameters of this group 8
could no doubt be circumscribed by reference to Nietzscheanism, Wagnerism, 9
vegetarianism and socialism, and it was this witches’ brew of ideas that left its 40
mark on the young Mahler and constituted his true schooling at this time. It was 41R
84 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 presumably Lipiner who introduced him to the Pernerstorfer circle, and he had
2 certainly been introduced to Victor Adler by 1878 at the latest. The Viennese
3 polymath Friedrich Eckstein, who was one of the most colourful and distinc-
4 tive characters in fin-de-siècle Vienna, saw these events unfold and noted the
5 impression that Mahler left on outsiders at this time. Here he describes the
6 vegetarian restaurant where members of the circle met:
7
8 One of them was shortish, betraying an unusual irritability in his curiously
9 uneven gait. His narrow face, framed by a brown beard, was intellectually
10 alive and animated; he spoke wittily in a strong Austrian accent. He always
1 carried a bundle of books or scores under his arm and conversation with him
2 was sporadic. His name was Gustav Mahler. He had studied law [Eckstein is
3 wrong on this point] and completed a course at the Vienna Conservatory. He
4 came to our notice because he was the first to make a piano transcription of
5 a Bruckner symphony.25
6
7
A Time of New Departures
8
9 This, then, was the intellectual environment in which Mahler spent his form-
20 ative years between adolescence and manhood. Numerous detailed observa-
1 tions will later indicate the extent to which his whole outlook was shaped by
2 his years in Vienna between 1875 and 1881, when his musical, philosophical,
3 political and literary ideas were formed. (We shall later have more to say about
4 Mahler’s reading habits.) There is, however, surprisingly little evidence about
5 the state of Mahler’s health, or perhaps it is not so surprising after all as he was
6 not yet the compulsive correspondent that he was later to become. Letters to
7 his parents appear to have gone missing, and in Vienna he threw himself head
8 over heels into the physical and intellectual demands of his threefold course of
9 study at the Conservatory, the University and the ‘private university’ of the
30 Pernerstorfer and Lipiner circle. We are relatively ill-informed about the whole
1 of this decisive period, but especially about the years between 1878 and 1881.
2 Virtually the only letters that have survived from this time are those that
3 Mahler wrote during his summer vacations and sent to his friends who were
4 still in Vienna. He continued to compose, of course, and wrote an overture,
5 The Argonauts, which he submitted for the Beethoven Prize in July 1878, but
6 his entry was unsuccessful, and no prize was awarded that year. Conversely, a
7 Scherzo from a Piano Quintet which, like the overture, is no longer extant,
8 earned him a first prize from the Conservatory at this time. And with that he
9 completed his studies at this last-named institution on 2 July 1878.
40 In the autumn of 1879 he began work on his opera Rübezahl, leading to his
41R falling-out with Wolf. Of this particular project, only a kind of libretto has
survived, but the impression that it leaves is one of immaturity, which is 1

hardly surprising. We do not know how much progress Mahler may have 2
made on the score or whether he started work on it at all. Nor do we know how 3
far he got with his plans for an opera on Duke Ernst of Swabia. But with that 4
we leave the realms of speculation and find ourselves dealing with Mahler’s 5
first complete surviving compositions. The text of his cantata, Das klagende 6
Lied, had been completed by the spring of 1878, but it was not until November 7
1880 that he put the finishing touches to the score of what is a very substan- 8
tial work. I shall have more to say about this in the next chapter. In the 9
summer of 1879, while he was back at home in Iglau, Mahler had fallen in 10
love with Josephine Poisl, the daughter of the manager of the local telegraph 1
office – we may assume that he already knew her before this date. Josephine 2
Poisl was the second woman with whom we know Mahler fell in love – the first 3
was a certain Pauline, whom he got to know on the estates at Morawan and 4
Ronow in the two summers of 1875 and 1876 – and it was she who inspired 5
his first three songs, ‘Im Lenz’ (In Spring), ‘Winterlied’ (Winter Song) and 6
‘Maitanz im Grünen’ (May Dance in the Country), which he completed in 7
quick succession in February and March 1880. During the summer of 1879 8
Mahler gave piano lessons to Josephine and her sister, Anna, but there was 9
never any prospect of a long-term relationship: as a twenty-year-old impecu- 20
nious music student, he stood no chance of being accepted as a suitable 1
suitor by Josephine’s parents. Three letters to her have survived. The first dates 2
from March 1880 and still addresses her with the formal ‘Sie’. In it, Mahler 3
recalls the previous summer when the two of them sat in a little house in the 4
Föhrenwald and he told her the stories of two of the heroic legends from 5
Germany’s distant past, the Lay of Horn-Skinned Siegfried and the tale of 6
Wayland the Smith. In his final letter, he reacts to the news that her father 7
had evidently declared the relationship over. In it, he strikes what is already 8
a typical note of outrage that we shall find again and again in similar 9
situations: 30
1
Despair dictates these lines. . . . I have never humbled myself before another 2
person! See! I am kneeling before you! – Oh, by all that is dear to you – if you 3
have ever felt even the least spark of love for me – I beg you – give me a sign 4
to say that I should not despair . . . I am scarcely in control of myself any 5
longer – my blood runs cold in my veins – and I am wandering round like a 6
corpse! . . . Yes, yes! You still love me! – You must still love me – otherwise I 7
must despair of the light and of heaven – nay, of everything that is beautiful 8
and dear! – O my sweet child, whom I love so ardently! Hear me – across all 9
the lands and mountains that lie between us I call out to you in my hour of 40
greatest need! Give, O give me a sign!26 41R
86 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Few letters have survived from this period, but most of those that have are
2 detailed and powerfully expressed. This is especially true of the letters that
3 Mahler wrote to his fellow student at the Conservatory, Anton Krisper, and to
4 Josef Steiner, who had been two classes above him at the Iglau Grammar
5 School and who wrote the words for his planned opera Duke Ernst of Swabia.
6 Steiner had remained in Iglau, and when Mahler spent a few weeks in Puszta-
7 Batta near Budapest between early June and mid-August 1879, earning some
8 money by giving piano lessons to the children of his host, Moritz Baumgarten,
9 it was Krisper and Steiner to whom he opened his heart, telling them of his
10 loneliness in Hungary and pining equally for Iglau and Vienna. Like his corre-
1 spondence with Josephine Poisl, these letters allow us a deeper insight into
2 the nineteen-year-old Mahler’s frame of mind than most of his later letters,
3 which tend to be more to do with his career and other daily concerns. Not until
4 the unhappy summer of 1907, when Mahler was in Maiernigg, and the cata-
5 strophic marital crisis that overtook him in Toblach during the summer of
6 1910 does it again become possible for posterity to gaze more deeply into his
7 troubled psyche.
8 The letter that Mahler wrote to Josef Steiner between 17 and 19 June 1879 –
9 one of the longest that he ever sent – is a remarkable confession.27 It reveals a
20 young man filled with an extreme and emphatic love of life but also plagued by
1 depression and a death wish. Of course, we also need to pay due heed to the
2 literary stylization that is clearly influenced by his reading of Jean Paul and of
3 eccentric Romantics such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, even down to his choice of
4 particular words, making it hard to decide where to locate the dividing line
5 between literature and real life. The blurred distinction between them is typical
6 of Mahler, as is the emotional life which, lived to extremes, characterizes his
7 music. Although he later learnt to moderate its expression in his day-to-day
8 activities, it vented itself all the more explosively at critical junctures in his life.
9 His letter to Steiner is a three-movement symphony in epistolary form and could
30 be headed ‘The Sufferings of Young Mahler’. The opening movement is an
1 Allegro furioso ed estatico, the second an Andante lugubre and the third an
2 Allegretto grazioso. The three movements represent the three sections of the
3 letter, which was written on three consecutive days, each section reflecting the
4 mood of the day. The first is dominated by a sense of wild agitation: ‘The greatest
5 intensity of the most joyful vitality and the most consuming yearning for death
6 dominate my heart in turn.’ Mahler then strikes a note of despair at life and art
7 in general, showing him to be well prepared for the mood of the circle around
8 Pernerstorfer and Lipiner that he was to enter only a few weeks later:
9
40 When the abominable tyranny of our modern hypocrisy and mendacity
41R has driven me to the point of dishonouring myself and when the inextricable
web of conditions in art and life has filled my heart with disgust for all that 1
is sacred to me – art, love, religion – what way out is there except by self- 2
annihilation? Wildly I wrench at the bonds that chain me to the loathsome, 3
insipid swamp of this life, and with all the strength of despair I cling to 4
sorrow, my only consolation. 5
6
The young Mahler seems to be suicidal, much like Goethe’s Werther or even 7
Faust as the latter raises the phial of poison to his lips at the beginning of the 8
tragedy that bears his name. And yet Mahler never really considered commit- 9
ting suicide, for even in the darkest periods of his life, there was always a ray 10
of light that promised salvation. And the same is true in the present case: 1
2
Then all at once the sun shines upon me – and gone is the ice that 3
encased my heart, again I see the blue sky and the flowers swaying in the wind, 4
and my mocking laughter dissolves in tears of love. Then I needs must love this 5
world with all its deceit and frivolity and its eternal laughter. Oh, would that 6
some god might tear the veil from my eyes, that my clear gaze might penetrate 7
to the marrow of the earth! Oh, that I might behold this earth in its nakedness, 8
lying before its Creator without adornment or embellishment. 9
20
Implicit in these lines, and barely concealed at all behind a pseudo-literary veil, 1
is the erotically ecstatic, pantheistic idolization of nature that was to charac- 2
terize Mahler’s view of nature for a long time to come and that left its mark 3
above all on his first four symphonies. 4
The second section of the letter is less strident, less eccentric, less effusive. 5
As Mahler himself points out, it is as if ‘assuaging tears’ have welled up in his 6
eyes after the previous day’s outburst. The role that he now adopts is that of 7
Eichendorff ’s good-for-nothing: 8
9
But in the evening when I go out on to the heath and climb a lime tree that 30
stands there all on its own and gaze out into the world from the topmost 1
branches of this friend of mine, the Danube winds her old familiar way before 2
my eyes, her waves flickering in the glow of the setting sun; from the village 3
behind me the chime of the eventide bells is wafted to me on a kindly breeze, 4
and the branches sway in the wind, rocking me to sleep like the Erlkönig’s 5
daughters, and the leaves and blossoms of my favourite tree tenderly caress my 6
cheeks. – Stillness everywhere! The most sacred stillness! Only from afar comes 7
the melancholy croaking of the toad that sits mournfully among the reeds. 8
9
Particularly striking are the echoes of Schubert’s two songs, ‘Der Lindenbaum’ 40
from Winterreise and ‘Erlkönig’. At the same time, however, there are also 41R
88 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 pre-echoes of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, in which we likewise find the
2 motif of a lime tree (‘Auf der Straße steht ein Lindenbaum’). And when Mahler
3 then adds some delightful reminiscences of the farms at Morawan and Ronow,
4 where he fell in love with Pauline, then ‘two eyes that once made a thief of me’
5 peer over the horizon, and we see ‘my sweetheart’s two blue eyes’ from the
6 Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Although the third and shortest section of the
7 letter still speaks of loneliness, it confirms that Mahler’s mood is now ‘serenely
8 cheerful’, a change scarcely credible after the earlier outbursts but none the less
9 symptomatic of a young man in extremis. A few weeks later, while still giving
10 piano lessons to the Baumgarten children, Mahler wrote to Albert Spiegler in
1 a very similar vein. But what is most striking here is his longing to hear a
2 Christian service, especially the sound of peasants praying before the altar and
3 the strains of an organ playing. The fact that it is emphatically not the sounds
4 of a synagogue that Mahler was longing to hear indicates that even at the age
5 of nineteen he had already begun to distance himself from the Judaism of his
6 forebears.28 And in March 1880, when he was shaken to his very core by his
7 unrequited love of Josephine Poisl and seized by a tremendous feeling of lone-
8 liness even in the hurly-burly of Vienna (‘I am so alone! I do not know whether
9 I shall be able to bear it for much longer. I feel as if I am about to collapse at
20 any minute! I have just been fighting a great battle – and have still not got to
1 the end of it’29), he sent Anton Krisper a copy of a poem that is a remarkable
2 mixture of things that he had read and others he had experienced for himself,
3 the former category including reminiscences of Wilhelm Müller and Schubert
4 (once again, there are clear references to Schubert’s Winterreise), Eichendorff
5 and Jean Paul, as well as the literary style that was typical of Mahler during this
6 period and later. As before, one can understand why Mahler hesitated for a
7 time between the careers of poet and musician. As such, his poem may
8 usefully bring to an end our survey of his adolescence:
9
30 Vergessene Liebe
1 Wie öd’ mein Herz! Wie leer das All’!
2 Wie groß mein Sehnen!
3 O! wie die Fernen Tal zu Tal
4 sich endlos dehnen!
5 Mein süßes Lieb! Zum letzten Mal!?
6 Ach, muß ja ewig diese Qual
7 in meinem Herzen brennen!
8
9 Wie strahlt’ es einst so treu und klar
40 in ihren Blicken!
41R Das Wandern ließ ich ganz und gar
trotz Winters Tücken! 1

Und als der Schnee vergangen war, 2
Da tat mein Lieb ihr blondes Haar 3
wohl mit der Myrthe schmücken! 4
5
Mein Wanderstab! Noch einmal heut’ 6
komm aus der Ecken! 7
Schliefst du auch lang! Nun sei bereit! 8
Ich will dich wecken! 9
Ich trug es lang’ – mein Liebesleid 10
– Und ist die Erde doch so weit – 1
So komm, mein treuer Stecken! 2
3
Wie lieblich lächelt Berg und Tal 4
in Blütenwogen! 5
Kam ja mit seinem süßen Schall 6
der Lenz gezogen! 7
Und Blumen blüh’n ja überall 8
– Und Kreuzlein steh’n ja überall – 9
– die haben nicht gelogen!30 20
1
[Forgotten Love / How desolate my heart! How empty the world! How great 2
my longing! O, how the distances stretch out endlessly from valley to valley! 3
My sweet love! For the last time!? Ah, this torment must burn in my heart for 4
ever! How her eyes once shone so true and clear! I gave up my wanderings 5
completely, in spite of winter’s wiles! And when the snow had gone, my love 6
decked her blonde hair with myrtle! My staff! Come out from your corner 7
again today! You have slept long! Prepare yourself! I shall waken you! How 8
long I endured love’s anguish, and yet the earth is broad enough – so come, 9
my faithful staff! How lovely mountains and valleys smile in their flowery 30
billows! Spring came with its dulcet strains! And flowers are blossoming 1
everywhere – and everywhere there are little crosses – they have told no lies!] 2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3 4
4
5
6
7 The Summer Conductor: Bad Hall
8
9
(1880)
10
1
2
3
4 AD HALL IS a health resort in Upper Austria, about twenty miles to the south
5
6
B of Linz, between Kremsmünster and Steyr and, as such, in the northern half
of the Traun. As with Hallein, the name is derived from the Celtic word for ‘salt’
7 and reflects the fact that this tiny town has one of the highest concentrations of
8 iodine bromine in any salt-water springs in Central Europe. As early as 1873 a
9 local physician, Hermann Schuber, proudly published a pamphlet on the town’s
20 merits. Schuber was a man of many parts: not only a doctor of medicine and a
1 surgeon but also an expert on midwifery and ophthalmology. Indeed, so excep-
2 tional was his versatility that the town required no other physicians as it was suit-
3 ably prepared for all life’s vicissitudes. Schuber was rewarded for his services by
4 being appointed the spa doctor, and as if this were not enough, he was also
5 senior consultant to the Imperial and Royal Hospital for Military Pupils. In
6 addition to all these details, the title page of his pamphlet includes an attractive
7 picture of the tree-lined town square, although it is a distinctly modest affair
8 when compared to the one at Iglau. The first mention of Hall as a spa dates back
9 to the end of the fourteenth century, but it was not until around 1820 that its
30 medicinal role was revived. Within thirty years the town was a flourishing
1 community, and by the turn of the century – by which time Mahler had almost
2 forgotten about his stay in the town – Bad Hall had really come into its own, a
3 development reflected in its many attractive Jugendstil buildings.
4 Bad Hall was far from being Bad Ischl, but by the end of the 1870s it had
5 a summer theatre – a concept hard for today’s readers to grasp. True, there are
6 still spa orchestras, and plays are performed in multi-functional venues, gener-
7 ally by visiting companies. But the concept of a small theatre with its own
8 ensemble that was summoned into existence during the summer months, when
9 the town was used both as a spa and as a holiday resort, is now no more than a
40 distant memory. Tiny ensembles were formed, made up of singers and actors
41R who were cheap to engage because they were either young and unknown or old
THE SUMMER CONDUCTOR: BAD HALL 91
and otherwise unemployable. A scratch band was assembled that could also play 1
at spa concerts and that was fifteen- or twenty-strong. In this way, the theatre 2
was able to mount comedies, musical farces, vaudevilles and even operettas that 3
required minimal casts – operas were out of the question, of course. The reper- 4
tory during Mahler’s months in Bad Hall comprised shorter pieces in the tradi- 5
tion of the Viennese folk theatre (Gleich, Meisl and Bäuerle rather than the more 6
demanding works by Nestroy or Raimund, which required stage machinery 7
of often Baroque complexity). Above all, however, it featured the operettas of 8
Jacques Offenbach, which were enormously popular in Vienna, too, and prob- 9
ably also pieces by Lecocq and Planquette. Viennese operetta was only just 10
emerging as a recognizable genre at this time, the works of its founder, Franz von 1
Suppé, having recently received their successful first performances. We should 2
not underestimate the value of these theatres for visitors from towns that had no 3
theatres of their own, for this was their one and only opportunity to be intro- 4
duced to this kind of art form. This was also true of children, who had not yet 5
been taken to the theatre in larger towns and cities but who had their first expe- 6
rience of the theatre during their summer holidays at performances that may 7
have been regarded as harmless but which were often quite the opposite. 8
Mahler was nineteen when he took up his first professional appointment. By 9
today’s standards, he was still extremely young, less so by the standards of his 20
own day. As we have seen, he had spent several stimulating and productive 1
years in Vienna before travelling to Bad Hall for the months of mid-May to 2
mid-August 1880. Photographs of the period attest to the change that had taken 3
place in him. The twelve-year-old boy seen standing next to his cousin Gustav 4
Frank in a photograph taken in Iglau that shows him in regulation dress – in 5
other words, like a grown-up, with a trilby in his right hand – is still the bashful 6
melancholic familiar to us from his first surviving photograph. The eighteen- 7
year old has abandoned the dutiful parting slightly to the left of centre and now 8
combs his thick dark hair backwards and for the first time is seen wearing 9
rimless spectacles to correct a short-sightedness that was already evident in 30
earlier photographs. From then on he was obliged to wear a whole series of 1
different spectacles, concealing a profound sadness in his eyes that was never to 2
disappear, so that in the few surviving photographs that show him without 3
glasses, this quality emerges all the more clearly and to all the more disturbing 4
effect. The next surviving photograph was taken in 1881 and shows Mahler at 5
the age of twenty-one at his home in Iglau, a year after his engagement in Bad 6
Hall and no doubt shortly before he took up his interim appointment in 7
Laibach. Again he is seen without glasses. But what a change has taken place in 8
him during these three years! His hair, which remained full and dark until his 9
death, is longer and more luxuriant. He has what at the time was called an 40
‘artist’s head’. Above all, he has a beard, which he was to retain until he moved 41R
92 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 to Kassel, where his facial hair was progressively reduced to a Van Dyke beard
2 and thence to a simple moustache, before disappearing for good, the only
3 exception being the months that he spent in Maiernigg during the summer
4 of 1905. Although still short-sighted, he now radiates a feeling of great self-
5 confidence. His years of apprenticeship were now over, and his intellectual and
6 musical development had reached its first high plateau. Photographed from an
7 angle, he gazes past us, a young artist staring into a promising future – and the
8 word artist does not need to be placed in quotation marks (Ill. 8).
9 Mahler owed his engagement in Bad Hall to his Viennese agent Gustav
10 Lewy, with whom he had signed a five-year contract only days before he took
1 up his post. Then, as now, agents were a tiresome but unavoidable aspect of
2 cultural life, as they were uniquely well placed to know what positions were
3 available for conductors, singers and actors at the countless theatres in the
4 German-speaking world. Administrators in search of such artists did not adver-
5 tise in the press but appealed to agents, who leafed through their files and made
6 recommendations as well as organizing auditions. The artist’s fees could be
7 considerable and involved a certain percentage of the sum that the agent was
8 able to negotiate, the size varying according to the circumstances. Mahler was
9 evidently tired of eking out a living by giving piano lessons and presumably
20 had no wish to continue to be a burden on his parents’ finances at a time when
1 his younger siblings were costing more and more money. It cannot have been a
2 love of operetta that took him to Bad Hall, as he was wholly indifferent to the
3 genre. Rather, it was his first opportunity to conduct an orchestra, however
4 small. It appears that he had already given up the idea of earning his living
5 as a pianist, so that only conducting remained, not least in the light of his
6 enthusiasm for opera. (Composition already fascinated him, of course, but this
7 was highly unlikely to provide him with a source of any real income.) And he
8 was seething with impatience, a restlessness that also finds expression in his
9 constant changes of address at this period. Although some of his addresses can
30 no longer be identified, it seems that when he started studying in Vienna, he
1 lived in the Margarethenstraße near the Naschmarkt, within walking distance
2 of the Conservatory, but from there he moved to the Salesianergasse near the
3 Schwarzenbergplatz, a quarter that evidently appealed to him as he later took
4 rooms at the Auenbruggergasse, just round the corner from here, during his
5 tenure as director of the Vienna Court Opera. In the autumn of 1879 he moved
6 round the corner to the Rennweg, a major thoroughfare that leads out of the
7 town from the Schwarzenbergplatz, past the Belvedere Gardens, but by the end
8 of November he was once again outside the city, living in one of Vienna’s
9 suburbs. When he left, Hugo Wolf moved into the room. By February 1880
40 Mahler was living at 39 Windmühlgasse in the sixth district of Mariahilf, a street
41R that leads off the Mariahilferstraße. Within only a matter of weeks, he had
moved again, this time to 12 Wipplingerstraße in an entirely different part of the 1

city, a street that runs past the Judenplatz. There were also practical reasons for 2
this restlessness: moving was easy, as pianos could be hired without difficulty, 3
and Mahler’s belongings could be packed away in a few cases, consisting, as they 4
did, in a small amount of cash, books, scores and not many clothes – a young 5
enthusiast like Mahler needed nothing more, a modesty that he retained 6
throughout his life. He was also sensitive to noise. True, he occasionally reduced 7
his fellow tenants and neighbours to a frenzy of despair by practising loudly on 8
the piano, but he was easily disturbed by others. And so we find him writing to 9
his friend Anton Krisper from the Windmühlgasse: ‘In the next room lives an 10
old maid who stays at her spinet the whole day long. Of course, she does not 1
know that on account of this I am going to have to take up my walking stick 2
again, like Ahasuerus. Heaven knows whether I shall ever settle down anywhere. 3
There is always some heedless fellow to drive me from one room to another.’1 (It 4
is worth adding that this is the first occurrence of the Ahasuerus motif in 5
Mahler’s letters, here without any reference to the fate of the Jews as a nation.) 6
Mahler’s emotional life was subject to extremely powerful mood swings that 7
go far beyond anything that might be thought of as normal in late pubescence. 8
His acute sensitivity is clear from the few surviving letters that he wrote to four 9
of his friends in the period around 1880: Josef Steiner, Emil Freund, Albert 20
Spiegler and Anton Krisper. We have already quoted passages from the longest 1
of these letters, which Mahler wrote to Steiner in June 1879 while giving private 2
piano lessons to Moritz Baumgarten’s children in Hungary. The family estates 3
outside Nagytétény near Budapest provided him with little stimulus, forcing 4
him back into his own inner world and a mood of world-weariness brightened 5
only by the intensity of his experience of nature. The final section of his three- 6
part letter to Steiner reveals the remarkable way in which his fervent love of 7
nature was combined with a musical experience, our first evidence of the inti- 8
mate bond between these two different worlds in Mahler’s emotional life: 9
30
It is six o’clock in the morning! I have been out on the heath, sitting with 1
Fárkas the shepherd, listening to the sound of his shawm. Ah, how mournful 2
it sounded, and yet how full of rapturous delight – that folk-tune he played! 3
The flowers growing at his feet trembled in the dreamy glow of his dark eyes, 4
and his brown hair fluttered around his sun-tanned cheeks. Ah, Steiner! You 5
are still asleep in your bed, and I have already seen the dew on the grasses.2 6
7
Linguistically speaking, this scene recalls a number of central motifs in Das 8
klagende Lied, the words of which were already essentially complete by this date: 9
these include the flower, the heath and the solitary song on the shawm. Erotically 40
speaking, however, Mahler’s longings are not yet fixed but cling to nature, as if 41R
94 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 seeking to suck it dry: ‘Oh, that I might behold this earth in its nakedness, lying
2 there without adornment or embellishment before its Creator,’ he writes
3 towards the beginning of the same letter.3 But his longings are just as much
4 directed at the friends of his youth. When Emil Freund wrote to him in
5 Puszta Batta during that frustrating summer of 1879, Mahler replied: ‘Your
6 letter found me in a state of the most terrible longing – I simply can’t stand
7 it any longer.’4 He fervently hoped to see his friend back at home before long.
8 When he met Josephine Poisl in the autumn of 1879, his longing acquired a
9 more concrete sense of direction, and so we now find him writing to Anton
10 Krisper:
1
2 I have just arrived in Vienna and am visiting the places where together we so
3 often shared our joys and sorrows. I am the unhappiest of fortune’s favourites
4 ever to have writhed among roses. A new name is now inscribed in my
5 heart alongside yours – true, only whisperingly and blushingly, but no less
6 powerfully for that.5
7
8 Two months later he wrote to Krisper again:
9
20 Dear friend, I have been quite dreadfully entangled in the delightful fetters of
1 the darling of the gods. [. . .] For the most part I have really spent the time
2 wallowing in sweet sufferings in the most varied ways, arising in the mornings
3 with ‘Ah’ and going to sleep with ‘Oh’; dreaming, I have lived, and waking,
4 I have dreamt. [. . .] In a week I shall be in Iglau and shall awake from my rosy
5 dreams into a still rosier daylight.6
6
7 He is referring, in other words, to when he will see Josephine Poisl again in Iglau.
8 Needless to add, these ecstatic confessions and stifled longings are to a large extent
9 a reflection of Mahler’s reading, Goethe’s Werther first and foremost:
30
1 It is so strange how, when I came here first and looked out upon that lovely
2 valley from the hills, I felt charmed with everything around me – the little
3 wood opposite – how delightful to sit in its shade! How fine the view from
4 that summit! – that delightful chain of hills, and the exquisite valleys at their
5 feet! – could I but lose myself amongst them!
6
7 And again:
8
9 Ah, how often then did the flight of the crane, soaring above my head, inspire
40 me with the desire to be transported to the shores of the immeasurable ocean,
41R there to drink the pleasures of life from the foaming goblet of the Infinite,
and to realize, if but for a moment with the confined powers of my soul, the 1
bliss of that Creator who accomplishes all things in Himself, and through 2
Himself!7 3
4
Other literary borrowings may be traced to Mahler’s reading of Lenau and 5
Jean Paul. World-weariness, the anguish of love and the cult of nature combine 6
to create an erotic blend of emotions. Like Büchner’s Lenz, Mahler liked to 7
walk in the mountains. In later life these hearty hikes were confined to his 8
summer holidays and remained his principal physical exercise apart from 9
swimming in mountain lakes, an activity he pursued with great tenacity 10
and skill, at least until such time as his doctor’s diagnosis destroyed his 1
pleasure in this pursuit as well. Time and again the young Mahler undertook 2
extended hikes. During the summer of 1880, for example, he planned to 3
accompany Anton Krisper and the Krzyzanowski brothers on a walking 4
holiday that would have taken them to the Bohemian Forest and the Fichtel 5
Mountains, culminating in visits to ‘Baireuth’ and the Oberammergau Passion 6
Play – a thought-provoking combination. In the event, these plans had to 7
be abandoned when Mahler was offered his summer appointment in Bad 8
Hall, and although he later attended the Bayreuth Festival, he never visited 9
Oberammergau.8 20
In the mid-1890s, Mahler was asked by the music journalist Max Marschalk – 1
one of the first to respond favourably to his work as a composer – to provide him 2
with some biographical information about himself: ‘The first work in which I 3
really came into my own as “Mahler”,’ he replied, ‘was a fairytale for choir, soloists 4
and orchestra: “Das klagende Lied”. I am describing this work as my op. 1.’9 Even 5
though Mahler gave none of his works opus numbers, it is clear that what he 6
meant by this is that in his own eyes Das klagende Lied was the first of his works 7
that he felt to be worthy of the name. No more than a draft libretto of his Rübezahl 8
has come down to us (we cannot say how much more of it was written, although 9
we do know that Mahler continued to work on it even after completing Das 30
klagende Lied), while his surviving chamber works from his days at school and at 1
the Conservatory include only a single movement from a Piano Quartet in A 2
minor (‘Nicht zu schnell. Entschlossen’). We know only the title of a planned 3
opera on the Argonauts and a possible overture to it. And his first three songs 4
for Josephine Poisl, finally, are little more than student exercises, for all that 5
they already anticipate the tone of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. But Das 6
klagende Lied is entirely different from these. In the complete form in which it is 7
once again performed today (in other words, including the ‘Waldmärchen’ move- 8
ment that Mahler himself cut in 1893), it lasts a good hour in performance and is 9
scored for an impressive array of resources, including chorus, off-stage band and 40
five vocal soloists. 41R
96 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 For a first work, Das klagende Lied is undoubtedly a tremendous achieve-

2 ment, conceived along the grandest lines and representing an enormous effort
3 on the part of a twenty-year-old composer, its resultant grandeur utterly
4 breathtaking. If Mahler had written nothing after Das klagende Lied and
5 become just a world-famous conductor, we should have to lament the loss of a
6 great talent. He completed the text as early as 1878, setting ‘Waldmärchen’ the
7 following year and during the early months of 1880, putting the finishing
8 touches to ‘Der Spielmann’ in March 1880 and completing the third and final
9 section, ‘Hochzeitsstück’, in the October and November of that year. In his
10 letter to Max Marschalk he referred to the whole piece as a ‘fairytale’, and there
1 is no doubt that it is permeated by the ‘old scent from the age of fairytales’, to
2 quote from Albert Giraud’s words to Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire.
3 The reader will recall that as an old man, Theodor Fischer remembered his
4 nursemaid Nanni telling him and Mahler the tale of the ‘mournful song’ when
5 they were children. We do not know which version of the tale she used, still
6 less what her philological approach to the material may have been or even
7 whether she knew it from a published collection of fairy stories or if she herself
8 had heard it as a child and now passed it on in the tradition of oral poetry –
9 this latter alternative seems more likely as it is not even certain that Nanni
20 could read. The best-known written version was recorded by Wilhelm Grimm
1 in January 1812, and his source was Dortchen Wild. A native of Kassel, she was
2 one of the wise women who provided the Brothers Grimm with their reposi-
3 tory of fairytales. In this particular case, the tale was recounted by the stove in
4 the summerhouse at Nentershausen one cold winter’s day. In their notes to the
5 1856 edition of their famous fairytales, the brothers draw attention to earlier
6 versions of the narrative that told of two or even three princes who are made
7 to compete with each other to decide which of them will succeed his old and
8 ailing father: the one who captures a bear or a wild boar with a little gold lock
9 shall become king. It is, of course, the most foolish of the sons who wins. No
30 one, moreover, is murdered in this version. But in another version, the elder
1 brother murders his more fortunate younger sibling in order to achieve
2 success. Yet another version tells of a brother and a sister, and the wild boar is
3 a flower that the sister finds, whereupon she is killed by her brother. A young
4 shepherd finds a bone from her buried body and carves a flute from it. But
5 it starts to sing and reveals the crime. In a Scottish folksong transmitted by
6 Walter Scott, a harper makes a harp from the sternum of a murdered woman,
7 and the harp starts to play of its own accord. In this version the murderess
8 and her victim are sisters. According to another song, the harp’s strings are
9 made from the victim’s hair. The Grimms’ version turns the rival princes or
40 princesses of other versions into two brothers from a poor family to whom the
41R king promises his daughter if they can capture or kill a wild boar that is laying
waste to his kingdom. The younger brother encounters a black mannikin who 1
gives him a spear that allows him to kill the beast. His elder brother envies him 2
his success and murders him on a bridge over a stream. He buries the body 3
beneath the bridge, takes the wild boar as his trophy and marries the king’s 4
daughter. Years later a shepherd finds a bone beneath the bridge and carves 5
from it a mouthpiece for his horn. The bone then starts to sing by itself, so that 6
the tale is called ‘The Singing Bone’: 7
8
Ach, du liebes Hirtelein, 9
du bläst auf meinem Knöchelein, 10
mein Bruder hat mich erschlagen, 1
unter der Brücke begraben, 2
um das wilde Schwein, 3
für des Königs Töchterlein.10 4
5
[Ah, you dear little shepherd, you are playing on my little bone. My brother 6
slew me and buried me beneath the bridge for the sake of the wild boar, in 7
order to win the king’s little daughter.] 8
9
The shepherd hurries off to see the king and produces the singing bone, and 20
the king understands what has happened. He has the rest of the body dug up 1
beneath the bridge, has the wicked brother drowned and arranges for the 2
remains of the good brother to be buried in the cemetery ‘in a beautiful grave’. 3
This, then, may be the version of the tale that Nanni told the young Theodor 4
Fischer and his friends in Iglau, although she may alternatively have trans- 5
mitted a more elaborate account familiar from Ludwig Bechstein’s New Book of 6
German Fairy Stories from the middle of the nineteenth century. Here it is a 7
queen who decides whether a brother or his sister shall succeed to the throne 8
by sending them out in search of a rare flower. The sister finds the flower. The 9
brother kills her. One of her bones becomes a flute that reveals the crime to the 30
queen. The murderer collapses on his throne beneath the weight of the revela- 1
tion. Bechstein’s version has the merit of already bearing the same title as 2
Mahler’s cantata, Das klagende Lied. But this title is also shared by a six-part 3
ballad by Martin Greif, a successful playwright and poet who divided his time 4
between Munich and Vienna and who was at the height of his fame in the 5
1870s, writing poems that reflect the influence of Lenau and Mörike combined 6
with older balladesque traditions. Greif dresses up the succinct fairytale 7
versions of Grimm and Bechstein with all manner of theatrical effects, consid- 8
erably expanding them and larding them with numerous passages of undeni- 9
ably effective direct speech and a use of contrast by no means lacking in 40
dramaturgical skill. Although it cannot be proved, it is relatively certain that 41R
98 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Mahler attended a ‘performance’ of Greif ’s ballad, probably a semi-staged

2 rehearsed reading in which he may even have been actively involved at the
3 Vienna Conservatory in May 1876. When combined with his memory of the
4 children’s fairytale that he had heard in Iglau, this performance will have laid
5 the foundations for his own attempt to dramatize the subject. A fourth influ-
6 ence is also likely in the form of Robert Schumann’s choral ballads. Nowadays
7 virtually forgotten, they were still a part of the repertory in the 1870s and
8 1880s, especially with choral societies with any claims to distinction.
9 Schumann’s Geibel-inspired ballad Vom Pagen und der Königstochter (Of the
10 Page and the Princess), op. 140, includes two comparable basic motifs: the
1 murder out of envy and the revelatory power of music.11
2 Ever since he had been able to read, Mahler had felt at home in the world of
3 the fairytale and of German Romanticism, even though it was only at a later
4 date that he began to explore the world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Drawing
5 on a poetic vein that he had started to tap as a youth and that he quickly
6 mastered to an astonishing degree, he drew up his own independent version of
7 the story based on all these sources, the first draft of which he enclosed with a
8 letter to Anton Krisper probably written in February or March 1878. (The
9 accompanying letter has not survived, making it impossible to date the draft
20 any more accurately.) With only a few retouchings, this ‘Ballad of the Flaxen-
1 and Auburn-Haired Horsemen’ provided Mahler with the basis for the first
2 section of Das klagende Lied, ‘Waldmärchen’. Mahler subsequently cut this
3 movement. The words were first reproduced by Hans Holländer but with a
4 number of transcriptional errors.
5 This ballad formed the first part of what was originally the three-part
6 version of Das klagende Lied. In the second part, headed ‘Der Spielmann’, the
7 eponymous minstrel finds one of the bones of the buried skeleton and carves a
8 flute from it. On this occasion, the bone does not start to sing of its own accord
9 but needs to be woken into life by being played, at which point it goes its own
30 way and reveals the heinous deed. The third part of the work is headed
1 ‘Hochzeitsstück’ (Wedding Piece) and begins with a description of the queen’s
2 wedding with the auburn-haired knight. The Minstrel appears and is welcomed
3 as a musician, but his flute then starts to sing its denunciatory song. Mahler
4 reveals a certain dramatic skill in building to a climax. The murderer himself
5 ‘takes up the flute in impious scorn’ and plays on it. (Mahler was clearly inspired
6 by Heinrich Heine’s Belsatzar here: ‘And the monarch straight seized on a
7 sacred cup / With impious hand, and fill’d it up.’) But the flute adds a new
8 strophe to its existing accusation: ‘Ah brother, dear brother mine! This must I
9 now deplore! / It was you who struck me dead! / You’re playing on my dead
40 bone! / This must I lament for ever!’ The wedding ends as the walls collapse and
41R the guests scatter.
1
2
5 3
4
5
6
Emotional Ups and Downs 7
8
in Laibach 9
(1881–2) 10
1
2
3
a map of the area covered by Mahler in the course of his pere- 4
A GLANCE AT
grinations between school, conservatory and vacation shows how surpris-
ingly close all these places were. Mahler’s birthplace of Kalischt lies eight miles
5
6
to the south of Ledetsch and twenty miles to the north-west of Iglau. The village 7
from which his father came, Lipnitz, lay four miles to the east of Kalischt, while 8
his mother came from Ledetsch. Prague, where the young Mahler was particu- 9
larly unhappy, lies some eighty miles to the north-west, Vienna a little further 20
to the south-east. Iglau lies almost halfway between the two largest cities in 1
the monarchy and was then on one of the major railway lines, making it a suit- 2
able place at which to start and end journeys. The farmsteads at Ronow and 3
Morawan where the fifteen-year-old Mahler spent one of his first relatively 4
extended vacations with his friend and classmate Josef Steiner lie seven and ten 5
miles to the south-east of Caslau (Cáslav), some forty miles to the north-west 6
of Iglau. Puszta Batta near Budapest, where Mahler gave private piano lessons 7
to Moritz Baumgarten’s children during the summers of 1879 and 1882, was the 8
furthest he had ever been from home. For him, a summer without returning 9
home to see his parents and siblings was inconceivable. He was deeply attached 30
to the melancholic, elegiac countryside around Iglau, and when he was in 1
Hungary he tried to rediscover that mood, albeit in a ‘flatter’ form. Seelau 2
(Zeliv), where he visited Emil Freund on a number of occasions, also lay within 3
this area, some seven miles to the south-west of Kalischt. Seelau was not on 4
the rail network but could be reached in three hours by wagon. Wlaschim 5
(Vlašim), where he spent the summer of 1881 with his cousin Gustav Frank, 6
was no more than forty miles to the north-west of Iglau, and from Wlaschim, 7
Mahler could travel to Seelau before returning to Iglau, the attractiveness of 8
which was briefly increased during the summer of 1879, when he fell in love 9
with Josephine Poisl. Mahler also spent the summer of 1882 in Iglau and Seelau, 40
by which date he was already twenty-two. These close regional ties began to 41R
100 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 loosen only in 1883, when Mahler went to Kassel. Thereafter his visits to Iglau
2 and the surrounding area grew briefer and more infrequent. By 1889, when
3 Mahler’s parents both died within a short period of each other and he arranged
4 for his brothers and sisters to live in Vienna, such visits had virtually ceased
5 altogether, and from then on he had surprisingly little contact with a region that
6 he had loved so much. He now felt drawn to the Alps, which he visited first
7 with his brothers and sisters, then with his sisters and finally with his wife and
8 children. Here he settled beside mountain lakes in order to be able to write
9 music in the seclusion of his ‘composing houses’. The mountains for walking,
10 the lakes for swimming in and an isolated hut in which to work – this remained
1 his ideal until the end of his life. His reasons for breaking free from his close
2 links with his native Iglau are undoubtedly to be found in part in the loosening
3 of his family’s ties with the region but also in his recognition that his family
4 background had become oppressively restrictive and that – as he once admitted
5 to Natalie – he now felt that he had outgrown it.
6 Mahler left Bad Hall on 19 August 1880 and returned to Vienna. His
7 agent, Gustav Lewy, had nothing lined up for the coming season. It is clear
8 from his few surviving letters from this period that Mahler – already suffering
9 from melancholia, not to say depression – was plunged into the depths of
20 despair. (The twelve months between the autumn of 1880 and the autumn of
1 1881 are again exceptionally poorly documented.) Virtually all these letters are
2 addressed to Mahler’s small circle of adolescent friends, although his contacts
3 with Lipiner, with whom he had previously been so close, were noticeably
4 distant at this period. Perhaps the most eloquent of these letters is the one that
5 he wrote to Emil Freund in Seelau in response to a particularly upsetting piece
6 of news from Freund: on his first visit to Freund’s house in Seelau during the
7 summer of 1878, he had met a young woman who was related to his host and
8 who fell in love with Mahler – we do not even know her name. According to
9 Freund’s later account of the matter, Mahler did not return her feelings but
30 appears, rather, to have been annoyed by the strength of her emotions. Instead,
1 he advised her to beware of unduly passionate feelings, a warning that must
2 have made Mahler seem both precocious and cold. But subsequent develop-
3 ments seem to have proved him right, for in October 1880 Freund wrote
4 to tell him that the young woman had killed herself out of unrequited love.
5 Although Mahler himself appears not to have been responsible, the news
6 arrived at a time when he was already feeling profoundly upset as Rott had
7 just been committed to an asylum and the first signs of Anton Krisper’s
8 syphilitically induced mental illness had made themselves felt to devastating
9 effect.
40 In spite of the fact that he had just completed Das klagende Lied, all
41R three events, together with his evidently unrequited love for Josephine Poisl
EMOTIONAL UPS AND DOWNS IN LAIBACH 101
and his inability to decide between the careers of piano virtuoso, conductor 1
and composer, plunged Mahler into a state of deep depression. His reply to 2
Emil Freund is dated 1 November 1880 and reveals his state of mind in no 3
uncertain terms: 4
5
I have been dealt so many emotional blows in recent weeks that I find it 6
almost impossible to speak to anyone who knew me in happier times. I can 7
counter your news with some that is unfortunately just as upsetting: my 8
friend Hans Rott has gone mad! – And I’m bound to fear a similar fate for 9
Krisper. – Your lines reached me at the same time as this last piece of news – 10
at a time when I myself was in need of comfort [no doubt Mahler is referring 1
to his feelings for Josephine Poisl]. Misery is everywhere. It wears the 2
strangest guises to mock us poor human beings. If you know a single happy 3
person on this earth, tell me his name quickly, before I lose the little courage 4
to face life that I still have. – Anyone who has watched a truly noble and 5
profound individual struggle with the most vapid vulgarity [here Mahler is 6
clearly referring to Rott] can scarcely suppress a shudder when he thinks of 7
his own poor skin; today is All Saints’ Day – if you’d been here at this time 8
last year, you would know in what mood I welcome this day. Tomorrow will 9
be the first All Souls’ Day of my life! Now I too have a grave on which to lay 20
a wreath. For the last month I have been a total vegetarian. The moral impact 1
of this way of life, with its voluntary castigation of the body and resultant lack 2
of material needs, is immense. That I am completely taken by this idea you 3
can infer from the fact that I expect of it no less than the regeneration of the 4
human race.1 5
6
There is a clear link here between Mahler’s mood of world-weariness and his 7
interest in Wagner’s notion of regeneration. (Wagner’s essay on ‘Religion and 8
Art’, in which these ideas, including vegetarianism, play a central role, had just 9
appeared in the October issue of the Bayreuther Blätter.) Mahler had felt 30
something similar in the spring of 1880, when he wrote to Anton Krisper to 1
complain that the world had affected him for the first time on a ‘material’ level, 2
a remark that relates in part to his feelings of unrequited love but that was valid 3
in other ways too. 4
Nor should we forget what the awakening of Eros matutinus meant for a 5
young man of Mahler’s generation. A good twenty years his junior, Stefan 6
Zweig left a vivid and – in the circumstances – extremely outspoken account 7
of this in his reminiscences. In Hugo Wolf, Hans Rott and Anton Krisper, 8
Mahler now had no fewer than three deterrent examples of the dangers of 9
venereal disease among his own immediate circle of friends. Fear of such 40
diseases was so great that uninhibited contact with the opposite sex was 41R
102 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 impossible outside marriage. Sex with a prostitute was accompanied by the

2 constant fear of infection. As Zweig points out, there was a notice on the door
3 of every sixth or seventh house in Vienna that read ‘Specialist for Skin and
4 Venereal Diseases’. Those infected had to undergo painful courses of treatment
5 with little prospect of recovery. For weeks on end their entire body was rubbed
6 with mercury, with the inevitable side effect that their hair and teeth fell out,
7 and yet not even this could guarantee a complete cure: the insidious disease
8 could break out again at any time and lead to a ‘softening of the brain’, as was
9 the case with Rott and Krisper and probably also with Wolf. It was by no means
10 unusual for young men diagnosed with syphilis to take their own lives. Zweig
1 reports that he could not recall a single comrade of his youth who at one time
2 or another did not come to him ‘with pale and troubled mien, one because he
3 was ill or feared illness, another because he was being blackmailed because of
4 an abortion, a third because he lacked the money to be cured without the
5 knowledge of his family, the fourth because he did not know how to pay hush
6 money to a waitress who claimed to have had a child by him, the fifth because
7 his wallet had been stolen in a brothel and he did not dare go to the police’.2
8 Arthur Schnitzler says much the same in his early autobiography, while the
9 ‘problem’ is even more clearly spelt out in his diaries. (He, too, had a friend –
20 Richard Tausenau – whose health was being undermined by syphilis.)
1 It is easy to imagine what all this must have meant for a young man like
2 Mahler, even if he did not share Schnitzler’s erotomania. Unlike Schnitzler, who
3 repeatedly indulged his priapic desires in countless fleeting affairs with wait-
4 resses, seamstresses, ladies of more or less ill repute and married women and
5 who was evidently extremely fortunate in never becoming infected, Mahler
6 equally evidently pursued a very different course. Even if Alma was later to give
7 the impression that it was she who roused him to manhood – or perhaps this
8 was the impression that Mahler himself wanted her to give – this was not in fact
9 the case. Conversely, there is no doubt that as a young man he was exception-
30 ally reserved in the matter of sex. The reasons for this must be sought not only
1 in his fear of infection but also in his feelings of world-weariness, in a scepti-
2 cism unusual in one so young and in a seriousness of purpose that extended
3 beyond mere morality and embraced his whole philosophy in life. Wagner’s
4 Parsifal preached not only respect for animals but also sexual abstinence, sex
5 being regarded as sinful. And like Parsifal, Mahler will have felt obliged to keep
6 his distance from many a seductive Flowermaiden, to say nothing of women
7 like Kundry, a corrupter of morals whom Parsifal rejected just as surely as
8 Mahler would have done – only in the case of Anna von Mildenburg did
9 Mahler fail to emulate Parsifal.
40 Mahler arrived in Laibach (Ljubljana) in September 1881 for the second
41R engagement that he owed to his agent, Gustav Lewy. Now the main city of the
Republic of Slovenia, Laibach was then the centre of the Duchy of Krain 1
(Kranjska), one of the crown territories of the Imperial and Royal Monarchy 2
some sixty miles to the south of Klagenfurt. It was much larger than the spa 3
resort of Bad Hall, and its theatre – the Landschaftliches Theater or ‘Provincial 4
Theatre’ – was correspondingly larger in turn, the multi-functional preserve of 5
the German-speaking population that dominated a town in which Slovene 6
nationalism was none the less on the increase. By the date of Mahler’s arrival, 7
the town had some twenty-six thousand inhabitants, 60 per cent of whom 8
were Slovene, the remainder German. Some fifteen years later the coalition 9
government of Alfred August von Windischgrätz and Ignaz von Plener was to 10
founder on the Slovene question. We do not know to what extent Mahler 1
learnt about these problems during the six months that he spent in Laibach 2
between taking up his appointment on 3 September 1881 and leaving the town 3
at the beginning of April 1882. His post was as principal conductor, certainly 4
a significant advance on his position in Bad Hall. His lodgings, too, had the 5
advantage of a certain homeliness as he boarded with Anton Krisper’s parents. 6
It is unclear whether Krisper himself spent the winter in Laibach, although this 7
seems unlikely. 8
Mahler’s first appearance in the pit was on 24 September, when the regional 9
assembly was opened and a play by Eduard von Bauernfeld was performed, 20
prefaced by Beethoven’s Egmont Overture under Mahler’s direction. According 1
to the laconic report in the local paper, it was a ‘precise’ performance. A week 2
later he conducted his very first opera, Verdi’s Il trovatore, which in keeping 3
with standard practice in the German-speaking world at this time was 4
performed in German as Der Troubadour. This was also the first performance 5
under the theatre’s new director, Alexander Mondheim-Schreiner. The local 6
paper reported that it passed off ‘without any untoward disruption’ – one 7
wonders what other performances were like if this point had to be specially 8
made. ‘The orchestra under Herr Mahler’s direction held its ground.’ This 9
remark, too, will have failed to satisfy the young conductor, whose burning 30
ambition and growing awareness of his own merits and abilities were in stark 1
contrast to the modest potential of these tiny theatres where he had to muddle 2
through as best he could. His lifelong loathing of routine performances 3
cobbled together with the help of inadequate artists, which he resisted with an 4
iron will and a fanatical belief in art at the great theatres where he worked from 5
1883 onwards, was fuelled by his experiences in Bad Hall, Laibach and 6
Olmütz, all three of them appointments that he took over at the eleventh hour 7
when the previous incumbent had found it impossible to stick at his post. The 8
young student from the Vienna Conservatory who had never learnt how to 9
conduct was thrown in at the deep end with inadequate orchestral musicians, 40
largely untalented singers and amateur choristers, all of them lacking in 41R
104 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 enthusiasm. They were generally much older than their conductor and
2 unwilling to be told what to do by a greenhorn.
3 Needless to add, there was no ‘general music director’ in Laibach. As
4 principal conductor, Mahler was responsible for all the opera performances.
5 Usually, a colleague shouldered the burden of the operettas that were in the
6 repertory, although even here Mahler occasionally had to help out. There is no
7 doubt that Mahler learnt the repertory here, but it is noteworthy that he had
8 to conduct works that he spent the rest of his life avoiding: Rossini’s Il barbiere
9 di Siviglia, Gounod’s Faust (always performed in German as Margarethe),
10 Flotow’s Alessandro Stradella and the operas of Donizetti. Among the operettas
1 that he conducted were works by Lecocq, Suppé and Johann Strauß. Mahler
2 was relieved that Wagner’s works could not be performed in so small a theatre,
3 nor could French grand opera, in other words, Halévy, late Rossini and
4 Meyerbeer, whose staging and casting demands ruled them out of court –
5 and again Mahler was happy at this. Mahler also made two further public
6 appearances as a pianist. Otherwise, we know little about the months he spent
7 in Laibach as no letters have survived from this period. At the same time,
8 however, the words ‘we know very little about this period’ will soon no longer
9 be necessary: with the beginning of 1883 the number of surviving documents
20 grows from a mere trickle and no longer incorporates the gaps that have been
1 so evident until now. Such were Mahler’s artistic ideals and the enormous
2 demands that he placed on himself that this repertory could never satisfy him.
3 He retained a lifelong aversion to everything in the world of opera that was
4 lacking in substance. Operetta naturally fell victim to this verdict. (Whether
5 the verdict is justified is another question.) The operas of Flotow, Rossini and
6 Gounod were little more than dross in his eyes, and in this respect he was very
7 much Wagner’s man, although even Wagner held Rossini in higher regard
8 than Mahler did. Against Verdi he harboured all the reservations that were
9 common at this time, and at no point in his life was he able to accept that the
30 Italian was an important composer who could stand comparison with Mozart
1 and Wagner. A year later in Olmütz he was happy to be allowed to conduct
2 only Verdi and Meyerbeer, rather than Wagner and Mozart, as he felt that he
3 would not have to besmirch and sully the great composers through inadequate
4 performances with singers, players and chorus who were simply not up to the
5 mark. His attitude to Meyerbeer was clearly the one adopted by Wagner in his
6 essay ‘Jews in Music’, first published in 1850 and reissued in pamphlet form in
7 1869. For a Jewish conductor, this is a depressing observation, and it was not
8 until much later that we find Mahler moderating his judgement.3 His attitude
9 to Verdi, too, changed in later life, when we find him admitting to Natalie that
40 in his final operas Verdi achieved a much greater degree of concentration. Of
41R the works that he conducted in Laibach, only Mozart and Weber can really
have been to his liking, although it was presumably a matter of much regret to 1
him that he had to perform their works with the resources of a provincial 2
theatre, so that he drew the logical conclusion in Olmütz and declined to 3
conduct them at all. With Weber’s music he was then to develop a much closer 4
and more remarkable relationship in Leipzig. 5
Again, we know next to nothing about another frustrating experience that 6
can have done little to lighten his mood at this time: on 16 December 1881, 7
Vienna’s annual Beethoven Prize was awarded by a jury that included Brahms, 8
Karl Goldmark and the Wagner disciple and principal conductor at the Vienna 9
Court Opera, Hans Richter. Mahler had submitted Das klagende Lied, but 10
it left no impression on the members of the jury. The winner was Mahler’s 1
harmony teacher, Robert Fuchs, with a Piano Concerto in B flat minor. In his 2
letter to Emil Freund, Mahler announced that his main concern was to arrange 3
for this tremendously ambitious and monumental work to be performed. 4
He can have been in no doubt about the difficulty of achieving this aim, given 5
the vast resources involved, including offstage orchestra, soloists and several 6
choirs. Victory in this prestigious competition would undoubtedly have helped 7
him as the prize-winning work was assured of a performance, quite apart 8
from the prize money of five hundred florins. (In Bad Hall, Mahler had earned 9
thirty florins a month.) In all, seventeen works were submitted by twelve 20
different composers. It is no longer possible to say why the prize was awarded 1
to Fuchs, who was then thirty-four and needed neither the money nor the 2
prestige. From today’s perspective, his compositions are notable for their 3
impressive command of the tools of the composer’s trade but there is little 4
about them that is personal or original, still less do they display any obvious 5
trace of genius. A whole world separates his works from Das klagende Lied, but 6
a jury that set store by Fuchs was bound to view Mahler’s work as a ragbag of 7
eccentricities. Of the eminent members of the jury, only Goldmark seems to 8
have suspected that Mahler’s submission was the work of a talented composer. 9
(Not until much later was Mahler to draw closer to Brahms.) Although 30
Goldmark yielded nothing to Fuchs in his championship of traditionalism, he 1
seems to have sensed Mahler’s originality. Or at least posterity may hope that 2
he had Mahler in mind when he asked for a rider to be added to the report: 3
‘Herr Goldmark considers it desirable that, in assessing the works that have 4
been submitted, the awarding committee should agree on certain principles 5
with regard to the priority to be given either to the dexterity and skill shown 6
in the construction of the works, or to talent, even if it shows less technical 7
proficiency.’ This pronouncement was answered unanimously by the jury’s 8
award of the first prize to Robert Fuchs, not even Goldmark having the 9
courage to express his misgivings in a minority report. That he raised the point 40
at all none the less redounds to his credit. 41R
106 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 The subsequent fate of Das klagende Lied – the first work of which Mahler
2 could legitimately be proud, for all that it was to remain a problem piece – is
3 briefly told. All his attempts to have it performed came to nothing. Following
4 his failed attempt to win the Beethoven Prize, he quickly realized that his
5 chances of gaining a hearing were slim. In the summer of 1883 he sent the
6 score to Liszt in Weimar, asking whether he would consider performing it at
7 a meeting of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein. The score was returned
8 to him with a note to the effect that Liszt did not like the ‘poem’. Mahler
9 could understand why the work should have found little favour with Vienna’s
10 ‘Brahmins’, but he must have been profoundly depressed to discover that the
1 head of the New German School, whose son-in-law, Wagner, had just died,
2 had no time for the work’s audacities. For a while he returned the score to his
3 bottom drawer, but in 1891, during his time as conductor in Hamburg, he
4 made a third attempt to promote the piece and offered it to the publishing
5 house of Schott in Mainz, but in vain. As a result of these multiple setbacks,
6 Mahler set about revising the work. It was not that he doubted in himself or in
7 the score, for he remained convinced that what he had written thirteen years
8 earlier still had merit. And so we find him writing in 1893 to his sister Justine
9 to express his astonishment at taking out the work again: ‘The nuts which I
20 have given to crack here are perhaps the toughest that my soil has yet brought
1 forth.’4 In spite of this, Mahler undertook an initial series of revisions to the
2 score in an attempt to make it more accessible, principally reducing its
3 length and cutting the whole of the opening movement, ‘Waldmärchen’. He
4 also simplified the instrumentation, removing some of the vocal soloists and
5 simply omitting the offstage orchestra, in spite of its dramatic importance
6 and undoubted effectiveness. This was a painful amputation, and it certainly
7 reduces the work’s impact. Mahler clearly saw that he had gone too far here, for
8 in 1898 he revised the work again and restored the offstage orchestra in the
9 final movement. That same year he told Natalie that he had unfortunately not
30 had time to prepare the score for the printer, but in spite of this he had real-
1 ized that the offstage orchestra must be reintroduced at this point, ‘whether
2 they play it for me or not’.5 In general, Mahler toned down the more audacious
3 passages when revising the work at this time, notably at the point at which the
4 Minstrel carves his flute from the bone and the offstage orchestra and onstage
5 bells allow past, present and future to merge together in the manner of a
6 phantasmagoria – one of the boldest passages that Mahler ever composed.
7 The first performance finally took place at a special concert by the Vienna
8 Singakademie and the Court Opera Orchestra in the city’s Musikvereinssaal
9 on 17 February 1901. It was conducted by the composer himself, who was
40 otherwise extremely hesitant to mount performances of his own works in
41R Vienna, and the soloists included the best that the Court Opera could offer:
the sopranos Elise Elizza and Anna von Mildenburg, the contralto Edyth 1
Walker and the tenor Fritz Schrödter. The audience was impressed, not least 2
by the lavish forces for which the work is scored. (As if anticipating the later 3
publicity surrounding the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, reviewers drew attention 4
to the fact that there were some five hundred performers onstage.) The press, 5
conversely, was dismissive, Max Kalbeck – an intimate of Brahms – summing 6
up the views of his ‘superiors’, as Mahler used to call his critics, as follows: ‘Das 7
klagende Lied seems to us more a skilfully laid out assortment of more or less 8
crude or subtle acoustic effects than an artistically moulded and inspired 9
musical organism.’6 Natalie reports that even the choir included anti-Semitic 10
elements and that Mahler had to contend with a certain amount of opposition, 1
as he did throughout his whole time in Vienna. Mahler himself never heard 2
the original three-movement version and conducted the two-movement alter- 3
native only twice.7 4
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9
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3
4
5
6
7
8
9
30
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3
4
5
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41R
1
2
3 6
4
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6
7 For the Last Time in the
8
9
Provinces: Olmütz
10 (1882–3)
1
2
3
4 final stage on Mahler’s painful journey through the world
5
6
T HE THIRD AND
of late nineteenth-century provincial music-making began in Olmütz in
January 1883. It had been clear from the outset that he was able and willing to
7 remain in Laibach for only a single season, for he had accepted the appointment
8 knowing that it was a temporary one. In spite of this, he chalked up a number of
9 successes in the town, both as a conductor and as the soloist at a concert by the
20 local Philharmonic Society. In March 1882 he was able to conduct a benefit
1 performance at the opera, a common practice at a time when conductors’ salaries
2 desperately needing boosting. But by early April his Laibach intermezzo was over.
3 Before returning to Vienna, he made a brief detour to Trieste in order to see a city
4 that he did not yet know. He spent the summer in what was already his traditional
5 way, first with his family in Iglau, then with Emil Freund in Seelau and, for the
6 last time, as piano tutor to the Baumgarten family at Nagytétény near Budapest.
7 On 19 September he made his one and only appearance as a conductor in Iglau,
8 conducting Suppé’s overture to Boccaccio in a performance at the town’s theatre
9 described by the local press as ‘rousing’, as if he had been conducting a work by
30 one of the great composers of the German repertory. On his return to Vienna, he
1 resumed his inconstant lifestyle, working on Rübezahl and changing his address
2 with a frequency that took his former restlessness to new heights, so that even his
3 otherwise tolerant and commonsensical mother was moved to remonstrate
4 shortly before Christmas, which he spent with his parents in Iglau:
5
6 Why these endless changes of apartment? I don’t believe that there can be a
7 single person apart from you who changes his apartment every 2 weeks. Will
8 you end up changing your apartment every time you change your under-
9 clothes? And in the end won’t you find yourself without any underclothes or
40 clothes? For as I know you, you will forget something in each place – and will
41R continue to move until you have nothing left.1
FOR THE LAST TIME IN THE PROVINCES: OLMÜTZ 109
Mahler’s brief tenure in Olmütz also marked the last time he stepped in at the 1
last minute to replace a colleague, the principal conductor, Emil Kaiser, having 2
thrown in the towel in mid-season, whereupon Mahler’s agent, Gustav Lewy, 3
had once again played his joker. (The Olmütz Theatre, a building designed by 4
the eminent architect Josef Kornhäusel, was run by Emanuel Raul, to whom it 5
was a matter of indifference who replaced Kaiser.) Mahler arrived in Olmütz on 6
10 January 1883, and two days later his appointment was reported in the local 7
press. In moving to the town, Mahler was in fact returning to his roots, Olmütz 8
lying some forty miles north-east of Brünn and about twice as far to the east of 9
Iglau. He lost no time in moving into the first available lodgings and dropping 10
a quick postcard to his new friend in Vienna, Friedrich Löhr (‘I’m in the worst 1
possible mood’). By the 16th he had already conducted his first opera in the 2
town, Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots, the epitome of French grand opera, which 3
at least indicates that Olmütz was a step up from Laibach, where Meyerbeer’s 4
works were not performed at all. We would know even less about Mahler’s time 5
in Olmütz than we do about his period in Laibach if it had not been for the fact 6
that the company included in its ranks a young and ambitious Hungarian bari- 7
tone, Jacques (or Jakob) Manheit, with whom Mahler later worked in Budapest 8
as well. Ludwig Karpath, who for a time was a follower of Mahler, interviewed 9
Manheit on the subject of the time that Mahler spent in Olmütz, producing in 20
the process one of the liveliest accounts of the young conductor’s life. Manheit 1
recalled Mahler’s arrival in Olmütz and the company’s first encounter with its 2
new conductor: 3
4
The following day, at nine o’clock in the morning, the new conductor, whose 5
name was Gustav Mahler, held a rehearsal for the chorus. When we went to 6
a full ensemble rehearsal an hour later, the chorus singers came to us in 7
absolute despair, claiming that they were completely hoarse and refusing 8
to work with the new conductor any more. Full of curiosity, we soloists 9
entered the rehearsal room, where Mahler was already sitting at the piano 30
and warming his hands with his coat-tails. His head was covered in long, 1
unkempt hair, he had the beginnings of a black beard, and he wore a large 2
horn-rimmed pince-nez on his very prominent nose. He started the rehearsal 3
without bothering to introduce himself to anyone. All his colleagues, men 4
and women alike, regarded the new conductor with unconcealed hostility, 5
which they expressed loudly and without reserve. Mahler, however, did not 6
react to any of the interruptions, but demanded strict compliance with his 7
orders. No one dared to contradict the young man. Two days later we saw 8
him on the podium for the first time. We were performing Les Huguenots. 9
After the first act the bass who was singing Marcel stormed breathlessly into 40
the dressing room shouting, ‘I can’t sing with this man. He holds his baton 41R
110 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 now in his right hand, now in his left, and keeps on passing his free hand over
2 his face, so that I can’t see any of his cues.’ When Mahler heard this serious
3 complaint he replied quite equably, ‘Yes, my dear friend, conducting makes
4 me very hot and I perspire too much, so my pince-nez keeps slipping off
5 and I have to catch it with my free hand. But I’ll put it right straight away.’ So
6 he went to the wardrobe master for a broad piece of ribbon, fastened his
7 pince-nez to it, and hooked it round his ears. But now he looked so comic
8 that when the singers looked down on him from the stage, they were
9 convulsed with laughter. Somehow we got to the end of the performance.2
10
1 Manheit not only describes this curious beginning to Mahler’s stint in Olmütz,
2 he also explains how he succeeded in making contact with the aloof and stand-
3 offish Mahler outside the theatre, too, offering a graphic account of Mahler’s
4 ability to excite the contempt of his colleagues at the local inn. He would order
5 water instead of beer or wine and boiled spinach and apples instead of the
6 usual helpings of meat, a practising vegetarian in the spirit of Wagner,
7 although, as Manheit later noted, by the time that he was living in Budapest
8 Mahler had already abandoned his vegetarian principles. No less impressive is
9 Manheit’s account of a meeting with Mahler on 13 February 1883. Shortly
20 before this, Mahler had told him that his father was in poor health. On the
1 13th, Manheit found the conductor sobbing loudly in the street, his hand-
2 kerchief held to his eyes. Manheit was about to offer him his condolences on
3 the death of his father, but Mahler interrupted him: his father was still alive,
4 but something far worse had happened – Wagner had died. For the next few
5 days no one could speak to him. Manheit’s memoirs provide us with a
6 complete picture of the young Mahler: uncompromisingly devoted to his
7 art but with little interest in the more superficial aspects of his profession,
8 heedless of his effect on others, exuding a powerful authority and even
9 charisma in spite of his youth and lack of height and, as a Wagnerian of the
30 most enthusiastic kind, holding radical views and leading a commensurate
1 lifestyle. Manheit leaves us in no doubt that all who had eyes and ears could
2 tell that they were dealing with an altogether exceptional individual in Olmütz.
3 At the end of his brief stay in the town, Mahler was again offered the opportu-
4 nity to conduct a benefit performance, the proceeds of which would be his to
5 pocket. In spite of advice to the contrary, he insisted on conducting Méhul’s
6 hugely challenging opera Joseph, a work designed to test the resources of a
7 small company to their limits. Manheit’s account of Mahler getting his way,
8 leaping over the double-bass players on to the stage during the rehearsals, a
9 diminutive figure fired by nervous energy, not only conducting the score but
40 simultaneously moving the singers around the stage and taking charge of the
41R production, allows us a glimpse of the man who was later to revolutionize the
operatic stage in Vienna, where he single-handedly invented the modern 1

approach to opera production. It was a working method that Mahler retained 2
throughout the whole of his life. 3
The extent to which Mahler was tormented by the conditions under which 4
he had to work and which he regarded as unworthy of his art and his abilities 5
emerges from a letter to Friedrich Löhr, who for many years was one of his 6
closest friends. The two men met at the University in Vienna, where Löhr 7
was studying philology and archaeology. Their contacts deepened during the 8
summer of 1882, resulting in a lasting friendship, albeit one that never recap- 9
tured the intensity of its early months. In the letter that he wrote from Olmütz 10
in mid-February 1883, Mahler made no secret of his feelings but struck a note 1
of complete self-confidence: ‘Take a thoroughbred horse and yoke it to a cart 2
with oxen – all it can do is pull and sweat along with the rest of them. I hardly 3
dare to appear before you – I feel so besmirched’, and we may well believe that 4
Mahler was being sincere here, rather than merely fishing for compliments. He 5
then expresses his delight at having to conduct ‘virtually only’ Meyerbeer and 6
Verdi, rather than Wagner and Mozart, but finally gives vent to his despair at 7
having to suffer at the hands of his fellow artists and their ‘unspeakable lack of 8
sensitivity’, for all that he is grateful to them for occasionally making an effort 9
to please their conductor rather than serving the cause of their art: 20
1
for the idea that an artist can become consumed by a work of art is quite 2
beyond them. At times, when I’m all on fire with enthusiasm and am trying 3
to sweep them along with me to greater heights – I see these people’s faces, 4
see how surprised they are, how knowingly they smile at each other – and 5
then my ardour cools and all I want is to run away and never return. Only the 6
feeling that I am suffering for my masters’ sake and that some day I may 7
perhaps kindle a spark in these poor wretches’ souls fortifies me, and in some 8
of my better hours I vow to endure all this with love – even in the face of their 9
scorn.3 30
1
His ability to inspire even inadequate opera companies, orchestras and 2
choruses to raise themselves to a higher than normal level will have made it 3
clear to him from an early date that he would one day be able to make a living 4
as a conductor and in the process serve his great masters, though he was, 5
throughout his life, haunted by the nightmarish vision of the starving composer 6
with no other resources to fall back on. (The example of Hugo Wolf was 7
undoubtedly a particular deterrent in this regard.) The drudgery of life in an 8
opera house about which he later complained so frequently and that kept him 9
from composing was undoubtedly the result of clear, cold calculation during 40
this earlier period. He knew, moreover, that the schedules of the opera houses 41R
112 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 of the period would allow him a certain amount of free time to indulge his love
2 of composition. All this helps explain why, at the end of his brief period in
3 Olmütz, Mahler made a concerted effort to find a better and, above all, a long-
4 term position in a larger house. Nor was it long before fortune smiled on him,
5 a development engineered by his admittedly self-interested agent Gustav Lewy,
6 a man whom Mahler later preferred to airbrush out of his life.
7 And it was the hated town of Olmütz that played a decisive part in this devel-
8 opment, the audience at the aforementioned performance of Méhul’s Joseph
9 including, as it did, one Karl Überhorst, who later became stage manager at the
10 Dresden Court Theatre. As chance would have it, Überhorst was acquainted
1 with Baron Adolph von und zu Gilsa, the intendant of the Theatre Royal in
2 Kassel – as we know from the figure of Botho von Hülsen at the Berlin Court
3 Opera, such posts were the appanage of retired members of the nobility. In
4 May 1883 Lewy heard that Kassel was looking for a second conductor who
5 would also take charge of the chorus: the official title was ‘music and chorus
6 director’. Scarcely had Lewy’s letter of recommendation been received in Kassel
7 when a letter from Überhorst arrived on the intendant’s desk, evidently written
8 at Mahler’s request and warmly recommending the ‘quite outstanding young
9 conductor’, whom he had had the good fortune to observe at work in Olmütz
20 where ‘through energy and circumspection’ he had been able to ‘weld his rather
1 weak forces into an harmonious whole’.4 Gilsa was so impressed by this praise
2 from the pen of a qualified commentator that during the last week of May
3 he invited Mahler to conduct a number of performances in Kassel on a trial
4 basis. Mahler was in Vienna, where he had taken a few choral rehearsals at the
5 Carltheater during an Italian season of operas, but was once again leading a
6 relatively aimless existence in the city – the last time he was to do so. He seized
7 the chance with his typical purposefulness and resolve. In his reply to the letter
8 from Kassel asking him to reflect on the matter, he did not hesitate to manipu-
9 late dates, another feature typical of an artist so often described as unworldly.
30 When he wrote to Kassel in May 1883, he was twenty-two and therefore in his
1 twenty-third year, but he brazenly announced that he was in his twenty-fifth
2 year – by contemporary criteria, and even by today’s standards, he was still rela-
3 tively young for the Kassel appointment. It is a little surprising that he was not
4 worried that his papers would expose his mendacity if he were appointed, but
5 he was evidently not concerned about this and, indeed, his act of deception
6 went unnoticed. By the end of May he was in Kassel, the trial performances
7 passed off creditably and he was offered a three-year contract running from 1
8 October 1883 to the end of September 1886, although, in the event, circum-
9 stances dictated that he remained in Kassel for only two seasons. His annual
40 salary was 2,100 marks, a princely sum for the period. It was also his first
41R regular income.
In July he and Heinrich Krzyzanowski undertook a walking tour from Eger 1

to the Fichtel Mountains, whither he was drawn in particular by the prospect 2
of visiting Wunsiedel, the birthplace of one of his favourite writers, Jean Paul. 3
He also spent a few days in Iglau, where he found his elderly parents in poor 4
health – ‘poor and gloomy’, he told Löhr: it was impossible, he went on, to show 5
them any love or affection. Prior to this, however, he had been deeply shaken 6
by an experience of a wholly different order, for he had been in Bayreuth, where 7
he had attended a performance of Parsifal that had affected every fibre of his 8
being. Wagner’s self-styled ‘farewell to the world’ had received its world 9
première only twelve months earlier in sets by Max and Gotthold Brückner 10
based in part on designs by Paul von Joukowsky, with the Munich Court Opera 1
Orchestra under the direction of its principal conductor, Hermann Levi. (The 2
painfully strained relationship between the Wagners and Levi, who was the 3
son of a rabbi from Gießen, is a particularly embarrassing chapter in the story 4
of German culture.) Overseen by Cosima, the production was the work of 5
Wagner himself, a stage director avant la lettre. Six months after Wagner’s 6
death, the production was revived by Emil Scaria, who shared the role of 7
Gurnemanz in these performances. As in 1883, the conducting duties were 8
divided between Levi and the less experienced Franz Fischer. (Mahler does not 9
say which conductor he heard.) And in the principal roles Mahler was able to 20
hear some of the finest Wagnerian voices of the age. Above all, however, the 1
Wagners’ exclusivity clause meant that he could hear Parsifal only in Bayreuth 2
in a performance so intense that he was rendered speechless by it. In a letter to 3
Löhr, he describes a feeling of rapt enchantment in barely articulate terms: 4
‘When I emerged from the Festival Theatre, incapable of uttering a word, I 5
knew I had come to understand all that is greatest and most painful in the 6
world and that I would have to bear it within me, inviolate, for the whole of the 7
rest of my life.’5 A few days later he gave his final concert in Iglau, performing 8
Beethoven’s ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata and other works with the violinist Mila Ott von 9
Ottenfeld – never again was he to appear in public in the town. He arrived in 30
Kassel on 21 August, giving himself ample time to prepare for his first perform- 1
ance on 19 September. A new era was beginning: Mahler was just twenty-three. 2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3 7
4
5
6
7 Presentiment and a New
8
9
Departure: Kassel
10 (1883–5)
1
2
3
4 OR THE FIRST time Mahler was now able to work continuously in a theatre
5
6
F over a period of years rather than just for months or even weeks; for the
first time, too, he was employed by a theatre in which his talents and ambition
7 could be given free rein, and for the first time he at last had a passionate affair
8 with a woman. This love affair fired his imagination as a composer, and he
9 wrote his Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, the earliest of his works to have
20 remained in the repertory. When Mahler arrived in Kassel, he had just turned
1 twenty-three. His period of employment ended a day before his twenty-fifth
2 birthday.1
3 Mahler’s first address in Kassel – furnished, as usual – was a second-floor
4 apartment at 17 Mittlere Carlstraße, where his landlord was a master tailor by
5 the name of Adolf Frank. During his second season he lived at 22 Frankfurter
6 Straße in a property owned by a piano teacher, Caroline Liese. And from
7 November 1884 he stayed with a Frau Lauckhardt at 13 Wolfsschlucht, an
8 address that must have had a particular resonance for a lover of Weber’s Der
9 Freischütz, quite apart from the fact that Weber’s works and especially his
30 descendants were soon to enter Mahler’s life in not entirely positive ways. At
1 the time of Mahler’s arrival, Kassel numbered some 62,000 inhabitants. It had
2 long been the residence of the landgraves and, later, the electors of Hesse,
3 becoming the capital of the new province of Hesse-Nassau following the
4 province’s secession to Prussia in 1866. (Even today, the city’s most important
5 buildings date from these two periods in its history, an era that came to an end
6 in 1918.) Kassel was also a centre of industry with particular emphasis on
7 the production of railway engines, carriages and textiles. The art gallery in the
8 Museum Fridericianum enjoyed a European reputation, as did the regional
9 library, which was likewise housed in the Fridericianum at this date in its
40 history. It was here, after all, that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm had worked as
41R librarians in the early years of the century, Mahler himself following in their
PRESENTIMENT AND A NEW DEPARTURE: KASSEL 115
footsteps with Das klagende Lied. The Carlsaue along the Fulda was a recre- 1
ational area of great natural beauty. 2
The theatre and music had always played an important role in Kassel, the 3
local orchestra in particular being able to look back on a five-hundred-year 4
tradition. Heinrich Schütz had been trained as a boy chorister in the town 5
and had also been active as an organist and assistant conductor – Mahler’s 6
position – before leaving for Dresden in 1615. Beethoven would have become 7
Court Kapellmeister there in 1809, if the Viennese aristocrats had not 8
persuaded him to stay with a better offer. The Kassel Court Theatre had 9
seating for over a thousand, was well equipped in terms of its stage machinery 10
and enjoyed a particular upturn in its fortunes between 1822 and 1857, when 1
Louis Spohr – not only one of the leading conductors of his day but also active 2
as a composer working in the German Romantic tradition – left his mark on 3
the town’s musical life as Kapellmeister, an appointment that he owed to none 4
other than Weber. In Mahler’s day the principal conductor at the Kassel 5
Theatre was Wilhelm Treiber, who was soon to become his bitter enemy. 6
Following Kassel’s promotion to the status of a Prussian provincial capital, the 7
theatre had been renamed the Königliche Schauspiele, a title it shared with the 8
theatres in Wiesbaden and Hanover. As such, it staged both opera and spoken 9
drama. Its intendant was nominally subordinate to Botho von Hülsen, the 20
general administrator in Berlin, but in practice he had a largely free hand. For 1
the past eight years he had been the aforementioned Baron Adolph von und zu 2
Gilsa, a retired army major and the first real intendant that Mahler encoun- 3
tered in the course of his work in the theatre. Although his appointment ended 4
prematurely and was beset by numerous disagreements, Mahler retained fond 5
memories of his superior, who was not particularly popular with his company 6
but feared and respected rather than hated. Not unexpectedly, he ran his 7
company with military precision, but it is significant that his bohemian assis- 8
tant conductor learnt to respect an attitude which, however much it may have 9
rubbed him up the wrong way, was none the less based on a motto to which he 30
could relate: ‘Subordination of individual interests to the interests of the 1
whole.’ When Mahler was later obliged to run an equally tight ship in Vienna, 2
he will have recalled his superior in Kassel. The strictness that Gilsa evinced 3
emerges from a surviving punishment book that records how Mahler was 4
reprimanded for causing a number of ladies in the chorus to burst into peals 5
of laughter. What would now be regarded as an important part of a good 6
working relationship was grounds for rebuke in Mahler’s day. It seems that in 7
Kassel the sort of loose morals that have always been regarded as a part of 8
theatre life flourished only under the most adverse conditions. For example, 9
male conductors and répétiteurs were forbidden to hold solo rehearsals with 40
female members of the company – there had to be at least three people present 41R
116 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 in the room. Mahler’s courtship of the women in his life (all singers apart from
2 Marion von Weber and Alma Schindler) was subjected to tiresome restric-
3 tions, at least in Kassel.
4 By today’s standards, the Kassel Theatre’s repertory was almost unimagin-
5 ably wide-ranging: during the two seasons that Mahler spent in the town,
6 there were fifty-eight different operas, including local premières, new produc-
7 tions and revivals, and a similar number of plays, most of which were ‘classics’
8 by Shakespeare, Goethe and Schiller, although Kleist, Hebbel, Lessing and
9 Raimund were also represented, while the operatic repertory consisted in the
10 main of German works by Gluck, Weber, Marschner, Nicolai, Lortzing,
1 Wagner and, of course, Mozart, whose Italian operas were given in German in
2 keeping with contemporary practice. The French repertory was represented by
3 grand opera, especially Meyerbeer, a genre by no means dead in spite of
4 Wagner’s polemics against it. And there were also a handful of Italian works by
5 Rossini and other bel canto composers as well as some Verdi. As music
6 director and chorus master, Mahler was subordinate to both Treiber and the
7 senior stage manager, a situation that soon led to problems. Mahler’s surviving
8 conditions of service would be enough to instil a sense of sheer terror in
9 anyone holding such a position today, for the assistant conductor’s duties defy
20 belief: not only did he have to conduct everything left after the principal
1 conductor had taken his pick, he also had to engage any additional performers
2 needed at the performances that he himself conducted; adapt large-scale works
3 to the resources of the local company, which meant arranging the existing
4 parts for forty-seven permanent orchestral musicians and a chorus of thirty-
5 eight; rehearse and conduct the overtures and entr’acte music in plays, a task
6 that Mahler particularly hated; rehearse the chorus for at least an hour a day;
7 take music calls; and write and conduct music for particular occasions – one
8 such task was incidental music for Der Trompeter von Säkkingen, a stage adap-
9 tation of Joseph Victor von Scheffel’s tremendously popular epic ‘in seven
30 scenes’. The result was a combination of duties which in a house of comparable
1 size would now be divided up among at least four different people: the first
2 Kapellmeister (Mahler’s colleague, Wilhelm Treiber, would now be general
3 music director or at least principal conductor), the assistant conductor, the
4 chorus master and the head of the music staff. It is clear from surviving
5 records that during his two seasons in Kassel Mahler conducted 160 opera
6 performances and superintended the incidental music at one hundred
7 performances of plays, making a total of 260 performances, a figure that is
8 scarcely conceivable, especially when we recall that the seasons were then
9 shorter than today.
40 Mahler also had to conduct an enormously wide-ranging repertory, but it
41R was here that he prepared the ground for his later ability to work at far larger
houses, from the Vienna Court Opera to the Metropolitan Opera in New York, 1
and to do so, moreover, with sovereign authority. The highlights of the reper- 2
tory were inevitably the preserve of the first Kapellmeister, but Mahler was 3
still able to take charge of Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable – the opera with which 4
he made his Kassel debut on 19 September 1883 – and Verdi’s Un ballo in 5
maschera. Although neither of these composers was a favourite of Mahler’s, 6
they still ranked higher in his eyes than Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia, 7
Donizetti’s La Fille du régiment and Lortzing’s Der Waffenschmied, works that 8
he was simply unable to take seriously, so rigorous were his artistic standards. 9
All this meant something of a step backwards when compared with Olmütz, 10
where he had effectively been principal conductor but where the repertory 1
had been far more limited in scope. His burning sense of ambition and his – 2
undoubtedly justified – conviction that he was a better conductor than 3
his superior, Wilhelm Treiber, led sooner than expected to conflicts that ulti- 4
mately contributed to his premature departure from his post in Kassel, a devel- 5
opment in which complications of a more private nature also played a part. 6
Kassel’s music lovers soon realized or at least suspected that their 7
new conductor was a man of no ordinary talent. The reviews of his early 8
performances – for a time his name was misspelt as ‘Maler’ – were very good 9
and in some cases positively euphoric. Curiously enough, he was described, 20
among other things, as ‘extremely experienced’, which, given his previous 1
experience, was something of an exaggeration, but the assessment does at least 2
show the extent to which ardour, enthusiasm and tremendous talent can make 3
up for a lack of experience. Equally curious and from a future standpoint more 4
significant are the critical comments that were made at this time and that were 5
to accompany the whole of Mahler’s career as a conductor, later acquiring 6
anti-Semitic associations: he was accused of a nervous style of conducting and 7
rebuked for his extreme tempi and for unusual and surprising crescendos 8
and sforzatos. Indeed, he was even censured by his intendant for stamping his 9
feet during performances. Mahler’s lifelong ability to spur on his players and 30
singers with élan, enthusiasm and unassailable authority until they achieved 1
standards of which they had scarcely thought themselves capable – with the 2
drawback that he was resisted and even hated by those musicians who 3
preferred a life of philistine lethargy – had been apparent from the very begin- 4
ning but it was in Kassel that it first found such clear expression. We must 5
never lose sight of the fact that even if Mahler had never written a note of 6
music he would still have been ranked alongside Bülow and Nikisch as one of 7
the most brilliant conductors of his age. 8
Problems with Wilhelm Treiber were not slow to emerge. On the very day 9
that Mahler faced the orchestra for the first time in Kassel, we already find him 40
writing to his closest friend at this time, Friedrich Löhr, complaining that his 41R
118 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 superior was ‘the cheerfullest four-square time-beater ever to have come my

2 way’, by which he meant a conductor who, lacking in inspiration and imagina-
3 tion, was content to keep the orchestra more or less together by means of
4 economical, unvarying gestures.2 Mahler must have reached this snap judge-
5 ment very quickly as he can have had few opportunities to observe Treiber at
6 work, the season having only just started. The fact that he was already tending
7 to overestimate his own merits and sometimes even overstepping the mark
8 and expressing hurtful and hateful sentiments is clear from another letter
9 written during these early weeks in Kassel, this time to his agent in Vienna. It
10 is with a certain insolence, not to say outright mendaciousness, that he begins
1 by claiming that administration, audience and critics already rate him more
2 highly than Treiber, before going on to adopt an even more arrogant tone:
3 ‘Admittedly, Herr Treiber’s contract cannot be overturned out of hand, so he
4 naturally has more to conduct than I do. But it is not entirely impossible that
5 something unpleasant might befall the above-mentioned gentleman. I prefer
6 not to express myself more clearly.’3 This is a new aspect of Mahler’s person-
7 ality, but it is clear from this example that whenever it was a question of
8 pursuing artistic and even personal goals, Mahler could show a surprising
9 sense of purpose and that he had no hesitation in elbowing rivals out of the
20 way with positively brutal force. This particular passage reveals something
1 amounting to an annihilation fantasy and certainly a lively imagination in rela-
2 tion to his advancement in Kassel, an imagination unsupported by any authen-
3 ticated fact. There are no surviving reviews praising Mahler at the expense of
4 Treiber or demanding that Treiber be replaced by his assistant. Still less did
5 Gilsa or Hülsen think for a moment of dismissing the tried and tested and
6 popular Treiber and appointing in his place a twenty-three-year-old nobody
7 who had been in his post for only four weeks.
8 That Mahler spent these weeks and months in Kassel in a state of agitation,
9 not to say mild hysteria, is clear not only from his letters to Löhr, with their
30 complaints about his life among pygmies, by which he meant not just his exces-
1 sive workload but also and above all the lack of any intellectual and personal
2 exchange with like-minded individuals, but also from the intense passion that
3 he felt for Johanna Richter and that drove him to unprecedented extremes of
4 effusiveness. Above all, however, it emerges from a remarkable incident with
5 Hans von Bülow that took place at this time. Bülow arrived in Kassel with his
6 Meiningen Orchestra at the end of January 1884, preceded by an exceptional
7 reputation on at least three different fronts. Not only was he one of the most
8 accomplished and technically brilliant pianists of his day and, as such, the dedi-
9 catee of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1 in B flat minor, a work notorious
40 for its horrendous technical difficulties that Bülow had unveiled in Boston in
41R October 1875, but he was also the most impressive conductor of his day, having
initially championed the works of Wagner by conducting the world premières 1

of Tristan und Isolde and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in Munich in the 2
1860s, only to become an early advocate of Brahms when Wagner showed his 3
gratitude by appropriating Bülow’s wife, Cosima, née Liszt-d’Agoult. Thirdly, he 4
was widely regarded as one of the most malicious and acerbic men of his age, a 5
point evidenced by his surviving writings and letters. Bülow gave two concerts 6
in Kassel with the Meiningen Orchestra, whose later conductors were to 7
include Richard Strauss and Max Reger. The first was an all-Beethoven concert, 8
while the second comprised works by Beethoven, Brahms and the locally 9
revered Louis Spohr. In the wake of the first concert Mahler wrote a letter to 10
Bülow that was to have dramatic repercussions. He had attempted to see Bülow 1
at his hotel but had been turned away, and so he immediately wrote an 2
exuberant letter, beginning with the admission: 3
4
I am a musician who is wandering without a guiding light in the dreary night 5
of present-day musical life, and who is prey to all the dangers of doubt and 6
confusion. At the concert yesterday, when I beheld the fulfilment of my 7
utmost intimations and hopes of beauty, it became clear to me that I had 8
found my spiritual home and my master, and that my wanderings would 9
come to an end now or never. And now I am here to beg you to take me along 20
in any capacity you like – let me become your pupil, even if I had to pay my 1
tuition fees with my blood.4 2
3
The letter ends with a brief note on Mahler’s career to date and with the sigh: 4
‘At least send me a reply!’ 5
We do not know exactly what Bülow made of this letter, although we can 6
infer what he thought about it from his reaction to it, a reaction that made it 7
clear that Mahler had poured out his enthusiasm and effusiveness to the wrong 8
person. A cynic and a sceptic like Bülow, who in spite of his successes as an 9
artist had been bruised and disillusioned by life, was incapable of seeing this 30
remarkable fantasist’s letter in the right light and unable to understand the 1
predicament and the ardour that lay behind it. He could react only by shaking 2
his head in disbelief and by embarking on two courses of action that must 3
have had a profoundly dispiriting effect on Mahler. First, Bülow handed the 4
letter to Wilhelm Treiber and, second, he replied to Mahler a few days later, on 5
his return to Meiningen, a letter whose coldness was no doubt intentionally 6
wounding: ‘Dear Sir, it is possible that your wish might come true in eighteen 7
months’ time, assuming that I receive sufficient evidence of your abilities both 8
as a pianist and as an orchestral and choral conductor in order to be able to 9
recommend you. I am, however, unable to offer you an opportunity to provide 40
this evidence.’5 Although we have no direct testimony to his reactions, Mahler 41R
120 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 must have been deeply upset by all this. Be that as it may, it was not until
2 several years later, in Hamburg, that there was any kind of artistic rapproche-
3 ment between the two men, Bülow finally having learnt to appreciate the sort
4 of person he was dealing with. Conversely, it is all too easy to imagine what
5 Mahler’s fan letter must have meant in the hands of his arch-enemy, Wilhelm
6 Treiber, who could never have served as Mahler’s ‘guiding light’, and who
7 with some justification must have seen himself as the butt of his assistant’s
8 comments on the ‘dreary night of present-day musical life’. He duly forwarded
9 the letter to his intendant, no doubt in the hope of making life more difficult
10 for his young rival. But Gilsa merely filed it away without comment, an action
1 that helps to explain Mahler’s continuing respect for the dry old civil servant.
2 Another episode that was to have far-reaching consequences for Mahler’s
3 life and work was his affair with the singer Johanna Richter. Initially there
4 seem to have been two options of an erotic nature that presented themselves to
5 the assistant conductor, whose appointment coincided with that of two young
6 sopranos, Virginia Naumann-Gungl and Johanna Richter herself. There is
7 some evidence that Mahler’s feelings were first fired by Naumann-Gungl, but
8 she was already married and the mother of two children and, indeed, consid-
9 erably older than Mahler. In short, she was less attainable. With Johanna
20 Richter, by contrast, the situation was very different. Although we know little
1 about her and have no idea what she looked like, making it impossible to say
2 whether there is any truth to the claim that she was a noted beauty, it seems
3 likely that she was indeed physically attractive as Mahler’s susceptibility to
4 female beauty is clear from pictures of the young Alma Mahler and of all the
5 other women with whom he was in any way associated. Anna von Mildenburg
6 is the only woman in his life who cannot be said to have been conventionally
7 beautiful: in her case the critical factor was, rather, the power of a woman who
8 can only be described as demonic. Johanna seems to have been more or less
9 the same age as Mahler and was a coloratura soprano who excelled in parts
30 such as Mozart’s Konstanze and the Queen of the Night but whose repertory
1 also included Leonora in Il trovatore and even Wagner’s Venus. She was a
2 popular favourite with Kassel audiences and also with local critics. It appears
3 that there were initial misgivings about her vocal technique, but these were
4 quickly silenced, and we may assume that Mahler worked closely with her: it
5 was no doubt at this period in his career that he developed his partial under-
6 standing of vocal technique and of voices in general, an understanding
7 that can be observed on repeated occasions in the course of his later career.
8 Johanna Richter’s subsequent career was far from insignificant. She left
9 Kassel a year after Mahler and sang first in Rotterdam and then in Cologne,
40 where she remained a member of the local ensemble for a period of many
41R years, subsequently appearing in smaller houses and ending her professional
career in around 1905, while remaining active as a teacher. She died in Danzig 1
in 1944. 2
It is clear from his letters to Löhr that Mahler fell in love with Johanna 3
Richter as soon as he arrived in Kassel, leading to a period of the most turbu- 4
lent emotional upheaval. It was the first genuinely intense experience of love 5
that he had known and at the same time a liaison that brought him more pain 6
than pleasure, a point that emerges not from any direct evidence, for the only 7
surviving letter from Johanna Richter to Mahler is decidedly non-committal, 8
but from Mahler’s letters to Löhr, among others, in which he reports on the 9
highs and, more frequently, the lows of his liaison. It transpires from these 10
letters that Mahler was exposed to a veritable whirlwind of emotions in which 1
fear prevailed over hope. His own surviving account of the relationship gives 2
the impression of a via dolorosa, a time of a ‘continuous and altogether intol- 3
erable struggle’.6 On his return to Kassel following the summer break of 1884, 4
he told Löhr that he was once again ‘in thrall to the terrible old spell’.7 Johanna 5
Richter seems to have expended all the wiles of feminine coquettishness on 6
Mahler, leaving the completely inexperienced assistant conductor utterly help- 7
less, an observation that implies no moral judgement, as the ability to recon- 8
cile the career of a singer with an affair involved a difficult balancing act, given 9
the unsettled life led by such singers and the risk of an unwanted pregnancy 20
that might put an end to that career. The course of Mahler’s relationship with 1
Johanna Richter may be illustrated by a passage from a letter that he wrote to 2
Löhr on 1 January 1885. He had spent New Year’s Eve with the soprano: 3
4
I spent yesterday evening alone with her, both of us silently awaiting the 5
arrival of the new year. Her thoughts did not linger over the present, and 6
when the clock struck midnight and tears gushed from her eyes, I felt terrible 7
that I, I was not allowed to dry them. She went into the adjacent room and 8
stood for a moment in silence at the window, and when she returned, silently 9
weeping, a sense of inexpressible anguish had arisen between us like an ever- 30
lasting partition wall, and there was nothing I could do but press her hand 1
and leave. As I came outside, the bells were ringing and the solemn chorale 2
could be heard from the tower. 3
4
As so often with the young Mahler, his effusive style has a literary ring to it, in this 5
case an obvious allusion to a passage from Tannhäuser’s Rome Narration: ‘The 6
new day dawned; the bells were ringing – celestial songs came floating down.’ 7
Appropriately enough, Mahler concludes his description with a clear reminis- 8
cence of Heine: ‘Ah, dear Fritz – it was all just as if the great director of the 9
universe had intended it all to be artistically apt. I spent the whole night crying in 40
my dreams.’8 But such effusions did nothing to move the relationship forward, 41R
122 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 and Mahler was left to traverse his vale of tears alone: ‘I am torn apart, my heart
2 is bleeding, all is lost’ – these are the phrases that keep on recurring.
3 Mahler addressed several poems to Johanna Richter, the final line of the first
4 of them already containing a reference to a ‘solitary wayfarer’9 and illustrating
5 the link with the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Mahler composed this set of
6 four songs, probably in December 1884, and dedicated them, at least tacitly,
7 to Johanna Richter. There were originally six poems, all of them written by
8 Mahler himself, but he set only four of them. The two that were not set to
9 music include the following, a poem that offers arguably the most striking
10 illustration of the composer’s inner vacillation between the cynicism of Jean
1 Paul’s Schoppe in Titan and the openness of the twin brothers Walt and Vult in
2 his Flegeljahre, while also including allusions to some of Wilhelm Müller’s
3 poems that Schubert set to music in Winterreise:
4
5 Die Nacht bricht mild aus stummen ewigen Fernen
6 Mit ihren tausend goldenen Augen nieder,
7 Und müde Menschen schließen ihre Lider
8 Im Schlaf, auf ’s neu vergessnes Glück zu lernen.
9
20 Siehst du den stummen fahrenden Gesellen?
1 Gar einsam und verloren ist sein Pfad,
2 Wohl Weg und Weiser der verloren hat
3 Und ach, kein Stern will seinen Pfad erhellen.
4
5 Der Weg ist lang und Gottes Engel weit
6 Und falsche Stimmen tönen lockend, leise –
7 Ach, wann soll enden meine Reise,
8 Wann ruht der Wanderer von des Weges Leid?
9
30 Es starrt die Sphynx und droht mit Rätselqualen
1 Und ihre grauen Augen schweigen – schweigen.
2 Kein rettend Wort, kein Lichtstrahl will sich zeigen –
3 Und lös’ ich’s nicht – muß es mein Leben zahlen.10
4
5 [With her thousand golden eyes, night falls gently from mute, eternal
6 distances, and weary men and women close their lids in sleep to learn lost
7 happiness anew. Do you see the silent wayfarer? All lonely and forsaken is his
8 path, his way and signpost he has doubtless lost and, ah!, no star will light his
9 path. The way is long, God’s angels far away, and siren voices call enticingly
40 and softly – ah, when will my journey end, when will the traveller rest from
41R his journey’s anguished sufferings? The sphinx stares blankly and threatens
riddling torments, her grey eyes silent – silent. No saving word, no ray of light 1
appears – if I fail to solve them, it will cost me my life.] 2
3
This painful relationship lasted until Mahler left Kassel and seems never to 4
have transgressed the bounds of formal, polite behaviour, for all that Mahler 5
would have liked it to have done so. In the only surviving letter that Johanna 6
wrote to Mahler after he had already left for Prague, she addresses him as her 7
‘dear good friend’ and uses the respect for pronoun ‘Sie’. Mahler spent his final 8
hours in Kessel with Johanna in June 1885, but neither party was capable of 9
finding a way out of the hopeless crisis of their unrequited love. 10
There is little more to be said about Kassel. Mahler’s first summer break 1
from the town, in 1884, was spent partly in Iglau and partly with Friedrich 2
Löhr in Perchtoldsdorf. He returned to Kassel in late August, breaking his 3
journey in Dresden, where he attended two performances at the Court Opera 4
and was introduced to the company’s principal conductor, Ernst von Schuch, 5
who went on to champion the operas of Richard Strauss. Mahler admired 6
Schuch’s technical virtuosity on the podium but did not know where to begin 7
to make sense of his interpretations. In January 1885 the Kassel newspapers 8
reported a sensational event in the world of the theatre: the young assistant 9
conductor had a new contract in his pocket, having successfully applied for a 20
vacant position at the Leipzig Stadttheater, albeit not until his Kassel contract 1
had expired, which in the normal course of things would not have been until 2
the end of the 1886/7 season. As it turned out, things did not run their normal 3
course, for Mahler was progressively worn down by the torments associated 4
with his relations with Johanna Richter and by his confrontations with Treiber. 5
In the spring of 1885 he asked for his contract to be prematurely terminated, a 6
request that was eventually granted. His dismissal had to be approved by the 7
central office in Berlin, and Gilsa, evidently perceptive and sympathetic to 8
Mahler’s situation, wrote a series of tactical letters to the capital expressing 9
criticism of his assistant conductor. An interim solution had to be found 30
for the months during which Mahler was otherwise unoccupied between 1
Kassel and Leipzig, and in this he was helped by Angelo Neumann, Wagner’s 2
erstwhile comrade-in-arms, who was now director of the German Theatre in 3
Prague. Having heard good things about the musical firebrand in Kassel, he 4
signed a contract with Mahler in early April, an engagement formally 5
announced in the newspapers two months later. But there was another major 6
event in Mahler’s life before he left the town. 7
For some time he had – with his intendant’s permission – taken on the addi- 8
tional post of chorus master in the nearby town of Münden, where a series of 9
successful concerts, coupled with his work as chorus master at the theatre, had 40
led to an invitation to conduct a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony 41R
124 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 at the opening concert of a Grand Music Festival to be held in Kassel on and

2 around 1 July 1885. Gilsa had already agreed that the theatre orchestra would
3 take part, a decision that inevitably left the town’s principal conductor, Wilhelm
4 Treiber, feeling snubbed. Treiber mobilized all his resources against Mahler,
5 including a regular campaign against him in the local papers. Particularly
6 remarkable is the fact that for the first time in his life, but by no means the last,
7 Mahler found himself the butt of anti-Semitic barbs – we shall return to them
8 in the context of our later examination of the whole complex of Jewishness and
9 anti-Semitism. The entire episode caused quite a stir. Gilsa did not want to lose
10 Treiber, especially at a time when Mahler was already on the point of leaving
1 Kassel, and so he saw himself obliged to side with Treiber and, in spite of his
2 sympathy for Mahler, to stop the orchestra from appearing. A scratch band was
3 hastily assembled, and the Grand Music Festival began not with Beethoven but
4 with Mendelssohn’s oratorio Saint Paul, a performance that proved a triumph
5 for all concerned, Mahler being praised in particular for his ‘all-encompassing
6 energy’. The soloists were all of the first order, including, as they did, Rosa
7 Papier-Paumgartner, Mahler’s friend from his days in Vienna.
8 Mahler returned to Münden to work with his choir on 5 July, his last day in
9 Kassel, and wrote afterwards to Löhr: ‘So far as I am concerned everything has
20 turned out extremely well up to now. Honours & love have been simply show-
1 ered upon me.’11 The next day he returned to Iglau to spend some time with
2 his family and to recover from recent upheavals, although he was unable to
3 stay long in the town as his engagement in Prague was due to begin on 1
4 August. It had been a time of great agitation for Mahler, a time when he had
5 suffered a great deal but also learnt a lot. He had also completed his Lieder
6 eines fahrenden Gesellen, his first work after the great exertions of Das klagende
7 Lied and the major disappointments that had followed.
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
8 3
4
5
6
The Avid Reader: Mahler 7
8
and Literature 9
10
1
2
3
the ‘coachman scholar’ Bernhard Mahler enjoyed books as 4
T HE SON OF
others enjoy food: ‘I am “devouring” an increasing number of books!
They are, after all, the only friends that I keep by me! And what friends!
5
6
Heavens, if I had no books! I forget everything round about me whenever a 7
voice from “one of us” reaches me! They become ever more familiar and more 8
of a consolation to me, my real brothers and fathers and lovers.’1 Thus Mahler 9
ends one of his letters to Friedrich Löhr, probably written in Hamburg during 20
the winter of 1894/5. In using the phrase ‘one of us’ – in German, ‘unsere Leut’ 1
– Mahler was parodying an expression regularly used by German and Austrian 2
Jews to describe other Jews. From our earliest account of the young boy with- 3
drawing to the ridge of his parents’ roof, where he sat, totally engrossed in his 4
reading, to the fatally ill Mahler capable of holding in his enfeebled hands only 5
odd sections torn from Eduard von Hartmann’s The Problem of Life, we have 6
the picture of a man fired by a passionate love of books and reading. It was a 7
passion greater than that normally found in nineteenth- and early twentieth- 8
century composers and even in conductors of the period. There are few who 9
can be compared with him in this respect: among composers, there were 30
Schumann, Berlioz, Wagner and, above all, Busoni, a contemporary and a 1
colleague with whom he was friendly, while among conductors, there was 2
only Hans von Bülow. Unlike his colleagues, however, Mahler did not express 3
himself in literary terms, except in his letters, unless it was a question of 4
preparing a text to set to music, as was the case with his Lieder eines fahrenden 5
Gesellen, or when he wrote poems to express his extreme emotional tension, 6
poems generally addressed to the women he loved. All who knew him attested 7
to his passion for reading. Especially at times of storm and stress in his life, 8
Mahler’s letters are filled with requests to his friends to send him books, either 9
as gifts or as a loan, for they were expensive and even beyond the reach of 40
a student. Later he surrounded himself with books wherever he lived and 41R
126 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 worked: an edition of Goethe’s works, or at least the conversations with

2 Eckermann, and a few volumes by Jean Paul were always to hand in his various
3 composing houses or accompanied him on his vacations from Vienna. Books
4 helped him to pass the time on long railway journeys, they were recommended
5 to friends, and friends in turn recommended titles to him, recommendations
6 by which he set great store. His reading was wide-ranging, extending, as it did,
7 from the classics of world literature to rather more recondite works. Apart
8 from occasional glances as far back as the ancient Greeks and, in particular, to
9 Euripides, Shakespeare was the earliest playwright to engage his attention,
10 which was focused in the main on German classical and Romantic writers,
1 notably Goethe but also Hölderlin and E. T. A. Hoffmann. Among the great
2 humorists whose works he enjoyed were Cervantes, Sterne, Jean Paul and
3 Dickens, while Dostoevsky and the Dutch novelist Multatuli were likewise a
4 source of abiding interest. As for more recent literature, Mahler’s reading list
5 was relatively brief, being largely dictated by friendship (Siegfried Lipiner and
6 Gerhart Hauptmann), acquaintanceship (Frank Wedekind) or chance encoun-
7 ters (the Russian novelist Dimitri Merezhkovsky, who wrote a successful novel
8 about Leonardo da Vinci and whose essay championing Dostoevsky at the
9 expense of Tolstoi must have appealed to Mahler). His reading was not limited
20 to belles lettres, however, but also included texts of a more philosophical
1 nature, from Kant, whose works formed part of his reference library, to
2 Frederick August Lange’s History of Materialism and Alfred Edmund Brehm’s
3 Life of Animals, which he is said to have owned in its entirety. His friend
4 Arnold Berliner, who successfully popularized modern science, provided him
5 with information about developments in this field. Unfortunately, Mahler’s
6 library has not survived: when Alma had to flee from Vienna in 1938, his
7 books were left behind to be plundered, destroyed and sold. Although a cata-
8 logue of them was never drawn up, we are none the less well informed about
9 its contents.
30 Mahler’s relationship to literature is best examined from the standpoint of
1 his attitude to the texts that he set to music, in particular his Wunderhorn
2 songs and those based on poems by Friedrich Rückert.2
3 The world of Rübezahl and of the ‘Waldmärchen’ that we find in Mahler’s
4 early plans for an opera and in Das klagende Lied was soon transformed
5 into that of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which left its mark on an entire
6 complex of works in the form of several songs and the first four symphonies.
7 The uncertain date of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen initially led writers
8 to assume that Mahler wrote the words to these songs before he read Des
9 Knaben Wunderhorn, but it was only a matter of time before it was discovered
40 that the first of the four Gesellen songs reveals verbal parallels with two of
41R the Wunderhorn poems, Arnim’s and Brentano’s collection containing two
THE AVID READER: MAHLER AND LITERATURE 127
strophes which, although they do not belong together, are printed one after the 1
other: 2
3
Wann mein Schatz Hochzeit macht, 4
Hab ich einen traurigen Tag: 5
Geh ich in mein Kämmerlein, 6
Wein um meinen Schatz. 7
8
Blümlein blau, verdorre nicht, 9
Du stehst auf grüner Heide; 10
Des Abends, wenn ich schlafen geh, 1
So denk ich an das Lieben.3 2
3
[The day on which my sweetheart marries will be a sad day for me: I shall go 4
into my little room and weep for my sweetheart. Little blue flower, do not 5
fade, you are growing on a green heath; in the evening, when I go to bed, I 6
shall think of love.] 7
8
Mahler turned these lines into the following: 9
20
Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht, 1
fröhliche Hochzeit macht, 2
hab’ ich meinen traurigen Tag! 3
Geh’ ich in mein Kämmerlein, dunkles Kämmerlein! 4
Weine! Wein! Um meinen Schatz, 5
um meinen lieben Schatz! 6
Blümlein blau! Blümlein blau! 7
Verdorre nicht! Verdorre nicht! 8
Vöglein süß! Vöglein süß! 9
Du singst auf grüner Heide! 30
Ach! Wie ist die Welt so schön! 1
Ziküth! Ziküth! 2
Singet nicht! Blühet nicht! 3
Lenz ist ja vorbei! 4
Alles Singen ist nun aus! 5
Des Abends, wenn ich schlafen geh, 6
denk ich an mein Leid’! An mein Leide! 7
8
[The day on which my sweetheart marries, is happily married, will be a sad 9
day for me! I shall go into my little room, my dark little room! Weep! Weep! 40
For my sweetheart, for my dear sweetheart! Little blue flower! Little blue 41R
128 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 flower! Do not fade! Do not fade! Sweet little bird! Sweet little bird! You are
2 singing on the green heath! Ah! How beautiful the world is! Cheep-cheep!
3 Cheep-cheep! Do not sing! Do not bloom! For spring is over! All singing is
4 over and done with! In the evening, when I go to bed, I shall think of my
5 anguish! My anguish!]
6
7 Mahler’s approach to his present source was to be typical of all his later
8 settings, hence its exemplary nature. His ability to assimilate a particular tone
9 or, rather, his ability to give his own tone of voice to what was initially another
10 tone was combined with an essentially unscholarly permissiveness with regard
1 to the texts he set, a freedom ranging from minimal changes, as was the case
2 with the Rückert settings, to free reworkings, most notably in the case of his
3 elaboration of Klopstock’s ‘Resurrection Song’ in his Second Symphony. But all
4 the changes that Mahler made, whether to the Klopstock song or to the later
5 Wunderhorn poems, serve a simple aim, namely, to add to the intensity of the
6 poem’s emotional content. The ‘sad day’ becomes a matter of personal import
7 for the man who has been forsaken, his little room becomes ‘dark’ when the
8 phrase is repeated, and the ‘love’ of the original becomes ‘anguish’ in Mahler’s
9 revisions. The repeated phrases have a largely compositional function, giving
20 the text a greater emphasis, and much the same is true of the numerous excla-
1 mation marks with which Mahler liberally sprinkles these poems. Here, too,
2 however, he remains true to his principle of using contrast for dynamic ends:
3 the musical expression is not redoubled in an attempt to add greater emphasis
4 to the words, as it is so often in the case of Strauss’s lieder. The exclamation
5 marks are not written into the music. Rather, the singer is instructed to remain
6 ‘quiet and sad till the end’, not to underline the exclamation marks by means of
7 vocal emphasis. Such punctuation marks should be felt, but then suppressed:
8 the sob should be swallowed before it can be expressed.
9 It is in the central section of the poem (‘Blümlein blau’) that Mahler departs
30 furthest from his source, for here he needed to enhance the impact of the quiet
1 and plaintive outer sections by means of a kind of scherzo. But the ‘Gently
2 animated’ performance marking of the central section represents no more
3 than a glimmer of life that is all too quickly extinguished. The agony of the
4 poet’s emotional life finds expression in the individual song as it does in the
5 cycle as a whole where grim self-mortification (‘Ich hab ein glühend Messer’)
6 appears alongside a sense of lethargy that longs for death (‘Die zwei blauen
7 Augen von meinem Schatz’).
8 The aspect of Des Knaben Wunderhorn that appealed to Mahler so disarm-
9 ingly and so directly was what might be termed its emotional polyphony.
40 Natalie Bauer-Lechner reports that while he was attending a fair near the
41R Wörthersee during the summer of 1900, Mahler was so taken by the combined
sounds of the shooting galleries and Punch and Judy show, the military band 1
music and the singing of a male-voice choir, that he exclaimed: 2
3
You hear? That’s polyphony, and that’s where I get it from! [. . .] Just in this 4
way – from quite different directions – must the themes appear; and they must 5
be just as different from each other in rhythm and melodic character (every- 6
thing else is merely many-voiced writing, homophony in disguise). The only 7
difference is that the artist orders and unites them all into one concordant 8
and harmonious whole.4 9
10
To Mahler, the world also seemed to resonate with music in the Wunderhorn 1
texts, with their polyphonic interplay of the sublime and the audacious, the 2
bold and the understated, an amalgam of dance, lovelorn lament and dirge. In 3
particular, Mahler was drawn to the figure of the deserter condemned to death, 4
a figure who acquired a special resonance during the Revolutionary Wars of 5
1792–9 and above all during the Napoleonic Wars, repeatedly raising his voice 6
in a moving lament in those of the Wunderhorn songs in which the singer steps 7
into the character’s role. Mahler’s sympathy for humiliated, wounded souls, 8
nurtured by his reading of Dostoevsky, inspired his greatest songs, including 9
‘Revelge’ and ‘Der Tamboursg’sell’, both of them late products of his enthu- 20
siasm for Arnim and Brentano’s collection of poems. The deserter is a figure 1
who was to preoccupy him from the time of his early song, ‘Zu Straßburg auf 2
der Schanz’. The fear of the soldier who, driven by homesickness and love to 3
neglect his duties, has been condemned to death and who now awaits the 4
firing squad, is grounded in the dull and unconsoling sounds of a march in 5
which battlefield and place of execution eerily overlap. Mahler gave musical 6
expression to the anguish of those who are bereft of speech, features that were 7
later to be stressed by Berg in the principal male character of his opera 8
Wozzeck which, Mahlerian in spirit, represents an intensification of Büchner’s 9
original. Adorno has convincingly demonstrated the way in which on the level 30
of the work’s musical design this characteristic reflects a plebeian element that 1
rebels against the bourgeois musical tradition: ‘Desperately it [Mahler’s music] 2
draws to itself what culture has spurned, as wretched, injured, and mutilated 3
as culture hands it over. The art-work, chained to culture, seeks to burst the 4
chain and show compassion for the derelict residue; in Mahler each measure 5
is an opening of arms.’5 6
When Mahler wrote his Kindertotenlieder and his five other Rückert songs 7
between 1901 and 1904, his elder daughter was still healthy and happy. We do 8
not know whether he later discovered that Rückert’s own children, Ernst and 9
Luise, died from the same illness or at least from one similar to that from which 40
Maria died in 1907. That a father who was also a poet might pen a poem to 41R
130 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 mark such an event is entirely to be expected, but for him to write several
2 such poems a day over a period of six months until he had finally completed
3 almost five hundred is almost certainly unique in world literature. Unlike the
4 earthy Wunderhorn texts, Rückert’s poems seem at first sight to have all the
5 faded charm of pressed flowers, but it was this that attracted Mahler at a
6 time when his symphonies – the Fifth and the Sixth – were characterized by
7 immense contrasts and vast resources. By 1900 Rückert’s poetry had been
8 largely forgotten by readers and composers, their author seen as a sterile and
9 unduly didactic orientalist by the champions of Naturalism and Symbolism,
10 Jugendstil and Décadence. Mahler’s interest in him reflects the composer’s total
1 independence in his poetical tastes and in the texts he chose to set to music.
2 Like the Kindertotenlieder, the five other Rückert settings that are nowa-
3 days normally taken together as the Rückert Lieder are notable for their
4 reduced orchestration, their chamber-like transparency looking forward to the
5 composer’s later period, the wild march rhythms and droll humour of the
6 Wunderhorn songs giving way to a greater sophistication and sensitivity.
7 Webern made a note of his conversations with Mahler during their first
8 encounter in February 1905, including the following remarkable comment on
9 Rückert: ‘After Des Knaben Wunderhorn I could not compose anything but
20 Rückert – this is lyric poetry from the source, all else is lyric poetry of a deriv-
1 ative sort.’6 This is a surprising remark when we recall that at this period
2 Rückert was generally suspected of writing derivative verse, quite apart from
3 the fact that there is no evidence that Mahler took any interest in the poetry
4 that was being written around 1900 by Hofmannsthal, George and others,
5 and that nowhere does he mention the names of Baudelaire, Rimbaud and
6 Verlaine. In short, his literary judgements were based on a very small body
7 of evidence. Rather, his affinity with Rückert attests to an understanding of
8 language in general and of poetry in particular similar to that found in the
9 case of Karl Kraus and Rudolf Borchardt. Kraus saw in poetry the most direct
30 linguistic expression of a spiritual message, be it felt or thought, seen or
1 reflected. There was no sense of coquettishness in Kraus’s own description of
2 himself as derivative in his poem ‘Bekenntnis’: ‘I am merely one of those
3 epigones dwelling in the ancient house of language.’7 For him, the ancient word
4 could seem new-born if it came close enough to the source of language, the
5 ‘well-spring’ around which his own poetry constantly revolved. For his part,
6 Borchardt brought out an anthology titled Everlasting Storehouse of German
7 Poetry, the afterword of which singles out Rückert for particular mention: on
8 the one hand, there were long sections of Rückert’s verse that consisted of pure
9 improvisation that failed to scale the literary heights, while on the other he was
40 said to represent a faithful reflection of the German tradition, a tradition
41R imbued with heartfelt beauty, caprice and playfulness, maturity and kindness,
generally illustrating a wondrous world of inner life such as no other nation 1

had created.8 Anyone reading Borchardt’s characterization will find it impos- 2
sible to resist the temptation to turn back a few pages and check that it is not 3
Des Knaben Wunderhorn that he is referring to here, but Rückert. But in the 4
process he helps to make Mahler’s fascination with Rückert more intelligible. 5
The German writer Hans Wollschläger, who was as familiar with Rückert’s 6
writings as he was with Mahler’s music, had the following to say about the 7
Kindertotenlieder: 8
9
Mahler was familiar from his own nature with panic-stricken terror and 10
sensed it in Rückert’s nature, too, allowing it to speak by removing its glib- 1
ness. His music surrounds the text with the surreal timelessness of the death 2
for which the death of a child is merely a metaphor; its linearity moves 3
beyond the period that produced it, and in the final song the sounds of 4
lamentation of all cultures seem to combine together.9 5
6
Herta Blaukopf has called Mahler a ‘relatively conservative reader’, a view 7
with which one can only concur.10 He registered the existence of the literature 8
of his own day only if he was in personal contact with the writer, as he was with 9
Gerhart Hauptmann, and yet even here sympathy for the author was generally 20
followed only by a cursory reading of a sample selection. That he took an 1
interest in the writings of Frank Wedekind is not generally known. He saw a 2
production of Spring Awakening at Max Reinhardt’s Kammerspiele in Berlin in 3
1907 and was introduced to the author who, as he explicitly stressed, struck him 4
as not entirely unsympathetic. One might have thought that he would have 5
been put off by the powerful emphasis on adolescent sexuality that caused 6
Wedekind such problems with the censor, but this was not in fact the case. 7
Mahler was filled with enthusiasm, writing to Alma: ‘You know, I was bowled 8
over! Immensely powerful, talented and full of poetry!’ But he then went on to 9
qualify his remark: ‘What a shame! To think what that man might have made 30
of his career! Just think of the company he keeps: whatever came over him?’11 1
It is not clear if Mahler knew about Wedekind’s subsequent development and 2
whether he was familiar with Pandora’s Box, still less whether he attended the 3
famous world-première production of the piece by Karl Kraus at Vienna’s 4
Trianon Theatre on 29 May 1905 – conceivably Mahler had already left Vienna 5
by this date in order to attend the Tonkünstlerfest in Graz. A seating plan of 6
the second performance on 15 June has survived, showing the names of 7
the members of the audience. Among them were Alban Berg, whose impres- 8
sions of the evening later found expression in his second opera, Lulu, and even 9
a certain ‘Maler’. But by this date Mahler was in Maiernigg for the start of his 40
summer holiday. Although he found both Arthur Schnitzler and Hugo von 41R
132 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Hofmannsthal sympathetic as individuals, his contacts with them were not

2 sufficiently deep to inspire him to immerse himself in their works. When
3 Strauss told Mahler that he was working on a setting of Hofmannsthal’s Elektra,
4 Mahler commented mockingly to Alma about the questionable delights of
5 being ‘modern’.12 He viewed with suspicion the works of Maeterlinck and Oscar
6 Wilde and, indeed, every author whose writings smacked of décadence and the
7 fin de siècle, which he equated with perversion and sexual pathology. He even
8 forbade Alma to read Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray.13 He loathed every form
9 of obscenity and smut, evincing a degree of reserve which, entirely untypical of
10 his age, was offended by the wholesale eroticization and sexualization of culture
1 in the years around 1900; and if he held Strauss’s Salome in such high regard, it
2 was only by being untrue to his fundamental nature, for Wilde’s play had
3 nothing to say to him, his position being comparatively close to that of the
4 Viennese court censor’s office, which was distinctly hostile to the piece’s under-
5 lying tendencies. On the other hand, he shared the view, held by his colleagues
6 in the Secession, that art should be unconstrained by censorship, so that in
7 recognizing the artistic merits of Salome and Spring Awakening, he was clearly
8 willing to lower his own moral standards.
9 Mahler’s lack of sympathy for turn-of-the-century Viennese literature, with
20 what Hermann Bahr termed its ‘defeat of naturalism’, and his complete ignor-
1 ance of French and English Symbolism, becomes more understandable when
2 we consider his far more positive assessment of the now largely forgotten
3 figure of Peter Rosegger, an assessment that many a Mahlerian now finds
4 intensely puzzling. Even on his fiftieth birthday, which the composer spent
5 alone at Toblach in 1910, he could still take pleasure in the fact that ‘the
6 heavens have been raining down volumes of Rosegger’ in the form of a gift
7 from his mother-in-law that pre-empted his own idea of giving Anna Moll a
8 similar set of volumes. The critic Ernst Decsey recalled that in the summer of
9 1909 Mahler had hailed Rosegger as the leading poet of the age: ‘He’s the
30 greatest. With all the others it’s more or less just a case of birth pangs . . . cum
1 grano salis, of course, cum grano salis’.14 In conversation Mahler could some-
2 times get carried away but there is no escaping the fact that he thought highly
3 of an ideologically blinkered poet from Styria famous for upholding tradi-
4 tional rural values at the expense of urban society. Mahler seems not to have
5 been disturbed by the aura of earthiness and the poet’s evident anti-Jewishness
6 (for Rosegger, Jewish shopkeepers and speculators threatened the very exis-
7 tence of the peasants who dwelt in the forests). Perhaps the stylistically sophis-
8 ticated simplicity and rustic values of a writer whose autobiographical tales are
9 still capable of impressing us with their descriptions of the world of nature
40 struck a chord with Mahler, recalling the experiences of his own lost childhood
41R and adolescence.
Mahler’s literary tastes seem to have been influenced in the main by the 1
books contained in his parents’ library in Iglau, thereafter by the anthology of 2
texts used by his local grammar school. As Herta Blaukopf assumes, this 3
volume must have been the one edited by Joseph Mozart and was made up for 4
the most part of the German classics. Indeed, it was these that formed the 5
unshakeable basis of Mahler’s later literary judgements, not that this prevented 6
him from devouring the works of other writers during his Sturm und Drang 7
period: Jean Paul was certainly no schoolboy classic. Later he lacked the time 8
and receptivity to discover other new writers. Shakespeare was an unassailable 9
authority for Mahler. When he saw a production of Romeo and Juliet in 10
Mannheim in 1904, he wrote to tell Alma that for all its bungled mediocrity 1
the performance had opened his eyes once again ‘to the greatest of all writers 2
and perhaps of all human beings’.15 On another occasion he played off 3
Shakespeare against Ibsen, a playwright he held in relatively low esteem as a 4
member of the modernist school: ‘Shakespeare is positive and productive, while 5
Ibsen is nothing but analysis, negation, infecundity.’16 6
If Lessing played no further discernible role in Mahler’s intellectual world 7
following his boyhood setting of ‘Türken haben schöne Töchter’, the same 8
cannot be said of Goethe, whose works occupied the position of a central sun 9
in the composer’s literary firmament. If we may allow for several suns in this 20
galaxy, then Jean Paul and Dostoevsky would have to be conceded a place 1
alongside Goethe. Faust was naturally central to Mahler’s enthusiasm, but he 2
was almost equally enthusiastic about the conversations with Eckermann and 3
Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wanderjahre. He knew whole sections of Faust 4
by heart – when Ernst Decsey visited him at Toblach in 1909, Mahler prevailed 5
on the critic to read to him from Faust, declaiming many of the lines from 6
memory to the delight of the critic, who recalled that in the half-lit room the 7
composer looked uncannily like Goethe, a somewhat puzzling suggestion, for 8
at first sight there was no physical similarity between Mahler and Goethe, but 9
Decsey was not the sort of writer to indulge in mystification.17 It was during 30
this same visit that Decsey discovered a complete set of Alfred Edmund 1
Brehm’s multi-volume Life of Animals on one of the shelves in Mahler’s house 2
in Toblach. Mahler also preferred to re-read books that he had already enjoyed 3
rather than risk disappointment with others that were unfamiliar, and so we 4
find him revisiting Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit, Die Leiden des jungen 5
Werthers and the life of Goethe by Albert Bielschowsky, published in two 6
volumes between 1896 and 1904. He also had a multi-volume edition of 7
Goethe’s correspondence on his shelves but told Alfred Roller that he was 8
keeping it for his old age. What drew Mahler to Goethe was more than just 9
the poet. Rather, he saw Goethe as a profound thinker and philosopher 40
whose wide-ranging interest in the natural sciences Mahler found particularly 41R
134 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 fascinating. And, flying in the face of the then traditional picture of Goethe as
2 a classical figure, he was no less fascinated by the constant sense of striving in
3 Goethe’s life: ‘He was never finished,’ he told Decsey; ‘he remained an appren-
4 tice right up to the end – that’s an open secret.’18 This sense of never achieving
5 closure but of constantly developing towards a higher state is one that Mahler
6 recognized in himself, too, and it was this that drew him to Goethe. Bruno
7 Walter gives numerous examples of Goethe’s towering importance for Mahler,
8 mentioning in particular the conversations with Goethe recorded by the writer
9 Johann Daniel Falk, especially the one that took place on the occasion of the
10 burial of the poet Christoph Martin Wieland, with whom Goethe had been
1 friendly, and that revolved around the subject of immortality. Far too little
2 attention has been paid to this reference until now. Together with Mahler’s
3 extremely important letter to Alma about the end of Part Two of Faust, it will
4 form the nucleus of a later chapter about Mahler’s whole outlook on the world.
5 We have already seen how Jean Paul was second to none in influencing not
6 only the young Mahler’s effusive epistolary style but also his whole way of
7 relating emotionally to the world. By 1880, when Mahler first discovered him,
8 Jean Paul was far from being the fashionable writer that he had been eighty
9 years earlier. By 1830 his reputation was already in decline. Ludwig Börne’s
20 hymn-like tribute to him was intended to encourage a reassessment, but it
1 merely sealed the older view, the emergence of naturalism leading to the
2 eclipse of a writer whose emotional outpourings and fantastical tales some-
3 times seem to anticipate Surrealism. The grotesquerie that the Weimar
4 Classicists saw in his writings, encouraging Goethe to define the author of the
5 novel Hesperus as a ‘tragelaph’ – a fabulous beast compounded of a goat and a
6 stag – left its mark on the whole of the second half of the nineteenth century,
7 Nietzsche’s well-known dismissal of the writer as ‘a fatality in a dressing gown’
8 being only the most familiar and handy expression of a view that veered
9 between bewilderment and disparagement. Given the fact that Mahler’s tastes
30 were relatively traditional, it is perhaps surprising to find him swimming
1 against the tide long before Jean Paul was rediscovered by Stefan George and
2 his circle. When Mahler made the pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1883, it was not
3 just for the sake of Wagner but for Jean Paul, too, for it was here in Bayreuth
4 that Jean Paul had spent the final years of his life, here, too, that he was buried.
5 Mahler also visited the writer’s birthplace at Wunsiedel some twenty-five miles
6 to the north-east. As late as 1894, when Bruno Walter first met Mahler in
7 Hamburg, it was clear that Siebenkäs was one of the conductor’s favourite
8 novels.
9 If Mahler was drawn to Goethe by the latter’s open-endedness and by the
40 sense that he was not interested in achieving closure, then these same qualities
41R must also have fascinated him about Jean Paul, who never intended his readers
to regard his longer narrative works and his manifold shorter prose writings 1
as finished but as works in progress. His self-irony, his whimsical and even 2
grotesque humour, the emotional depth of his lyrical outbursts, his intense 3
descriptions of nature, his political insights and satirical acuteness, his inward 4
inspiration, his hymn-like accounts of friendship and his inexhaustible linguistic 5
imagination must have struck the young Mahler as the work of a kindred spirit. 6
Among the characters who must have seemed to the highly strung young 7
conductor to be accurate reflections of his own emotional existence are Firmian 8
Stanislas Siebenkäs – the lawyer who helps the poor in the novel of the same 9
name and who once changed names with his friend Leibgeber, while Leibgeber 10
himself then finds his way into the author’s main work, Titan, as the humorist 1
and mocking wit, Schoppe – and the dazzling fallen angel, Roquairol, in Titan, 2
who as the main character in his own tragedy shoots himself in full view of 3
the audience. (It will be recalled that for a time Mahler’s First Symphony was 4
called Titan.) All the questions about God and His adversaries, about the 5
meaning of life and death, about the durability of love and friendship and about 6
the unfathomable depths of human feelings, whether good or bad – these were 7
all questions that Jean Paul asked with such eloquence and invariably answered 8
with his inimitable mixture of humour, sadness and tearful consolation, a 9
mixture that was largely responsible for his success with his readers. They also 20
exercised Mahler. 1
There was something else about Jean Paul that was bound to appeal to 2
Mahler in a way that not even Shakespeare or Goethe could, inasmuch as the 3
young composer was keen to break down the symphony’s old generic bound- 4
aries, much as Jean Paul had done with the novel, and to bring together 5
elements of the classical symphony and the symphonic poem. When he told 6
Natalie that the symphony, as he imagined it and as he planned to redefine it, 7
should be as inexhaustible as the world and as life itself, encompassing every- 8
thing,19 then this mission statement of his reflects the programme underpin- 9
ning Jean Paul’s novels: common to them all is the infinite subjectivity that 30
finds expression here and the creation of a sense of epic totality from top to 1
bottom, from the emotionally charged to the humorous. Like the novelist, the 2
writer of symphonies combines within his breast a multiplicity of different 3
souls, including the humorist, the satirist, the parodist (think of his perform- 4
ance markings ‘with humour’ and ‘in a spirit of parody’), the contemplative 5
philosopher, the reflective observer of the world, the sensitive lover (as in the 6
Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony), the nature worshipper (‘Like a sound of 7
nature’, we read in the opening movement of the First Symphony), the enthu- 8
siast (the ‘Veni, creator spiritus’ of the Eighth Symphony), the elegist with a gift 9
for fathoming the world’s profundities and seeing through its veil of illusion 40
(the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony): all of this can be rediscovered in the 41R
136 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 world of Jean Paul, taking us far beyond the relatively superficial borrowing
2 of the word ‘Titan’ as the title of the First Symphony. If, in his essay ‘The
3 Storyteller’, Walter Benjamin claims that to write a novel means ‘to carry the
4 incommensurable to extremes in the representation of human life’, then he
5 also, albeit unwittingly, provides the best possible definition of the Mahlerian
6 symphony – it is no accident that Benjamin was also familiar with the writings
7 of Jean Paul.
8 Following his return to Vienna after his second season in New York in
9 the summer of 1909, Mahler found himself surrounded by a group of
10 young admirers, including Schoenberg and Zemlinsky, and asked them
1 their opinion of Dostoevsky, only to discover that they knew the writer merely
2 by name. Mahler is then said to have turned to Schoenberg and exclaimed:
3 ‘But Schoenberg, what’s all this? Let the young people who are studying
4 with you read Dostoevsky – that’s more important than counterpoint.’
5 Webern apparently then got to his feet and like some hesitant schoolboy
6 said, ‘But we’ve got Strindberg.’ It was hardly a comment calculated to endear
7 his disciples to their revered master.20 If Ibsen was at least worthy of criticism
8 in Mahler’s eyes, Strindberg simply failed to register with him at all: he
9 presumably never read a line of Strindberg or saw any of his plays in the
20 theatre.
1 Dostoevsky was the third of the fixed stars in Mahler’s literary firmament,
2 although it remains unclear how the composer came across him. True, the
3 Russian novelist’s name cannot have been unknown to the Sturm und Drang
4 circles that Mahler frequented during his formative years in Vienna, for he was
5 very much a contemporary writer, controversial and much discussed: The
6 Brothers Karamazov did not appear in the original Russian until 1879/80, and
7 it was not until 1884, when Mahler was in his mid-twenties, that the first
8 German translation was published. None the less, there is no evidence that
9 Mahler read Dostoevsky at this time, although it is possible that one of his
30 friends, Nina Hoffmann-Matscheko, who published a monograph on the
1 novelist in 1899, drew the writer to his attention. Drawing on his first-hand
2 knowledge of the matter, Richard Specht adjudged that:
3
4 Mahler’s encounter with his books was an experience of determinative force
5 for him. Even though Mahler spoke about Dostoevsky as often as he could
6 and sought to coerce all whom he valued into reading the great Russian’s
7 writings, far too little weight has been placed on his relations with a writer
8 who exerted the same sort of revelatory, even fateful influence on him as
9 Beethoven did on Wagner and as Kleist did on Hebbel. Anyone who has
40 genuinely responded to Dostoevsky will have a different attitude to Mahler’s
41R music – at least to his first four symphonies – than was formerly the case.21
Mahler’s grief at the world’s suffering, his search for consolation and spiritu- 1
ality, and his constant quest for an answer to the question as to how one could 2
be happy as long as a single creature suffered on earth – all of this drew its 3
intensity from his reading of Dostoevsky, which appears to date from his deci- 4
sive years in Hamburg. If Goethe was his preferred reading towards the end of 5
his life, when he adopted a philosophical approach to the Sage of Weimar’s 6
writings, and if Jean Paul preoccupied him during the intellectual turmoil of 7
his adolescence, then Dostoevsky left his mark on Mahler chiefly during his 8
thirties, when he encouraged all who were close to him to share his enthusiasm 9
for the Russian novelist. Bruno Walter was made aware of this state of affairs 10
when Mahler’s sister, Emma, suddenly asked him: ‘Who’s right, Alyosha or 1
Ivan?’ To her surprise, Walter, who did not yet know the novel, failed the test. 2
The American pianist Olga Samaroff, who married the conductor Leopold 3
Stokowski, once sat next to Mahler at a dinner held by the Steinways in New 4
York. Her attempts to engage him in conversation proved unsuccessful and 5
seemed even to make him more uncivil than ever until she remembered that 6
prior to the meal she had seen him take down a copy of The Brothers 7
Karamazov from his hosts’ bookcase. Very fond of the novel herself, she none 8
the less wanted to provoke Mahler and, feigning innocence, asked him 9
whether he did not think that the book was much overrated. That saved the 20
evening, at least for Mahler and Olga Samaroff, as he spent the next few hours 1
convincing her of the novel’s merits. 2
The great conversation between Ivan and Alyosha to which Emma Mahler 3
was referring and that occurs in Book Five, immediately before the legend 4
about the Grand Inquisitor, revolves around some of Dostoevsky’s central 5
concerns during the final years of his life. The earlier implacable analyses of a 6
life without God and without transcendence are now offset by Alyosha’s belief 7
in the Resurrection, and there is no doubt that Mahler must have been struck 8
by the idea of the immortality of the human soul in the writings of an author 9
branded at the time as a misanthropic pessimist. It is an idea that may also be 30
seen as the basis of his own view of the world and as the source of his belief in 1
entelechy, the vital principle that guides the development of an organism and 2
that also causes the emotional force of a creative artist to be rekindled in his 3
work – it was very much this that later struck him about Goethe’s writings. In 4
short, Mahler was bound to recognize himself in a part of Ivan’s character, the 5
inner divisions of which were laid bare in this conversation with his brother 6
when he says that he must reluctantly acknowledge the existence of God but is 7
not prepared to acknowledge the world that this God created. And then comes 8
the central passage on the world’s suffering, a passage from which Mahler drew 9
his answer to his own oft-cited question, ‘How can one be happy as long as a 40
single creature suffers on earth?’: 41R
138 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 I am convinced that our sufferings will be healed and smoothed away, that
2 the whole offensive comedy of human conflict will disappear like a pathetic
3 mirage, like the infamous fabrication of the Euclidean human mind, as weak
4 and undersized as an atom, and that ultimately, during the universal finale, at
5 the moment of eternal harmony, there will occur and become manifest some-
6 thing so precious that it will be sufficient for all hearts, for the soothing of all
7 indignation, the redemption of all men’s evil-doings, all the blood that has
8 been shed by them, will be sufficient not only to make it possible to forgive
9 but even to justify all the things that have happened to men – and even if all
10 that, all of it, makes itself manifest and becomes reality, I will not accept it and
1 do not want to accept it.22
2
3 But Mahler believed that Alyosha was right: he not only knew and hoped that
4 this was the case, he also acknowledged it in order to be able to endure the
5 world’s suffering and to give it artistic expression.
6 Mahler was attracted not only to the more philosophical writers, he could
7 also work up considerable enthusiasm for E. T. A. Hoffmann, and there is no
8 doubt that he discussed Hoffmann with Ferruccio Busoni, who was an expert
9 on the subject. Certainly, we know that Mahler read the ‘ghostly’ Hoffmann at
20 an early age, later emphasizing the fact that Hoffmann had achieved greatness
1 as a music journalist and critic. Individual poems by Hölderlin, including ‘The
2 Rhine’, excited Mahler’s admiration, while he also evinced great affection for
3 Clemens Brentano’s fairytale Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeleia, which his daughter
4 Anna later recalled him reading to her on frequent occasions. Anyone who
5 likes Jean Paul, with his exceptionally profound approach to the theory of
6 humour, is also bound to enjoy the other great humorists of world literature,
7 and this was certainly true of Mahler, whose own caustic sense of humour was
8 whetted by his reading of Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, Dickens’s The Pickwick
9 Papers and Cervantes’s Don Quixote. Whenever he read the episode of the
30 windmills to his family and friends during his summer holidays, his laughter
1 would often prevent him from completing the passage, so much did he enjoy
2 the comic situation, while also deriving new strength from Don Quixote’s
3 idealism – for who can doubt that his own life was also a struggle with the sails
4 of manifold windmills, both as director of several opera houses and, even more
5 so, as a composer?
6 It is no accident that it is one of Jean Paul’s aphorisms that brings to an end
7 this portrait of Mahler as a reader:
8
9 How different and how wonderful is the friendship that can be forged with
40 printed people – books – rather than with real ones! How loyally attached to
41R us they remain when all else falls away, and how infinitely they can console
us! How they are always the same, criticizing our weaknesses without 1
committing weaknesses of their own! – And why should I not bring friends 2
with me from the previous world, even though they have lost their bodies, 3
but which contain all that is genuine, their soul? These friends alone have no 4
sense of time, no self-interest, they are intimately related to us, part of our 5
soul, two souls within one body.23 6
7
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3
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41R
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7 Becoming Mahler: Prague
8
9
(1885–6)
10
1
2
3
4 HE MONTHS THAT passed between the premature end of Mahler’s Kassel
5
6
T engagement in the summer of 1885 and the start of his new appointment
in Leipzig in the autumn of 1886 seemed initially as if they would be no more
7 than an embarrassing but necessary interlude in his life, and yet in the event
8 they turned out to be an exceptionally important year in his career. ‘I am on
9 the point of, as they say, making a name for myself,’ he told his friend Friedrich
20 Löhr in early July 1885, following a brief trip from Iglau to Prague to sort out
1 the necessary arrangements.1 His Prague contract must have been concluded
2 by the end of May, although it was not announced by the local press until
3 5 June – presumably Mahler did not want the newspapers mentioning his
4 name once again only weeks after the announcement of his Leipzig appoint-
5 ment, but on this occasion in the context of another city.
6 Theatrically speaking, the situation in Prague was confused at this time.
7 Mahler had already spent a miserable few months in the city when he was
8 eleven and had boarded with the Grünfelds, a family that was to produce two
9 eminent instrumentalists, the pianist Alfred Grünfeld and his cellist brother,
30 Heinrich. Heinrich, who was five years older than Mahler, later published his
1 memoirs, from which it emerges that even in 1923 he still had little idea
2 who his lodger had been: ‘At home I repeatedly found the opportunity to make
3 music with like-minded individuals, including a pale, slim youth who was
4 boarding with my parents and who struck me in particular because of his shock
5 of pitch-black hair. Otherwise none of us thought that there was anything
6 remarkable about him. He was studying music in Prague and was modesty
7 personified. His name was Gustav Mahler.’2 This is the only reference to Mahler
8 in the whole of Grünfeld’s book. But it is by no means untypical of the public
9 perception of Mahler in the 1920s. When Mahler returned to Prague in 1885 –
40 presumably for the first time since 1872 – he was twenty-five years old and a
41R completely different person, for he was now a young conductor with excellent
BECOMING MAHLER: PRAGUE 141
prospects, arriving in the second-largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1

(it now numbered 280,000 inhabitants), albeit one increasingly shaken by 2
nationalist divisions between its Czech and German populations: by their own 3
estimation, three-fifths were Czech and two-fifths were German-Austrian, 4
although the linguistic disparity between the two groups was even greater, for 5
some 80 per cent spoke Czech, whereas only 20 per cent spoke German even 6
though this was the official language. 7
Mahler’s new post was at the Royal German Regional Theatre – the 8
Landestheater – whose new director, Angelo Neumann, was also joining 9
the company at this time. Neumann was one of the most colourful theatrical 10
figures in the second half of the nineteenth century. A native of Vienna, he 1
began his career as a baritone, even appearing at the Vienna Court Opera, but 2
he soon became an impresario. While still working as a singer in Vienna, he 3
had taken part in Wagner’s own productions of Tannhäuser and Lohengrin and 4
become an enthusiastic Wagnerian, while also, no doubt, recognizing the box- 5
office appeal of the composer’s operas. With the exception of Wagner himself, 6
no one did as much as Neumann at this time to promote Wagner’s works. In 7
Leipzig, where he ran the local opera company from 1876 to 1882, Neumann 8
performed all of Wagner’s operas, including the Ring, which he staged between 9
April and September 1878. In 1882 he took the whole of his Leipzig company 20
to London for four cycles of the work. Later that year he left Leipzig and 1
formed his own touring company, the ‘Richard Wagner Theatre’, which was a 2
kind of peripatetic Bayreuth Festival featuring some of the Festival’s leading 3
artists. (The theatre at Bayreuth itself remained dark from 1876 to 1882.) 4
Wagner was forced to admit that Neumann, a Jew, had done a lot to further his 5
cause and that, like most Jews at this period, he did not take his anti-Semitism 6
amiss. Neumann later published his memoirs, including in them a number of 7
the letters that passed between him and Wagner. He took over as director of 8
the Prague Landestheater at the start of the 1885/6 season and, like Mahler, 9
was therefore new to the company. Unlike Mahler, he was to remain there 30
for many years and end his career in the city. The company was housed in 1
the building now known as the Tyl Theatre. It had opened as long ago as 2
1783, when it had been called the Count Nostitz National Theatre. It was 3
here, for example, that Don Giovanni had received its legendary first perform- 4
ances in 1787, an event whose centenary was to be commemorated soon after 5
Neumann and Mahler took up their new appointments. 6
Throughout the nineteenth century the theatre was at the centre of musical 7
life in Prague, while at the same time encapsulating all the problems bound up 8
with the coexistence of Germans and Czechs in this part of the Empire. Over 9
the course of many decades plays and opera performances in Czech were 40
increasingly marginalized, although in the case of the opera, there was of 41R
142 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 course still only a limited repertory. In the eyes of the city’s German speakers,
2 the Czech-speaking population belonged to the lower orders, their language
3 dismissed as ‘kuchelböhmisch’, in other words, a Bohemian dialect spoken by
4 kitchen maids. Performances in Czech were given in the afternoons, while the
5 evenings were reserved for German plays and Italian operas. This increasing
6 tendency of the two factions to drift apart culminated in 1862 in the founding
7 of a Provisional Theatre at a time of incipient Czech nationalism. (It was here
8 that Smetana worked from 1866 to 1874 and here, too, that The Bartered Bride
9 was first performed in 1866.) In 1881 the Národní Divadlo or National Theatre
10 opened its doors with a performance of Smetana’s Libuše. Although the house
1 burnt down later that same year, it was rebuilt within two years thanks to an
2 impressive fund-raising campaign on the part of the city’s Czech population.
3 Since then it has been a shrine to Czech opera. A year after Mahler’s departure
4 from Prague, a second major house (the German Theatre was a small house on
5 a Rococo scale) was opened. Now known as the Smetana Theatre, the New
6 German Theatre performed German works under Neumann’s direction and
7 was intended as a counterweight to the Czech National Theatre. Mahler prob-
8 ably spoke no more than a few words of broken Czech but was still sufficiently
9 open-minded to pay the occasional visit to the Czech Opera and see works
20 by Smetana, Dvořák and Fibich. Whereas we now tend to rate Dvořák more
1 highly than the ‘more primitive’ Smetana, Mahler felt greater enthusiasm for
2 the latter, whose works he could not have heard in Vienna but which he later
3 went on to champion. Neumann remained director of the German Theatre
4 until his death in December 1910, only a few months before Mahler’s own
5 death.
6 Mahler was therefore working for a company with a long-established tradi-
7 tion, excellent singers and a decent orchestra. Above all, he soon found himself
8 in a situation with which he could not have reckoned but which, completely
9 unexpectedly, allowed him at least provisionally to realize his ambitions and to
30 conduct the great works of the mainstream repertory, above all the operas of
1 Gluck, Mozart and Wagner. He owed this in the main to Anton Seidl, who had
2 worked with Neumann for many years and who was widely regarded as the
3 leading Wagnerian conductor after Hans Richter and Hermann Levi. (In 1897 he
4 was even allowed to conduct Parsifal in Bayreuth.) Seidl had assisted Neumann
5 on all his Wagnerian projects, but within weeks of the latter’s taking up his
6 appointment in Prague, Seidl had broken the terms of his contract and gone to
7 New York to assume control of the Wagner repertory at the Metropolitan Opera.
8 Mahler having made his Prague debut with a gala performance of Cherubini’s
9 Les Deux Journées held to mark the emperor’s birthday and having impressed
40 Neumann with his fiery conducting, the way was now open for him to conduct
41R all Wagner’s major works in Prague. (His close contemporary, Karl Muck,
who was to conduct Parsifal at every Bayreuth Festival from 1901 to 1930, 1
did not join the company until the following season.) Mahler had in fact 2
made contact with Neumann while he was still in Kassel and had been engaged 3
on the strength of a meeting. He moved to Prague on 13 July 1885, taking 4
rooms initially at 24 Rittergasse and later at 18 Langegasse, where he shared 5
a flat with the Swedish bass Johannes Elmblad. Neumann had evidently 6
bought a pig in a poke when signing up Mahler, but it soon turned out 7
that his trust was not misplaced, and, having proved himself in Les Deux 8
Journées (as always performed at this time in the German-speaking world as 9
Der Wasserträger), Mahler proved no less adept in Das Rheingold and Die 10
Walküre, which received their local premières on 19 and 20 December 1885. 1
Thanks to his excellent connections, Neumann was able to use the sets that had 2
been designed by Joseph Hoffmann for the Bayreuth performances in 1876 and 3
that had been executed in the Coburg studios of Max and Gotthold Brückner. 4
He also had access to the costumes, weapons and props designed for Bayreuth 5
by Carl Emil Doepler. 6
In this way Prague’s German Theatre became a sort of winter Bayreuth 7
and in this guise it enjoyed considerable success, not least as a result of the 8
fact that Mahler was able to conduct not only Das Rheingold and Die Walküre 9
but also Tannhäuser and Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and because the 20
company was able to draw on the talents of a more than respectable Wagnerian 1
ensemble. The Wagnerian tenor Adolf Wallnöfer was already embarked on a 2
distinguished career that was later to take him to the Met. (He was also a 3
composer in his own right and a well-known recitalist for whom Brahms, 4
among others, wrote songs.) The soprano Laura Hilgermann was still singing 5
smaller roles in Prague, but Mahler later engaged her at the Budapest Opera 6
and later still at the Vienna Court Opera, where she enjoyed a major career. 7
And Johannes Elmblad, a good-natured giant of a man who shared rooms with 8
Mahler in the city, sang Fafner, Hunding and Hagen in the Prague Ring, later 9
becoming one of the most sought-after Wagnerian basses of his day. And 30
finally there was Betty Frank. As a coloratura soprano, she was suited to only 1
a handful of Wagnerian parts but she was an outstanding interpreter of 2
coloratura and lyric roles in operas from Mozart to Meyerbeer. Above all, she 3
was the love of Mahler’s life in Prague, prompting him to write to Fritz Löhr in 4
early December 1885: ‘I keep stumbling from one idiocy into another. In this 5
short pause I have landed myself in something it will take a long time to get 6
out of ’,3 suggesting that after the whirlwind of his affair with Johanna Richter 7
in Kassel, he was now expecting something similar with Betty Frank. But these 8
negative expectations failed to materialize. 9
Betty Frank hailed from Breslau. She herself claimed that she had been born 40
in 1864, making it likely that the true date was somewhat earlier and that she 41R
144 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was the same age as Mahler. She had studied in Paris with the famous Mathilde
2 Marchesi, who had been friendly with Rossini, and had in this way borne
3 witness to the tail end of the bel canto tradition of the late eighteenth century.
4 Unlike Mahler, Betty Frank was already a star when she came to Prague, but
5 her career ran along rather less auspicious lines than Mahler’s. She became
6 involved in a lengthy running battle with Neumann but remained in Prague
7 and found herself increasingly sidelined. Other singers were given preference
8 and she was compared with visiting stars such as Sigrid Arnoldson. She later
9 tried to move to the Vienna Court Opera, but her attempts were unsuccessful,
10 and in 1891 she finally took her leave of the German Theatre in Prague. She
1 was still in her early thirties, but her career was effectively over. She married
2 and had a child, and it is possible that her voice suffered as a consequence.
3 After the First World War her name appears only as a singing teacher at one
4 of Berlin’s conservatories. With that, we lose all trace of her and do not even
5 know when she died.4 The only surviving portrait of her shows a small woman
6 tending to portliness but with a mischievous expression in her eyes.
7 When Löhr visited Prague in January 1886, he discovered that Mahler was
8 so overwhelmed with his work that he had little time to be sociable or to enjoy
9 himself. As for Betty Frank, one has the impression that the relationship soon
20 cooled and that by the time Mahler left Prague, it was all over. At all events, the
1 two seem not to have seen each other again. Back in 1885, the liaison was
2 manifestly the only distraction that he allowed himself. The numerous new
3 operas that he had to conduct took up the rest of his time, and the bohemian
4 lifestyle that he had adopted in Kassel gave way to a much more rigorous
5 regime. Not only Wagner demanded his undivided attention, so too did Don
6 Giovanni, Fidelio, Norma, Le nozze di Figaro, Die Entführung aus dem Serail,
7 Marschner’s Hans Heiling and Goldmark’s Die Königin von Saba – all of them
8 notoriously difficult works to conduct and nearly all of them first perform-
9 ances for Mahler. It is no wonder, then, that none of the letters that Mahler
30 wrote during his months in Prague even so much as mentions the beauties of
1 the city, let alone its distinguished history – the court of Rudolf II, Rabbi Löw,
2 the Golem and the secrets of the ancient Jewish cemetery. None of these played
3 any part in Mahler’s life. Rather, he missed his friends and had no opportu-
4 nity to commune with like-minded individuals, who almost certainly did not
5 include Betty Frank and Johannes Elmblad.
6 Mahler took care to ensure that he now looked to be fully mature and an
7 artist to be reckoned with. When he arrived in Kassel, he still had a bushy black
8 beard. There are young people who, no matter what they intend, look even
9 younger with a beard, and in 1883 Mahler was one such person. In Kassel, it is
40 clear from photographs taken in 1884 that he shaved off his beard and never
41R wore one again, preferring a kind of handlebar moustache instead. In Prague,
this handlebar moustache was reduced yet further to the usual close-cropped 1
moustache, a development trailed by Mahler in one of his letters to Löhr. 2
During his summer holidays in later life he occasionally reverted to this particu- 3
lar display of facial hair. As a conductor, Mahler was a sensation in Prague, 4
and Neumann was initially proud of his skills as a talent scout, not least 5
because he had already discovered Arthur Nikisch, with whom Mahler was 6
to have a problematical relationship the following season in Leipzig. As 7
Neumann later recalled, both he and Seidl felt that the young Mahler ‘moved 8
about too much when he was conducting, and in this way reminded us 9
strongly of Bülow’, whose nervous, fidgety manner was equally notorious and 10
by no means uncontroversial. This is an interesting observation, as it remained 1
a basic reproach throughout the whole of Mahler’s career as a conductor and 2
was later invested with an anti-Semitic subtext – a kind of mauscheln of the 3
podium. 4
Another recurrent theme dates from this period, for it was in Prague that we 5
first find the origins of the expression ‘tradition is slovenliness’ (‘Tradition ist 6
Schlamperei’), a phrase attributed to Mahler and usually believed to refer to 7
the Vienna Court Opera Orchestra or, rather, the Vienna Philharmonic but 8
which was in fact coined in Prague. Its full form reads: ‘What you call tradi- 9
tion is mere convenience and slovenliness for you.’ Mahler first conducted Don 20
Giovanni on 6 September 1885 in the house where it had received its first 1
performance in 1787. It was a piece, he believed, that the people of Prague had 2
never really understood. That same day he wrote to his family in Iglau: 3
4
It is a foregone conclusion that the papers, and especially the Tageblatt, will 5
pounce on me, for I can tell you in advance that they will all cry ‘Woe, woe, 6
“Tradition” has gone to the devil.’ By ‘tradition’ they mean the time-honoured 7
(i.e., slovenly) way of staging a work. I have not let it bother me in the least, 8
and shall quietly go my own way this evening.5 9
30
For the most part, this remained Mahler’s maxim in life. He was resolved 1
quietly to go his own way, and in Prague this attitude paid dividends. Most of 2
the major reviews that have come down to us give at least a vague indication 3
that here was an extremely gifted conductor, a point that emerges with partic- 4
ular clarity from the reports of the benefit concert that Mahler gave 5
on 21 February 1886, when he conducted Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The 6
first part of the concert – a piece of programming that is almost inconceiv- 7
able by today’s standards – had featured the Dawn Duet from the Prelude to 8
Götterdämmerung conducted by one of Mahler’s colleagues and followed by 9
excerpts from Act One of Parsifal under Mahler himself. The review that 40
appeared in Bohemia deserves to be quoted at length as it is the first to give any 41R
146 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 clear indication not only of Mahler’s particular style of conducting but also of
2 his tremendous memory, which allowed him to conduct both the Wagner
3 excerpts and the Beethoven symphony without a score, a feat almost unprece-
4 dented at this period. Also worth noting are the ways in which Mahler shaped
5 the music with his hands and his ability to invest it with an unheard-of vitality
6 thanks to the living, breathing tempo modifications generally referred to as
7 ‘rubato’:
8
9 Herr Mahler conducted both the long extract from Parsifal and the
10 symphony from memory, a magnificent testimony to his detailed knowledge
1 of the two works. He shaped every nuance in the air with his hands, recalling
2 the tradition of the peculiar manner of conducting the religious choral music
3 of the Middle Ages, which included shaping the melody by movements
4 and gestures of the hand. It was universally recognized that Herr Mahler’s
5 conducting showed every part of the work to its best advantage. He subtly
6 and artistically brought out the colouring of the first movement by stressing
7 certain notes by means of crescendi and diminuendi and by a careful use of
8 light and shade. By his choice of a moderate tempo for the passages in 3/4 time
9 he introduced a brilliant contrast into the second movement and made a
20 clear-cut distinction between the adagio and the yearning of the D major
1 episode.6
2
3 There is no doubt that in Prague, Mahler was already developing into the
4 greatest conductor of his age and was finally becoming aware of this fact by
5 being tested by the greatest works of the operatic repertory and by the reac-
6 tions of critics and audiences alike. Friedrich Löhr, who probably knew Mahler
7 better than anyone else at this time, attended this concert and wrote to an
8 unknown correspondent afterwards, not only acknowledging Mahler’s gifts as
9 a conductor but also revealing an even deeper understanding of Mahler as a
30 person: ‘Now I must say that Mahler’s conducting gave me enormous pleasure.
1 You will not believe how great and mature and enthralling his conducting is;
2 there is no longer any trace of fidgetiness, and he combines overwhelming
3 energy with youthful fire.’7 Even though Mahler had had a terrible row with
4 Angelo Neumann immediately before the concert (the argument evidently
5 concerned his choice of tempi in the ballet in Gounod’s Faust, which had
6 caused the dancers to stumble), he got his way and received an apology from
7 Neumann, an apology that represented a triumph for the inexperienced young
8 conductor over an ambitious impresario who was known throughout Europe.
9 It is no wonder that Mahler suddenly lost the desire to go to Leipzig and to
40 leave Prague after only a single season. It had also become clear to him that in
41R view of his abilities and ambitions it was inevitable that in Leipzig he would
come into conflict with Nikisch, who was his elder by five years and who was 1
generally regarded as Leipzig’s star conductor. And so he tried to persuade the 2
director of the Leipzig Opera, Max Staegemann, to release him from his 3
contract. But Staegemann had of course realized that with Mahler he would be 4
gaining a talented new conductor. He had no intention of releasing Mahler 5
from his contractual obligations. In April, Mahler also had an opportunity to 6
perform some of his own music in Prague, when, at a further benefit concert, 7
Betty Frank sang three of his early songs – ‘Frühlingsmorgen’, ‘Hans und Grete’ 8
and ‘Ging heut morgen über’s Feld’, the last of them from the Lieder eines 9
fahrenden Gesellen. In early July he conducted performances of works by two 10
of his household gods, Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide in Wagner’s adaptation, and, 1
for the first time in his life, Beethoven’s Fidelio, a work that he was later to stage 2
in Vienna with Alfred Roller as his designer. The season came to an end for 3
Mahler on 15 July. It had initially been a stopgap or interim solution for him, 4
but in the end it proved a decisive turning point in his career as a conductor 5
and opera director. After a short break in Iglau he set off for Leipzig on 25 July. 6
The 1886/7 season was due to begin in early August. With so little time to 7
rehearse, there was a sense of urgency bordering on panic. 8
9
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41R
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7 The First Symphony
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1
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3
4 LTHOUGH WE KNOW exactly when the First Symphony was finished, it
5
6
A is unclear when Mahler first thought of writing it and when he began
to plan it in connection with his four Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, two of
7 which are quoted in it. But it could have been in 1884 or 1885. The bulk of his
8 work on the score, however, dates from the early months of 1888. By now
9 Mahler was working at the Leipzig Opera. He wrote to his best friend,
20 Friedrich Löhr, at the end of March 1888:
1
2 Well! My work is finished! Now I should like to have you by my piano and
3 play it to you! Probably you are the only person who will find me unchanged
4 in it; the others will doubtless wonder at a number of things! It has turned out
5 so overwhelming it came gushing out of me like a mountain torrent! This
6 summer you shall hear it! All of a sudden all the sluice-gates in me opened!
7 Perhaps one of these days I shall tell you how it all happened!1
8
9 Unfortunately Mahler never made good this promise, at least in writing. His
30 First Symphony is a tempestuous, urgent, rebellious work, the composer’s
1 first contribution to the medium and without doubt the boldest symphonic
2 visiting card in the whole history of western music. According to Natalie
3 Bauer-Lechner, the explosive outpouring that produced the piece lasted a mere
4 six weeks and was closely bound up with Mahler’s love for Marion von Weber,
5 a point that Mahler merely hinted at when discussing the work’s origins with
6 Natalie but to which he admitted with astonishing candour when speaking
7 to the Berlin critic Max Marschalk. In his analysis of the work, which was
8 published in 1896 and, as such, the first in a whole series of analyses of the
9 composer’s symphonies, Marschalk mentioned a ‘love affair’ which, he
40 claimed, provided the work with a kind of ‘content’. Mahler gave his blessing to
41R Marschalk’s introduction, thanking him for it profusely, while stressing the fact
THE FIRST SYMPHONY 149
that the content did not originate in his affair: in his own emotional life the 1
relationship had preceded his work on the symphony but was certainly not its 2
all-decisive starting point. 3
Mahler’s relationship to his First Symphony was a complicated one. Not 4
only was its period of creative incubation unusually long, he was also uncer- 5
tain what to call the piece. Or perhaps we could say that it took an unusually 6
long time for him to decide what the work actually was. This is the piece that 7
first allowed him to engage with his concept of programme music and with the 8
whole idea of programmes for symphonic music, a point that can merely be 9
summarized here. At its first performance in Budapest in November 1889, the 10
work was still described as a ‘Symphonic Poem in Two Parts’. Although the two 1
parts did not as yet have independent titles, the five movements were given the 2
following headings: 1. Introduction and Allegro comodo; 2. Andante (later 3
described as ‘Blumine’, this movement was removed – definitively – at the time 4
of the work’s Berlin première in 1896); 3. Scherzo; 4. A la pompes funèbres; 5
and 5. Molto appassionato. For the Hamburg performance in October 1893, 6
Mahler subjected the work to a thorough revision and discarded the term 7
‘Symphonic Poem’, a decision that no doubt reflected his awareness of the 8
problems associated with it: after all, it implied a debt to the model established 9
by Liszt, who had sought to establish the genre as an alternative to the tradi- 20
tional symphony, an orchestral work with a programme and a basic poetic idea 1
to it, Liszt’s Tasso of 1849 being seen as the natural successor of Berlioz’s 2
Symphonie fantastique of 1830. 3
Above all, Mahler’s younger colleague and rival, Richard Strauss, had been 4
launched on his remarkably successful career as a composer of symphonic 5
poems with Don Juan, which had received its first performance in 1890, only 6
a year after the Budapest première of Mahler’s First Symphony. But Mahler was 7
now keen to distance himself from Strauss’s piece, with which his own compo- 8
sition had little in common. Still virtually unknown as a composer, he needed 9
to see a stretch of clear blue water between the two works. But he still seems to 30
have been reluctant to use the word ‘symphony’, and it was not until the Berlin 1
performance of 1896 that this term first appears and not until the first printed 2
edition of 1899 that the work was described as its composer’s ‘First Symphony’. 3
Much could be written on the reasons for Mahler’s reluctance to use the term 4
‘symphony’. Quite clearly he was anxious not to impose unduly restricting 5
shackles on himself and to burden himself with the weight of the Beethovenian 6
symphonic tradition that had culminated in the Ninth Symphony. He knew 7
how long Brahms had hesitated before writing his first symphony and he may 8
also have been familiar with Brahms’s famous comment, made with reference 9
to Beethoven: ‘I’ll never write a symphony. You’ve no idea what people like me 40
feel like when they can hear a giant like him constantly striding along behind 41R
150 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 them.’ Although the actual wording of this remark may not have been known
2 to Mahler, its essence was felt by all the young musicians of the 1870s and
3 1880s. This also explains the scope of the term ‘new symphony’ that Mahler
4 later applied to himself and Hans Rott. For the present, however, he believed
5 that by using the terms ‘symphonic poem’ and ‘tone poem’ he was giving
6 himself substantially greater freedom. At the same time, Mahler himself
7 claimed that in his first great tone painting (Das klagende Lied was something
8 entirely different) he had also attempted to learn the lessons of the Wagnerian
9 music drama. Meanwhile, he was becoming increasingly aware of the differ-
10 ences between his own works and Strauss’s subsequent symphonic output.
1 Perhaps, too, he was assailed by self-doubts as to whether his art of instru-
2 mentation was equal to a work of this length. Even as late as December 1909,
3 when he conducted his early symphony for the last time in New York, he
4 made further revisions to the score both before and after the performance,
5 still dissatisfied with the result. Don Juan was called a ‘tone poem for large
6 orchestra’. In Hamburg in 1893, Mahler showed a certain boldness in using
7 the same word (‘Tondichtung’) for his own piece, but added the phrase ‘in
8 symphonic form’, an addition sanctioned by the fact that whereas Strauss’s
9 work was in a single movement, his own was in five.
20 In Hamburg, Mahler also added the heading ‘Titan’, a title that continues
1 to this day to puzzle writers on the subject. The first part (the first three
2 movements, including ‘Blumine’) was additionally headed ‘ “From the Days of
3 Youth”: Flower-, Fruit- and Thorn-Pieces’, inevitably inviting comparisons
4 with Jean Paul and his novel Titan, as every half-educated person at this
5 time knew that Jean Paul had written a novel with this title and that the same
6 writer’s Siebenkäs – one of Mahler’s favourite books – had the typically whim-
7 sical subtitle of ‘Flower-, Fruit- and Thorn-Pieces or Married Life, Death and
8 Wedding of the Advocate of the Poor, Firmian Stanislas Siebenkäs’. Even the
9 strange title ‘Blumine’, although it does not come directly from Jean Paul, is
30 undoubtedly related to his ‘Flower Pieces’. In 1900, when he was preparing the
1 work for its Viennese première, Mahler discussed the work at some length
2 with Natalie Bauer-Lechner and in doing so denied any connection with Jean
3 Paul. All that he had had in mind, he insisted, was a powerfully heroic indi-
4 vidual, including his life and sufferings and his struggle in the face of a fate to
5 which he eventually succumbed: ‘The true, higher redemption comes only in
6 the Second Symphony.’2 Mahler had no reason to deny Jean Paul’s influence,
7 and so we would do well to believe Natalie’s account, at least from the perspec-
8 tive of 1900 – whether he thought of the novel in 1888 or was still thinking of
9 it in 1893 must remain an open question.
40 The Hamburg performance is noteworthy from a further point of view, for
41R not only did the work now have a poetic title but this was the first and last time
that the programme booklet included an ‘explanation’ of the work’s ‘content’, 1

Mahler evidently feeling that he could not trust the work to create an impres- 2
sion unaided. In summary, the programme was as follows. The opening move- 3
ment was headed ‘Spring without End’ and described nature waking up from 4
a long winter sleep. The second movement was still the Andante, but now – for 5
the first time – it was called ‘Blumine’. The third movement was a Scherzo 6
headed ‘In Full Sail’. Part Two was titled ‘Commedia humana’ after Dante and 7
began with a ‘Funeral March in the manner of Callot’. (Mahler had been intro- 8
duced to the work of the French humorist and illustrator Jacques Callot by 9
E. T. A. Hoffmann, who refers to him many times in his writings.) It bore the 10
title ‘Aground!’ In the longest of the explanations that he appended to this 1
programme, Mahler referred to a parodistic woodcut, ‘The Hunter’s Funeral 2
Procession’, that was familiar to every child in Austria. In it, the animals of the 3
forest can be seen accompanying a huntsman’s coffin. At the head of the 4
procession is a group of Bohemian musicians. (In 1850 Moritz von Schwind 5
made a famous engraving of this image in which the musicians themselves are 6
animals.) The fifth and final movement is headed ‘Dall’inferno’ – another allu- 7
sion to Dante – while the tempo marking is ‘Allegro furioso’. This programme 8
was never again used in this form. Occasionally we find references to ‘the 9
so-called Titan’, but eventually these too disappear as Mahler distanced himself 20
from anything that might resemble a programme. It was not, however, a ques- 1
tion of rejecting particular ideas that might help to explain what was effectively 2
inexplicable, for in his conversations with Natalie Bauer-Lechner in Vienna in 3
1900 there are still many such ideas, and interpretations of this and other 4
works cannot avoid them altogether. But Mahler had been forced to realize 5
that the sort of ideas he could entrust to his intimates were not suitable for any 6
wider dissemination. Regardless of Jean Paul, the hero of the First Symphony 7
is not one to whom we can give a name as we can to Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel 8
or Don Quixote. 9
In two important letters to the Berlin critic Max Marschalk, with whom he 30
was friendly, Mahler expressed his views on the problem of programmes and 1
of programme music. Both letters were written in the wake of the Berlin 2
performance of 1896. Marschalk was familiar with the Hamburg introduction 3
and wanted to know why the work was now described simply as a ‘Symphony 4
in D major for large orchestra’, why it was no longer divided into two 5
parts, with corresponding headings, and why it no longer had a main title 6
‘Titan’. Mahler replied with a candour that he was to demonstrate at no subse- 7
quent period in his life, as he grew increasingly mistrustful of critics. The 8
Hamburg programme, he explained, had been written at the urging of his 9
friends in order to make the piece more comprehensible, but unfortunately 40
he had soon come to realize that such a programme contributed little to its 41R
152 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 understanding and much to its obfuscation. In symphonic music, he went

2 on, there were of course programmes: even Beethoven’s symphonies had such
3 ‘inner programmes’, but these could be explained only by the audience’s
4 increasing familiarity with the works in question and had nothing to do with
5 anything that might appear in any programme booklet. In a second letter that
6 he sent to Marschalk only a few days later, Mahler adopted an even more
7 emphatic tone: ‘I know that, so far as I myself am concerned, as long as I can
8 express an experience in words I should never try to put it into music. The
9 need to express myself musically – in symphonic terms – begins only on
10 the plane of obscure feelings, at the gate that opens into the “other world”, the
1 world in which things no longer fall apart in time and space.’3 What this means
2 is that Mahler was unable to write music to suit an existing programme, on
3 which point he differed from Strauss. But nor could he provide a programme
4 for an existing piece of music, as he had unfortunately tried to do in Hamburg.
5 Moreover, any work of music must necessarily be based on something that the
6 composer himself has experienced, but by 1896 Mahler had reached the point
7 where he was no longer willing to entrust his acknowledgement of such
8 experiences to the printed page. It was different when explanations showed
9 understanding of the work in question. For new and unusual works such as
20 Mahler’s own, such explanations could be useful signposts or celestial maps,
1 especially during the weeks and months immediately after their first perform-
2 ances. One such explanation, in Mahler’s view, was Marschalk’s analysis of his
3 First Symphony, which Mahler had liked precisely because it was straightfor-
4 ward and had dispensed with poetic and biographical interpretative models.
5 Mahler took a close interest in the evolving problem of programme music,
6 a problem which in the years around 1900 was a favourite topic with critics,
7 who were equally exercised by the question of the extent to which it was still
8 possible to write operas after Wagner. It was a problem that troubled Mahler
9 greatly, not least because he was forced partly to blame himself for the situa-
30 tion. Time and again he felt the need to sum up his own position. But his
1 approach was never consistent, a point that emerges with some clarity from the
2 programme that he drew up for his Second Symphony and that he distributed
3 among his friends. Mahler often expressed his views on the subject, both in
4 writing and in person. Suffice it to draw attention to an important letter that
5 Bruno Walter wrote in December 1901 to the musicologist and critic Ludwig
6 Schiedermair, who earlier that year could boast of having published the very
7 first book on Mahler. The letter was undoubtedly written at Mahler’s instiga-
8 tion. Schiedermair had asked the composer to explain the ideas underpinning
9 his Fourth Symphony, prompting Walter to begin his letter with the bald state-
40 ment that ‘Mahler emphatically rejects all programmes’. He then went on to
41R offer an accurate summary of the composer’s views:
If we were to wish to put it into words, all that is most profound and most 1
inexpressible in our lives would seem at best like a bad translation but it 2
finds its altogether perfect interpreter in music, whereas, as I have already 3
mentioned, music is never in a position to describe with the same clarity 4
whatever can be accurately described in words, with the result that in 5
programme music it plays a doubly pitiful role, in the first place because it 6
forsakes its own higher realm, which is that of the original life of the 7
emotions (that has no other language) and now becomes incomprehensible 8
in an alien world (that of the individual events) or because at best it stammers 9
semi-incomprehensibly.4 10
1
In his impotent rage at not being able to escape from the subject, Mahler 2
exclaimed ‘Let all programmes perish’ following a performance of his Second 3
Symphony in Munich in October 1900, an imprecation that he repeated in a 4
letter to the critic Max Kalbeck.5 This is all that can be said on the subject. 5
Mahler himself cited the opening bars of the symphony’s first movement as 6
an example of the fact that not everything that gushed out of him like a moun- 7
tain torrent was instantly fixed for all time. The performance marking at this 8
point in the score is: ‘Slow. Dragging. Like a sound of nature.’ But it was only 9
while Mahler was rehearsing this passage in Budapest that he was struck by 20
this extraordinary opening for the strings. A normal A played by all the strings 1
entering together sounded far too substantial to express that shimmering and 2
flickering in the air that he was wanting to create here. It was at this point that 3
he thought of the possibility of using harmonics, which are produced when the 4
player touches the string very lightly at certain points along its length, causing 5
it to vibrate in a way that produces a strangely ethereal tone very different from 6
that of its usual frequency. No symphony before Mahler had begun in this 7
altogether remarkable manner. None the less, if we ignore the harmonics, the 8
principle of creating a layer of sound against which the dragging fourths of 9
the winds stand out before the signal-like calls of the clarinets break free from 30
it, is by no means without precedent. After all, the opening movement of 1
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony proceeds along very similar lines, while Mahler 2
was also familiar with a natural description of flickering, shimmering light in 3
Wagner’s Siegfried. But from these very first bars his handling of this effect is 4
quintessentially Mahlerian. The musical material that Mahler sets forth here, 5
juxtaposing it with apparently paratactical abandon, grows increasingly dense, 6
as if in a jigsaw puzzle gradually assembled from the outer edges to the centre, 7
before being distilled in a clear quotation from the second of the Lieder eines 8
fahrenden Gesellen, ‘Ging heut morgen über’s Feld’. This opening seems to 9
illustrate an important remark that Mahler made to Natalie Bauer-Lechner 40
in 1899: ‘Composing is like playing with bricks, continually making new 41R
154 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 buildings from the same old stones. But the stones have lain there since one’s
2 youth, which is the only time for gathering and hoarding them. They are all
3 ready and shaped for use from that time.’6 Structurally speaking, this opening
4 movement resembles nothing so much as a set of bricks or stones.
5 The movement as a whole is structured around a large-scale theme that
6 Mathias Hansen terms a ‘Groß-Thema’ and that is formed during the move-
7 ment’s opening section. It is made up of three components, the first of which is
8 ‘Ging heut morgen über’s Feld’.7 A weighty march instils in the hero a Dionysian
9 mood which, as Mahler himself explained, is as yet untroubled and unclouded.8
10 The impulsive forward momentum continues to increase, culminating in what
1 Adorno and others have termed a ‘breakthrough’, the moment when the energy
2 that has been held back breaks loose and there is a sense of a force being
3 unleashed, a sense that provides a feeling of fulfilment as the physical paragon
4 of freedom.9 This is not the place to discuss the complex nature of this concept,
5 but even the relatively inexperienced Mahlerian can quickly discover the rele-
6 vant passages and observe the way in which in the later symphonies, too, these
7 breakthroughs always occur at an exposed point in the score. Such break-
8 throughs often emerge from march rhythms and their climaxes, recalling the
9 moment when in the wars of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries,
20 attacking troops would break free from their march rhythm and start to run
1 towards the enemy, screaming and shouting, drunk on the prospect of victory.
2 This is the moment of breakthrough in Mahler’s symphonies. Adopting a
3 musicologically more precise definition, Mathias Hansen describes the break-
4 through as the moment when the movement’s formal structure explodes.10
5 When compared with the opening movement, the two middle movements
6 are distinctly conventional in character, as if Mahler had been vaguely afraid
7 that he had gone too far and curbed his own aspirations, confining himself to
8 a more domesticated environment, especially in the Scherzo whose pounding
9 dance rhythm recalls the specifically Austrian tradition of Schubert, Bruckner
30 and their intermediaries. It was only much later that Mahler realized that the
1 opening bars of the Scherzo are almost identical to those of a Brucknerian
2 Scherzo, with the result that he altered them slightly for the Vienna perform-
3 ance of 1900 in order to avoid the suspicion of plagiarism. The youth whose
4 development and desires are expressed in the First Symphony rushes out into
5 the world at the end of the final movement with a laugh of ebullient high
6 spirits. Such explanations may legitimately be quoted here, but only when we
7 bear in mind that they were offered to Natalie Bauer-Lechner within the
8 context of the Viennese performance. In short, they have nothing of an official
9 programme about them but are merely private descriptions of experiences
40 that preceded or accompanied the act of composition. Above all, we must
41R remember that they date from a period when Mahler had long since
withdrawn all his programmes, including those to the First Symphony. Yet in 1
a way this very circumstance invests them with all the greater significance. In 2
the second movement, this youth blusters through the world with all the 3
greater vigour and earthiness and a correspondingly increased ability to cope 4
with life.11 The third movement takes as its starting point the popular song 5
known in France as ‘Frère Jacques’ and in Germany as ‘Bruder Martin’. It was 6
this movement that encountered the greatest hostility on the part of Mahler’s 7
contemporaries. Even in Vienna in 1900 there were objections to the opening 8
movement (it was customary at this period to react to individual movements, 9
especially in the case of new works). 10
For its part, the Scherzo was well received, whereas the third movement was 1
greeted with mocking laughter. Over a century ago audiences certainly found it 2
difficult to digest a movement that begins with the rhythm of a funeral march on 3
the muffled timpani and, over it, a strascinando double-bass solo playing the theme 4
of ‘Frère Jacques’. In this movement, Mahler explained, the hero has already lost his 5
appetite for life because he has found a hair in his soup. Mahler imagined a funeral 6
procession passing in front of the hero at this point in the symphony, its unchanging 7
pianissimo avoiding any sense of artifice as the band is supposed to be a poor one, 8
its strains mixing with the screeching and exuberant high spirits of another band of 9
Bohemian musicians that passes by, outside the cemetery walls. The hero certainly 20
sees the bitter irony and implacable polyphony of life in this brutal juxtaposition as 1
the individual sections are assembled using the sort of straight cuts familiar from 2
the cinema. The hero’s anguished lament is heard above it all. The dreamily quiet 3
middle section draws on the fourth of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, ‘Die zwei 4
blauen Augen von meinem Schatz’. In particular, it is the consoling second section 5
that is used here, ‘Auf der Straße steht ein Lindenbaum’. The glumly comic canon 6
then demands its due again, after which it is overlaid by the other elements. The 7
movement ends with a bewildered after-song – Adorno’s Abgesang. 8
After only the briefest pause to catch its breath, the work then continues 9
with its fourth and final movement, which begins with what Mahler termed a 30
‘terrible outburst’ that indicates the way in which the hero has become caught 1
up in a bitter struggle with the pain and sorrow of the world. ‘Time and again,’ 2
he explained, ‘the hero and, with him, the triumphant motif are struck on the 3
head by fate.’ It is only in death that the hero achieves true victory. The victori- 4
ous youthful theme from the opening movement returns, and the movement 5
ends with a ‘glorious victory chorale’. As with the Scherzo, we cannot help but 6
notice that for the last time in Mahler’s output this final movement is relatively 7
conventional, a conventionality that has nothing to do with the composer’s 8
notorious ‘banality’. Formally, too, he relies more heavily on elements of first- 9
movement sonata form, such elements – exposition, development section, 40
recapitulation and often a coda, too – normally being found in the opening 41R
156 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 movement of a solo sonata, quartet or symphony. In the opening movement of

2 his First Symphony, Mahler had struck out boldly in a new direction, and it
3 seems almost by way of compensation that he sought to ensure that the final
4 movement was more firmly embedded within the existing tradition. But a
5 more detailed analysis would be bound to conclude that however much the
6 formative forces may assert their ability to forge a bond between the disparate
7 elements, they never really succeed in achieving that goal.
8 Audiences were left largely at a loss by the new work. As a representative of
9 the older generation, the critic Eduard Hanslick shook his grizzled locks in
10 considerable perplexity when he heard the symphony in Vienna in 1900 – only
1 three years earlier he had vigorously championed Mahler’s cause as the new
2 director of the Vienna Court Opera: ‘As a genuine admirer of Director Mahler,
3 to whom the Opera and the Philharmonic concerts are so profoundly indebted,
4 I do not wish to judge his strange grand symphony with undue haste. But on
5 the other hand, I owe it to my readers to be honest and so I sadly confess that
6 this new symphony belongs to a type of music that in my own view is not music
7 at all.’12 The first performance in Budapest in 1889 had produced very similar
8 reactions, and the respected conductor was advised to stick to what he did best,
9 interpreting the works of the great composers rather than writing music of his
20 own. In Hamburg, Ferdinand Pfohl, who at this date was still friendly with
1 Mahler, disagreed with the widely held view and saw in the First Symphony an
2 outstanding, inspired work, while regretting that it lacked any sense of overall
3 structure that would have implied a specific goal and a sense of proportion.13
4 For a long time, critics – rather than audiences – continued to fret over the
5 First Symphony and to chew over the problem of programme music, taking
6 exception to the cuckoo calls, to the ‘Frère Jacques’ canon and to the final move-
7 ment, whose mixture of disruptive and conservative elements left them floun-
8 dering. Even by the date of the work’s final performance during its composer’s
9 lifetime, which Mahler himself conducted in New York in December 1909, the
30 situation remained unresolved, the critic of the New York Tribune, for example,
1 complaining that Mahler was a composer of programme music, albeit one
2 unwilling to admit to that fact. He was also ‘a naive though unoriginal
3 melodist’.14 By this date in his career, Mahler no longer had any patience with
4 this and similar criticisms. But he was aware that the performance had elicited
5 little response in its audience, and two days later he wrote to Bruno Walter:
6
7 I myself was pretty pleased with that youthful effort! All these works give me
8 a peculiar sensation when I conduct them. A burning pain crystallizes: what
9 a world this is that rejects such sounds and patterns as something antago-
40 nistic! Something like the funeral march and the storm that then breaks out
41R seem to me like a burning denunciation of the Creator.15
1
2
11 3
4
5
6
Life’s Vicissitudes: Leipzig 7
8
(1886–8) 9
10
1
2
3
come to Leipzig. It was Mahler’s first visit to a city whose 4
A ND SO WE
geographical location and urban landscape could not remotely compare
with those of Prague, but as a centre of music it was infinitely more important.
5
6
Even so, its importance had little to do with Johann Sebastian Bach, whose 7
activities as Thomaskantor and director musices from 1723 to his death in 1750 8
were too remote to have had any deep or lasting influence on the city’s musical 9
life, at least beyond the world of religious music. And even by the 1880s 20
the Bach revival still had a long way to go, in spite of the efforts of Felix 1
Mendelssohn, who had directed the famous Gewandhaus Orchestra from 2
1835 until his death in 1847. It is perhaps worth adding at this point that as a 3
student Mahler had had little contact with Bach’s music, and many more years 4
were to pass before he discovered it for himself. The Gewandhaus was arguably 5
the city’s greatest musical asset at this time, and both then and now it 6
was certainly more important than the opera. Its principal conductor at the 7
time of Mahler’s arrival in Leipzig was Carl Reinecke, who remained the 8
Gewandhaus’s music director until 1895, evincing a particular predilection for 9
the music of Brahms, who appeared regularly in the hall both as a pianist and 30
as a conductor. It was here in 1879, for example, that Joseph Joachim gave the 1
first public performance of Brahms’s Violin Concerto under the composer’s 2
own direction. But the most outstanding figure in the musical life of the city 3
was Mendelssohn, to whom Leipzig additionally owed its conservatory, an 4
institution that moved into its splendid new premises in the Grassistraße in 5
1887. So crucial was the role played by Mendelssohn and, later, Ferdinand 6
Hiller and Joseph Joachim that in 1869 Richard Wagner, who was born in 7
Leipzig in 1813, used the second edition of his diatribe Jews in Music to fulmi- 8
nate against what he called ‘the capital of the world of Jewish music’. By the end 9
of the century the Leipzig Conservatory was the country’s leading music 40
college, enjoying a reputation far higher than those of Munich and Berlin. 41R
158 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Schumann had once taught there, as had Ignaz Moscheles, Max Reger and
2 Joseph Joachim, while their pupils included musicians of the eminence of
3 Niels W. Gade, Edvard Grieg, Arthur Sullivan, the magnificent if pugnacious
4 Ethel Smyth and, finally, Frederick Delius: as an institution, the Leipzig
5 Conservatory enjoyed a reputation that extended far beyond the country’s
6 confines.
7 Finally, there was the Leipzig Opera, which had found a home for itself
8 in the city’s Schauspielhaus in 1766. Its successor, the Neues Stadttheater on
9 the Augustusplatz, opened in 1867 and was designed by the famous Berlin
10 architect Karl Ferdinand Langhans. The orchestra was provided by the
1 Gewandhaus, an arrangement similar to that found in Vienna, where the
2 Vienna Philharmonic also performs in the opera house. Albert Lortzing had
3 worked here, Schumann had conducted the first performances of his opera
4 Genoveva, and Angelo Neumann had built up the Wagner repertory before
5 leaving for Prague. Among Neumann’s assistants in Leipzig were Anton Seidl,
6 a conductor who, long associated with Wagner’s works, followed Neumann
7 to Prague. And then there was Arthur Nikisch, of whom Mahler was not a
8 little afraid but whose challenge to his authority he was none the less deter-
9 mined to see off. Of the many anecdotes about Nikisch, the most famous is no
20 doubt the one about a female member of Berlin’s social elite at a time when
1 Nikisch was principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic. The woman
2 apparently sat down in one of the front rows in the Philharmonic Hall and,
3 turning to her neighbour, said: ‘Please wake me when he starts to become
4 fascinating.’ Nikisch certainly had charisma, although this is not clear from his
5 few surviving recordings, which reveal a very matter-of-fact approach to the
6 score. (What would one not give to have a recording of Mahler conducting?
7 His Welte-Mignon piano rolls unfortunately tell us far too little about his work
8 on the podium.) A native of Hungary, Nikisch was five years older than Mahler
9 and had studied in Vienna, before joining the rank-and-file violins of the
30 Court Opera orchestra. He was still only eighteen. If the experience of hearing
1 Wagner conduct Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at the ceremony accompanying
2 the laying of the foundation stone of the Bayreuth Festival Theatre in 1872
3 etched itself indelibly on his memory, he was no less enthusiastic about Verdi
4 as a conductor when he heard him conduct Aida in Vienna in 1875. Nikisch
5 was also gifted as a composer, but such was his fear of being branded a writer
6 of ‘Kapellmeister music’ that he soon abandoned this alternative string to his
7 bow. He joined the Leipzig Opera as chorus master in 1878, while Neumann
8 was still running the company, and was soon its undisputed principal
9 conductor. On the podium, he was notable for the extreme economy of his
40 gestures, a point that applied to Mahler only in the very last years of his life.
41R His colleague Erich Kleiber later used to wonder how Nikisch was able to
LIFE’S VICISSITUDES: LEIPZIG 159
unleash such powerful crescendos merely by slowly raising his left hand. Like 1
Mahler, Nikisch left his players considerable latitude in terms of rubato. His 2
secret seems to have been to suggest a whole world of expression by means of 3
the most understated of gestures. Mahler was fully aware of what he might 4
expect in Leipzig. (It is unclear if the two men had met in Vienna.) 5
Once again we have a chance to observe the skill and sophistication but also 6
the ruthlessness with which Mahler sought to turn the situation to his own 7
advantage. Even while he was still in Prague, he attempted to take soundings 8
and prepare the ground. He was convinced that Nikisch was a ‘jealous and 9
capable rival’. But perhaps he himself had cause to be jealous as the younger 10
and less well known of the two?1 As the young star of Leipzig’s musical scene, 1
Nikisch was undoubtedly ‘capable’, but why should he be jealous of a largely 2
unknown conductor from Prague? Mahler then attempted to persuade the 3
company’s director, Max Staegemann, to let him make his debut with 4
Tannhäuser, a piece with which he was sure he could make his mark, but his 5
démarche backfired and instead he was offered Lohengrin, a work in which the 6
conductor has fewer opportunities to shine, even though it is a much more 7
difficult piece to conduct. When Mahler finally arrived in Leipzig and was 8
able to observe Nikisch at work, he was honest enough to admit that his 9
colleague was an excellent conductor, albeit with an important qualification: 20
‘His conducting often gives me considerable pleasure and so I can watch a 1
performance under him as confidently as if I were conducting it myself – 2
even though the greatest heights and the greatest depths are a closed book to 3
him.’2 Ultimately, Mahler may have been right, of course, but his verdict seems 4
hasty and far too definitive when we recall what little opportunity he had had 5
to observe his colleague at work. Consumed by his own enthusiasm, he also 6
complained that Nikisch was cold and reserved towards him – but this was 7
only to be expected. 8
True to form, Mahler lost little time in seeking to take control of the situa- 9
tion, while at the same time overestimating his own abilities – this, too, was 30
symptomatic of a conductor who was convinced of his own youthful genius, 1
even if not everyone shared that view of him. He had been in Leipzig for only 2
three months, and he was already looking for trouble. And so we find him 3
writing to Staegemann and demanding to be allowed to conduct two of the 4
four Ring operas alongside Nikisch, brazenly claiming that there had been 5
a tacit agreement between them,3 an agreement presumably so tacit that 6
Staegemann could not even remember it. But Mahler had certainly not been 7
sold short, for he was allowed to conduct all the major works from Meyerbeer’s 8
Le Prophète and Les Huguenots to Halévy’s La Juive, a work about which he was 9
hugely enthusiastic. Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and Tannhäuser also 40
fell to his fiefdom. But the Ring has always been the preserve of a company’s 41R
160 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 principal conductor, and a division of labour is as unusual now as it was in the

2 1880s. In an attempt to exert more pressure, Mahler even threatened to resign.
3 Matters quickly came to a head. Nikisch received an offer to run the Budapest
4 Opera, although in the event Mahler himself went to Budapest before Nikisch,
5 who did not take up the post there until 1893. Meanwhile, Mahler himself
6 seems to have had three different irons in the fire in the form of offers of
7 work from the Hamburg Opera, the Karlsruhe Opera, where he would
8 have succeeded the self-avowed Wagnerian Felix Mottl, and Prague, where
9 Neumann was trying to lure him back. Later he also received a call from New
10 York, where he was invited to take over Anton Seidl’s old position. For some of
1 these offers we have only Mahler’s own testimony, but we may well believe
2 him, not least because his reputation as an immensely gifted opera conductor
3 was already beginning to spread with tremendous speed. In the event, the
4 crisis passed. Nikisch did not go to Budapest, and for the present Mahler
5 remained in Leipzig, even contriving to work out a tolerable modus vivendi
6 with Nikisch. During the early months of 1887 Nikisch even had cause to be
7 grateful to Mahler when a pulmonary infection reduced him to weeks of inac-
8 tivity and Mahler had to take over all his commitments, appearing almost
9 every evening in the pit of the Leipzig Opera.
20 Never before had Mahler had to work so hard, and it is unlikely that he ever
1 learnt as much professionally as he did in these few short weeks between
2 February and May 1887. He could now show what he was worth in the works
3 that had previously been Nikisch’s preserve. He felt that to all intents and
4 purposes he was Nikisch’s equal, and in this he was undoubtedly justified.
5 Above all, he was allowed to conduct the whole of the Ring, a privilege which
6 only a short time earlier he had fought to achieve for entirely selfish ends. The
7 orchestra liked Nikisch and however much the players may have admired
8 Mahler’s abilities, they kept their distance, a distance that was to remain a
9 feature of Mahler’s career throughout the rest of his life. He was not the sort
30 of conductor who could quickly gain the affection of his players. There was
1 always more respect and even fear than love. A comment by one of his orches-
2 tral players later did the rounds: ‘It’s as if we’d been plain daft before Herr
3 Mahler came along, as if it had needed him to come from Prague to show
4 us what piano means, as if we could never get on without new flashy tricks all
5 the time – if Nikisch doesn’t get better soon, the whole orchestra’s going to be
6 off sick.’4 The Leipzig Council records also contain a complaint from the
7 orchestra’s committee, asking for the council’s ‘protection and support’ in the
8 face of ‘the unworthy way’ in which it was allegedly being treated by its new
9 conductor, who was said to be placing ‘impossible demands’ on them, while
40 those who failed to meet his unreasonably high standards were accused of
41R ‘malice and stubbornness’.5 Mahler could count himself fortunate that his boss,
Max Staegemann, stood by him and protected him. With the thoughtlessness 1
that was typical of him, Mahler even claimed in a letter to Löhr that the battle 2
over control of Leipzig’s operatic life would soon be resolved in his favour 3
thanks to his own ‘physical superiority. I don’t think that Nikisch will stand the 4
pace, and sooner or later he will take himself off.’6 This was the Darwinian 5
spirit of the age speaking, and Mahler made no secret of his feelings when 6
discussing a colleague he did not like and who was standing in his way – this 7
characteristic, too, is part of our picture of a man who, for all his genius, was 8
often far from philanthropic in his dealings with others. In the event, Mahler’s 9
predictions proved unfounded, and Nikisch saw off his rival, leaving Mahler 10
to quit the battlefield in defeat. Nikisch later took over the Gewandhaus 1
Orchestra and, later still, the Berlin Philharmonic, increasingly turning away 2
from opera and concentrating instead on concerts. For his part, Mahler ran 3
three companies, in Budapest, Hamburg and Vienna, and it was only at the end 4
of his life that he became a proper concert conductor in New York. Previously 5
he had conducted concerts only when it was a question of promoting his own 6
works, while his brief stint as principal conductor of the Vienna Philharmonic 7
brought him more annoyance than pleasure. That the ‘physically inferior’ 8
Nikisch outlived Mahler by more than a decade is another story. Be that 9
as it may, Nikisch and Mahler were the two leading conductors of the years 20
between 1890 and 1911, however remote their fields of activity, so it is a pity 1
that the pressure on them to appear as rivals was so great. 2
Mahler led a lonely life in Leipzig, where his watchword was ‘work, and more 3
work’. It was in any case not in his nature to forge friendships quickly, and, 4
unlike so many other members of opera-house ensembles, he was never the life 5
and soul of the company canteen. The complaints levelled at him by the players 6
were presumably shared by their colleagues among the singers. But if there were 7
singers who he felt were making a serious artistic effort, then he could be 8
cordial and even friendly – this was certainly true of the bass Karl Perron, who 9
sang Ochs in the first performances of Der Rosenkavalier in Dresden in 1911, 30
and the young Paul Knüpfer, who went on to become principal bass at the 1
Berlin Court Opera. But if Mahler felt that the singers were pretentious or idle, 2
vain or only superficially interested in their art, he found it almost physically 3
impossible to conceal his revulsion. At no point in his life did he find it easy to 4
admit his indebtedness to others, and in gaining an audience for his own music 5
he had to learn the hard way that it is unwise always to speak one’s mind. Once, 6
at a party in Leipzig, a man who played a not unimportant part in the city’s 7
musical life and who at this date was certainly more influential than Mahler 8
ventured a mild criticism of one of Wagner’s opinions, prompting Mahler 9
to reply, tight-lipped: ‘When Wagner has spoken, one holds one’s tongue.’ 40
Sometimes he managed to cloak his negative views in sarcasm or, at best, irony. 41R
162 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 At another party, an ambitious young composer performed a new piece called

2 Im stillen Tal (In the Quiet Vale) in the most romantic salonesque style of the
3 period. Mahler suffered unspeakably, but even the other guests realized that the
4 piece had little merit. When the young composer ended his rendition and was
5 greeted by an embarrassed silence, Mahler leapt to his feet and enthusiastically
6 shook the younger man’s hand: ‘That was the real thing! I recognize the valley,
7 I think I know where it is. It’s in Styria! Thank you so much.’
8 The first person in Leipzig to welcome the recalcitrant Mahler with open
9 arms and accept him into his own family circle was his boss, Max Staegemann,
10 whose two attractive daughters provided an agreeable diversion for Mahler,
1 whose feelings were always easily inflamed, although in the present instance
2 nothing came of it all. In the case of his contact with another local family, by
3 contrast, there were to be far-reaching consequences of both a personal and an
4 artistic nature. The family in question was that of Carl von Weber, a captain in
5 a Leipzig regiment. Mahler had hitherto felt no great affection for members
6 of the military, but Carl von Weber was no ordinary captain, for he was the
7 grandson of Carl Maria von Weber, whose unpublished papers he owned. In
8 1821 Carl Maria von Weber had worked intensively on an opera, Die drei
9 Pintos, that was intended to be his contribution to the comic operas of his age.
20 Although he continued to work on the project between then and his death in
1 1826, the opera was far from complete. There were musical drafts for seven
2 out of a total of seventeen numbers, although even these were hard to decipher
3 and sketched out in only the most rudimentary form. Of the surviving 1,700
4 or so bars, only eighteen had been orchestrated. Weber’s widow, Caroline,
5 was not very hopeful when she passed on the surviving material to Giacomo
6 Meyerbeer – an early friend of her husband’s – and asked him to take it with
7 him to Paris in 1826 and, if possible, complete it. Whatever his reasons,
8 Meyerbeer returned it to Caroline twenty-five years later, without any indica-
9 tion that he had worked on the sketches or even that he had looked through
30 them. Weber’s son, Max Maria, made a second attempt to have the opera
1 completed and asked the composer and conductor Vincenz Lachner to under-
2 take the task, only for Lachner, too, to decline the invitation. Mahler, whose
3 great admiration for Weber’s music was due in part to the fact that Wagner,
4 too, had set such great store by it, was introduced to Weber and his wife at Max
5 Staegemann’s house, and it was not long before he was a regular visitor to the
6 Webers’ home as well, the frequency of his visits encouraged not only by Carl
7 Maria’s unpublished papers but also by the lady of the house, Marion von
8 Weber, who was four years older than Mahler and the mother of three children
9 aged between six and nine.
40 Marion von Weber was undoubtedly the first great love of Mahler’s life, his
41R violent passion for Johanna Richter and his more temperate infatuation with
Betty Frank being no more than the usual adolescent affairs on the part of a 1
hot-blooded young man. But the present liaison was different, or perhaps it 2
would be more accurate to say that it appears to have been different, for we 3
know even less about the present relationship than we do about its two prede- 4
cessors. Little documentary evidence has survived that would allow us to say 5
much that is certain about the precise course and character of the affair, and 6
yet what evidence there is is irrefutable. Whether or not we may believe every- 7
thing that we read in the reminiscences of the distinguished English composer 8
and suffragette Ethel Smyth, who was a frequent visitor to the Webers’ home 9
at this time, will probably never be ultimately established, but her comments 10
on the impression that Mahler made on her appear to be an accurate reflection 1
of her keen-eyed powers of perception and ability to turn an apposite phrase. 2
After all, what she writes is merely a more pointed expression of the impres- 3
sions left on many other of Mahler’s contemporaries. She was, she explains, 4
‘too young and raw then to appreciate this grim personality, intercourse with 5
whom was like handling a bomb cased in razor-edges’.7 6
In one of the first letters that he wrote to Friedrich Löhr from Leipzig, 7
Mahler mentions having met ‘a beautiful person – the sort that tempts one to 8
do foolish things’. According to Löhr himself, Mahler was referring here to 9
Marion von Weber, and although this is by no means certain, it is not improb- 20
able. Löhr, after all, must have known the true facts of the matter as he was 1
probably the only person at this time with whom Mahler discussed his 2
heartache. Conversely, a second letter from early January 1888 undoubtedly 3
refers to his ménage à trois with Carl and Marion von Weber. The few lines 4
that he writes to Löhr are ‘all I can manage now in this trilogy of the passions 5
and whirlwind of life! Everything in me and around me is in a state of 6
becoming! Nothing is! Let me have just a little longer to see it through! Then 7
you shall know all!’8 Unfortunately no subsequent letter makes good this 8
promise, and so we remain in the dark. Should we believe Ethel Smyth when 9
she writes that Carl von Weber was robbed of his reason by Mahler’s affair with 30
his wife, so much so that he suddenly pulled out his revolver in a train and 1
started taking potshots at the headrests between the seats before being dragged 2
away to an asylum? According to a more credible version of events, the couple 3
planned to elope, but Mahler could hardly have kept his lover in the style to 4
which she was accustomed, quite apart from the problem of her three children. 5
The couple did not elope, therefore, and with Mahler’s departure from Leipzig, 6
his passion seems to have waned. None the less, there is no doubt that Mahler’s 7
love of Marion von Weber was an important factor in the genesis of his First 8
Symphony, on which he began work in January 1888. The affair seems, more- 9
over, to have been an open secret, Leipzig’s artists being prone to gossip, and it 40
is said that Carl von Weber tolerated his wife’s affair only out of fear of a 41R
164 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 scandal that could have cost him his military career. Certainly, it seems
2 remarkable that he did not forbid Mahler to set foot in his house, which he
3 could have done without causing a scandal. Not only the First Symphony, but
4 the swift, even hasty genesis of Die drei Pintos was inspired by Marion von
5 Weber. Other composers may have turned down the challenge, but Mahler
6 succeeded in completing the sketches during a few brief weeks in the summer
7 of 1887, a summer additionally interrupted by visits to see his family in
8 Iglau, to Friedrich Löhr in Vienna and Perchtoldsdorf and a walking tour
9 from Bad Reichenhall to Innsbruck, where Mahler met Rudolf and Heinrich
10 Krzyzanowski, with whom he continued his journey on foot to Lake Starnberg.
1 A private performance of the as yet unfinished score of Die drei Pintos took
2 place at Max Staegemann’s home on 28 August, and only a few weeks later
3 Staegemann was able to inform Carl von Weber that the score was complete. The
4 opera received its first official performance to loud acclaim at the Leipzig Theatre
5 on 20 January 1888, Mahler himself conducting. Shortly beforehand, Mahler had
6 had an encounter with a younger colleague that was to prove momentous. The
7 twenty-three-year-old Richard Strauss was then the third conductor at the Munich
8 Court Opera. The Gewandhaus Orchestra was performing his early symphony in
9 F minor, and Strauss came to Leipzig for the occasion. Mahler and Strauss were
20 presumably introduced by Max Steinitzer, who was then one of Mahler’s few
1 friends in Leipzig and who went on to become a committed Straussian, writing
2 one of the earliest biographies of the Munich-born composer. The encounter must
3 have taken place at around the time of the concert, possibly on 13 October 1887,
4 and it led to contacts between the two composers which, although marked by
5 tensions, lasted until Mahler’s death. Their dealings could never be described as a
6 true friendship, for both men were too different in terms of their character and
7 compositional aims, but in their very different ways they felt a mutual respect for
8 each other’s work.
9 Mahler’s completion and adaptation of Die drei Pintos is an undoubted
30 masterpiece, as readers can judge for themselves following a recording of the
1 work in 1976. In the final years of the nineteenth century the opera enjoyed a
2 tremendous vogue and was staged by many leading companies, although its
3 star then set with equal rapidity. As Natalie Bauer-Lechner noted, Mahler
4 proudly informed his family and friends that large sections of the score were
5 his own work. It had taken him a long time, he explained, to decipher the
6 sketches, which were written in a kind of shorthand, but once he had found the
7 key, everything had proceeded more or less automatically. He had initially
8 been worried that he had, as it were, been commissioned by Weber himself to
9 complete the score, but the more he worked on it, the more confident he
40 became, adopting a freer approach and adding material of his own so that in
41R the end two-thirds of the finished opera could reasonably be said to be by
Mahler, albeit Weberian in spirit. Mahler was hugely amused by the fact that 1
the passages that were most Mahlerian were regarded by the critics as partic- 2
ularly typical of Weber. The work was later described as an opera ‘by Mahler 3
out of Weber’, a description that is by no means wholly inaccurate. And to the 4
extent that Mahler never wrote another opera – Mahlerians continue to argue 5
over whether this is a good or a bad thing – we must regard Die drei Pintos as 6
the composer’s particular legacy. When listening to it on a recording, we are 7
bound to wonder why the work is not performed more often. After all, there is 8
hardly such a glut of German comic operas as to justify this neglect. 9
Mahler spent no more than six weeks completing Die drei Pintos and imme- 10
diately threw himself into a further round of feverish activity, conducting a 1
performance of Tannhäuser in the presence of Cosima Wagner on 13 November 2
1887 that marked the start of her interest in his work. It was an interest that 3
lasted until well after Mahler had moved to Vienna as director of the city’s Court 4
Opera. The effect of the performance on her emerges from a letter that she wrote 5
some months later to Hermann Levi. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to 6
refer to the impression left on Cosima by Mahler himself, for there is no doubt 7
that he will have been introduced to her: after all, Cosima’s visits to German 8
opera houses resembled nothing so much as state occasions. Levi had evidently 9
drawn her attention to a fellow Jewish conductor as he knew that Bayreuth and, 20
in particular, Cosima Wagner was always on the lookout for talented young 1
musicians. ‘I know Kapellmeister Mahler,’ Cosima replied. ‘I heard a Tannhäuser 2
of his; the performance was worse than I would have thought possible in the 3
light of all that we now know; but he himself left a not insignificant impression.’9 4
Given the circumstances and in the wake of Wagner’s pamphlet on Jews in 5
Music, this was no mean praise from the composer’s widow. 6
The triumphant opening of Die drei Pintos in Leipzig was followed by 7
productions of Weber’s ‘new’ opera in many other houses, the work proving 8
a veritable sensation, while the royalties that Mahler secured for himself 9
provided him for the first time in his life with more money than he required 30
for his immediate needs and for the support of his family in Iglau. A few days 1
after the first night, he met Tchaikovsky, who was attending a performance of 2
Don Giovanni in Leipzig – the two men were to get to know each other rather 3
better in Hamburg. In mid-February 1888 he went back to work on his First 4
Symphony, which he completed in a frenzy of inspiration in a matter of only 5
six weeks. In this he was additionally helped by the theatre’s ten-day closure 6
following the death of Kaiser Wilhelm I on 9 March 1888. Later, in conversa- 7
tion with Natalie Bauer-Lechner, Mahler adopted a far more discreet tone, 8
speaking of the way in which Marion von Weber’s ‘musical, radiant and 9
aspiring nature gave my life new meaning’.10 Natalie, who was herself unhap- 40
pily and hopelessly in love with Mahler, will have drawn her own conclusions 41R
166 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 from his unusually effusive expression. ‘All of a sudden all the sluice-gates
2 in me opened!’ Mahler wrote to Friedrich Löhr in the context of his First
3 Symphony.11 At no other point in his life did the creative process prove so
4 abrupt and volcanically eruptive.
5 But it suddenly seemed as if his stay in Leipzig would be brought to a
6 premature end. Perhaps the hopelessness of his feelings for Marion von Weber
7 left him disenchanted with the city and with his work there. Moreover,
8 Nikisch’s illness had meant that he had now conducted all the works that inter-
9 ested him, while Die drei Pintos had proved a sensation far beyond the city,
10 his reputation as the man who completed Weber’s opera for a long time
1 outweighing that of the conductor and composer. But he had failed to achieve
2 one of his principal goals, which was to supplant Nikisch and persuade his
3 rival to move on. One has the impression that Mahler himself may even
4 have provoked the Goldberg Affair that ultimately led to his departure from
5 Leipzig, for only in this way could he find an excuse for behaving as he did
6 towards Max Staegemann, who had welcomed him into his family circle with
7 such warmth and cordiality. Albert Goldberg was the senior stage manager
8 at the Leipzig Opera and according to the company regulations was Mahler’s
9 superior. It seems that the two men had a very public row in the course
20 of which Goldberg screamed at his subordinate: ‘You won’t be conducting
1 here again!’12 Thus, at least, we gather from Mahler’s letter to Staegemann.
2 Mahler sought to interpret this as a dismissal, which it was not, because only
3 Staegemann could dismiss his assistant conductor. But Staegemann had
4 evidently realized that he could no longer keep his young firebrand of a
5 conductor and may also have seen the problems raised by Mahler’s associa-
6 tion with the Webers. Whatever the answer, Staegemann agreed to Mahler’s
7 request, and at the end of May the local newspapers reported on the
8 conductor’s dismissal. A few days earlier Mahler had asked to be relieved of all
9 his remaining duties throughout the rest of the season, and this wish, too, was
30 granted. By 17 May 1888 his stimulating and fruitful stint in Leipzig was over.
1 Within days Mahler had left for Munich, where he met Heinrich
2 Krzyzanowski. The two men then visited Lake Starnberg, as they had done the
3 previous year. Mahler spent the month of June in Iglau and, having broken the
4 symphonic ice, worked on ‘Todtenfeier’, which was to become the opening
5 movement of his Second Symphony. But he had no new post to look forward
6 to, and as always this made him extremely nervous. He knew what he was
7 worth and what he could do. Nor was he in any doubt about his own genius.
8 Long after he had taken up his post at the Vienna Court Opera, he continued
9 to suffer from a sense of existential anxiety due in part, but not entirely, to the
40 fact that initially he also had to look after his brothers and sisters and, later, his
41R own family. And yet he must have known that in the light of the reputation that
he had already acquired, it would be easy for him to find a new post. But his 1
fears outweighed all other considerations. An interim solution presented itself 2
in the form of a part-time contract with his former place of employment in 3
Prague, where he was initially to rehearse and conduct five performances 4
of Die drei Pintos, which opened on 18 August. Other work was also envisaged, 5
but here, too, Mahler fell out with his employer, his old patron Angelo 6
Neumann, so that these plans, too, came to nothing. In addition to all these 7
worries, Mahler was also preoccupied with the first performance of his First 8
Symphony. He had realized that it was not the sort of work that would be 9
welcomed with open arms by every court orchestra in the land. With typical 10
skill he exploited his contacts with his ‘dear colleague’ in Munich, Richard 1
Strauss, and asked whether Hermann Levi, the Court Kapellmeister whose 2
attention had already been drawn to him, might be persuaded to perform the 3
piece. A reply from Strauss has not survived, but we know from a much later 4
account that he and Levi played through the symphony’s Funeral March on the 5
piano and that both men were much taken by its originality. Even so, their 6
interest did not lead to a performance of the work in Munich, and it was not 7
until over a year later, on 20 November 1889, that the First Symphony – with 8
‘Blumine’ as its second movement – was heard in Budapest, where Mahler had 9
been working since October 1888, following an unexpected offer that he 20
hesitated before accepting. 1
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5
6
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41R
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7 Notes on Mahler’s Songs
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4 composer who did not just write lieder on the side, as
5
6
M AHLER WAS A
Strauss or Wagner did. Nor did he compose only lieder, as his student
friend Hugo Wolf did. His emotionally powerful songs stand somewhat apart
7 from those of his contemporaries and of his immediate predecessors such
8 as Brahms, Wolf, Pfitzner and Reger, for all that they reflect his attempts to
9 gain a firmer foothold with his audiences than he was able to achieve with
20 his symphonies. In this he was only partially successful, his songs enjoying a
1 hierarchy of popularity extending from the much-loved Lieder eines fahrenden
2 Gesellen at the one extreme to the Rückert Lieder at the other. Mahler’s
3 songs stand apart from those of his contemporaries not only by dint of their
4 compositional style but also in their choice of words. The predominance of the
5 Wunderhorn poems on the one hand and the poetry of Rückert on the other
6 (no other song composer seems as restricted in his choice of words as Mahler)
7 appeared strange even in Mahler’s own day. Even Brahms, who could hardly be
8 described as a keen advocate of the latest trends in literature, set the words of
9 contemporary poets such as Hermann Allmers, Karl Lemcke and Detlev von
30 Liliencron. Strauss, for his part, was at the very forefront of the avant-garde
1 in his choice of poets: John Henry Mackay, Otto Julius Bierbaum, Richard
2 Dehmel, Oskar Panizza, Carl Busse, Christian Morgenstern – no composer of
3 Strauss’s generation could possibly have done more to promote contemporary
4 poetry. Hans Pfitzner set verse by Dehmel and Ludwig Jacobowski, while only
5 Hugo Wolf reveals a comparably conservative tendency in anthologies such as
6 his Spanisches and Italienisches Liederbuch and Michelangelo Lieder. Mörike
7 was for Wolf what Rückert was for Mahler, and yet even Mörike was more
8 modern as a poet than Rückert.
9 A further aspect of Mahler’s songs is their dovetailing of the old and the
40 new. None of these songs reveals any of the audacities in their formal design
41R or metrical subtleties or even the harmonic experiments found in his later
NOTES ON MAHLER’S SONGS 169
works. As we have already seen, Mahler was in general no revolutionary keen 1

to explore and extend the language of music. Rather, he used a largely tradi- 2
tional language to express unusual ideas that had previously been thought of 3
as inexpressible. His famous claim that writing symphonies was synonymous 4
with creating a world using all the resources of an existing technique makes 5
sense only if the reader consciously underlines the word ‘existing’. The world 6
of Mahler’s songs is more limited, ‘smaller’ and easier to grasp than that of 7
his symphonies, so that the technique involved in writing them is also more 8
restricted. In his symphonies – or at least from the Fifth onwards – he explores 9
the outer limits of his musical world, whereas in his songs he remains well 10
within those confines. But within this context of a certain simplicity in terms 1
of both the material and the musical language, Mahler achieves a degree of 2
expression that comes close to that of his symphonies, especially in his later 3
songs. In Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Hans Sachs broods on 4
Walther’s Trial Song: ‘It sounded so old, and yet it was new, like birdsong in 5
sweet May.’ This same feeling is engendered in the listener by Mahler’s 6
songs. Much of what we hear sounds superficially familiar, but the sheer force 7
of the expression then creates an impression that is both strange and deeply 8
disturbing. 9
And there is something else: the songs and symphonies are related in ways 20
that are sometimes covert and sometimes overt, but with no other composer 1
in the whole history of music are these links as close. It would never have 2
occurred to Brahms, for example, to use material from his many songs in one 3
of his symphonies. For him, the boundaries between the two genres were too 4
strict, just as they were for Beethoven. But for Mahler the situation was alto- 5
gether different, a point that emerges with particular clarity from those of the 6
later songs that come closest to the symphonies in terms of their sonorities and 7
expressive power. And of no songs is this more true than it is of ‘Revelge’ and 8
the last of the Kindertotenlieder, ‘In diesem Wetter, in diesem Braus’. But even 9
in the first four symphonies, which for good reason have been dubbed the 30
Wunderhorn symphonies, we can see how even far more innocuous songs may 1
acquire a symphonic weight that had initially seemed improbable. Writers 2
on the later symphonies have repeatedly observed that the Kindertotenlieder 3
represent a kind of hidden germ cell. If the fourth of them, ‘Oft denk ich, sie 4
sind nur ausgegangen’, plays such a key role in the final movement of the Ninth 5
Symphony, a vast power must have been concentrated within its formal 6
confines. Das Lied von der Erde, finally, is the culmination of this increasing 7
dovetailing of song and symphony, a process realized in a large-scale song that 8
is subtitled a symphony.1 9
If we ignore Mahler’s earliest songs from the period around 1880, his lieder 40
can be divided into three major groups. First, there are the four Lieder eines 41R
170 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 fahrenden Gesellen of 1884–5. Second, there are the songs from Des Knaben
2 Wunderhorn, which can be subdivided in turn into three smaller groups:
3 first, the nine early songs that were published in 1892 together with some of
4 the even earlier Lieder und Gesänge but which are not part of the corpus of
5 songs generally heard in the concert hall under the title ‘Wunderhorn Lieder’;
6 they include ‘Ich ging mit Lust durch einen grünen Wald’, ‘Zu Straßburg auf
7 der Schanz’ and ‘Scheiden und Meiden’. The second part of this subgroup
8 comprises the more famous Wunderhorn songs such as ‘Der Schildwache
9 Nachtlied’, ‘Das irdische Leben’, ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ and
10 ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’. And the third subgroup is made up of just
1 two songs, the late Wunderhorn settings of ‘Revelge’ and ‘Der Tamboursg’sell’,
2 both of which date from 1899–1901 and represent the high point of Mahler’s
3 enthusiasm for Des Knaben Wunderhorn. The third group, finally, comprises
4 the ten Rückert settings, a group that can again be divided into two separate
5 subgroups, namely, the five songs generally known as the Rückert Lieder and
6 the five Kindertotenlieder.
7 The Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen are unlikely to have been written before
8 1885. At the start of that year, Mahler wrote to his friend Friedrich Löhr from
9 Kassel:
20
1 I’ve written a cycle of songs, six of them so far, all of them dedicated to her
2 [Johanna Richter]. She doesn’t know them. What can they tell her but what she
3 already knows? I’ll enclose the final song herewith, although the inadequate
4 words cannot render even a small part of it. – The idea of the songs as a whole
5 is that of a wayfaring man who has been stricken by fate and who now sets
6 forth into the world, travelling wherever his road may lead him.2
7
8 These lines do not necessarily prove that Mahler had completed these songs by
9 this date, for the opening phrase may simply mean that he had written the
30 words. Certainly, his reference to the ‘inadequate words’ of the final song would
1 suggest that he was thinking only of the poems here, a suggestion underscored
2 by the mention of six songs: as we know, Mahler set only four of them. Even so,
3 he must have worked on the music in parallel with the poems and completed
4 all four settings in the course of 1885. The words of the first song have given rise
5 to much head-scratching. By his own account, Mahler did not get to know
6 Arnim and Brentano’s anthology of Des Knaben Wunderhorn until 1887, by
7 which date he was already in Leipzig, and yet, as we have noted, this song already
8 includes verbal borrowings from two dance songs from the collection, borrow-
9 ings that cannot be the result of mere chance. Perhaps, then, this first song was
40 written somewhat later than the rest. Mahler’s achievement becomes all the
41R more striking when we compare his settings with Rudolf Baumbach’s successful
collection of poems that appeared under the same title in 1878. We do not know 1
whether Mahler knew this anthology, but he may have come across its title, even 2
if he then forgot where he found it. At all events, he evidently had no qualms 3
about taking it over. Baumbach introduces his wayfarer with the lines: 4
5
Bin ein fahrender Gesell, 6
Kenne keine Sorgen. 7
Labt mich heut der Felsenquell, 8
Tut es Rheinwein morgen. 9
Bin ein Ritter lobesan, 10
Reit auf Schusters Rappen, 1
Führ’ den lockren Zeisighahn 2
Und den Spruch im Wappen: 3
Lustig Blut und leichter Sinn, 4
Hin ist hin, hin ist hin. 5
Amen.3 6
7
[I’m a wayfaring fellow and have no cares. If the mountain spring refreshes 8
me today, then Rhineland wine will do so tomorrow. I’m a worthy knight and 9
ride on Shanks’s pony, I’m a bit of a lad, and the motto on my coat of arms is: 20
Merry blood and carefree mind, what’s done is done. Amen]. 1
2
Baumbach peers through industrially manufactured bull’s-eye windows and 3
sees a synthetic world full of wandering scholars and itinerant journeymen in 4
which the different centuries merge according to the whim of the poet, the 5
worlds of medieval minstrelsy and the mail coach entering into a kind of forced 6
marriage. (The song ‘Hoch auf dem gelben Wagen’ that is still popular today 7
comes from Baumbach’s collection.) For his part, Mahler goes back to Wilhelm 8
Müller and Schubert and transforms the verse of Des Knaben Wunderhorn into 9
confessional poetry based on personal experience. Its linguistic autonomy may 30
be poorly developed, but there is no denying the immediacy of the experiences 1
in which it is grounded. 2
In Schubert’s cycle, the miller’s apprentice announces his delight in travel- 3
ling the countryside. In Mahler’s case this delight is transferred to the wayfarer. 4
There is no doubt that this debt to Schubert’s song cycle has played a role in 5
the abiding popularity of Mahler’s Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Of all his 6
songs, these are the ones that comply most obviously with the formal demands 7
of the traditional German lieder repertory. With their regular form, the first 8
two songs adopt a ‘leisurely’ tone, whereas the third song – ‘Ich hab ein 9
glühend Messer’ – is already typically Mahlerian, the wayfarer expressing his 40
jealousy and his unhappiness in outbursts remarkable for their wildly jagged 41R
172 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 lines. Here, too, the model is readily identifiable, of course: in both ‘Der
2 Jäger’ and ‘Eifersucht und Stolz’ in Die schöne Müllerin, Schubert had already
3 depicted these same moods in the form of two concentrated miniatures, but
4 now the miniature has become a profoundly expressive theatrical monologue.
5 (It may be added in passing that Mahler never developed a deeper under-
6 standing of Schubert’s music.) The final song, ‘Die zwei blauen Augen’, is
7 in marked contrast. It is as if the wayfarer has fallen into a catatonic state,
8 the song’s narrow range bordering on the monotonous and approaching
9 Sprechgesang. And yet Mahler asks the singer to perform the song ‘with a
10 mysteriously melancholic expression’, a demand that is almost impossible to
1 meet, so clearly circumscribed is the range of expression. Any attempt to meet
2 the composer’s demand risks sliding into caricature. Even in his earliest fully
3 fledged songs, the young Mahler already poses more riddles than the sheer
4 verve of their performance can solve.
5 As we have already noted, the Lieder und Gesänge from Des Knaben
6 Wunderhorn do not form a coherent group, still less do they constitute a cycle.
7 They accompanied their composer over a period of some dozen years and ceased
8 to interest him only once he was working on his middle-period symphonies. In
9 March 1905, at the height of this phase, he wrote retrospectively to the critic
20 Ludwig Karpath, offering a detailed account of the world of the Wunderhorn
1 songs. Here he stresses that he was the only composer who for a long time took
2 his song texts from this book. Mahler was right to insist on this point. There are
3 other settings of Wunderhorn poems, even by Strauss and Eugen d’Albert.
4 But they remain exceptions. The only composer who set a larger group of
5 Wunderhorn texts was the now almost entirely forgotten Theodor Streicher,
6 whom Mahler knew, even if he held him in low esteem. The pseudo-archaic tone
7 that was otherwise so popular in the second half of the nineteenth century is one
8 that composers clearly preferred to adopt at third hand: Strauss, for example, set
9 poems by Felix Dahn, and a number of composers set verse by Rudolf Baumbach.
30 But Mahler goes on:
1
2 Another difference is that I have devoted myself heart and soul to that poetry
3 (which is essentially different from any other kind of ‘literary poetry’, and
4 might almost be called something more like Nature and Life – in other
5 words, the sources of all poetry – than art) in full awareness of its character
6 and tone.4
7
8 Mahler’s view of Des Knaben Wunderhorn as ‘natural poetry’ may strike modern
9 readers as strange. After all, we now have a clearer idea than Mahler of the
40 Romantic and highly artificial view of ‘Nature’ and tradition held by Arnim and
41R Brentano, but a composer fond of reading Brentano’s fairytale Gockel, Hinkel and
Gackeleia to his daughter clearly believed unconditionally in the Romantic 1

notion of the folk and of Nature. Our earlier chapter on Mahler’s literary 2
leanings has already addressed the question of his response to the Wunderhorn 3
poems, a response notable for its mixture of shock and immediacy. 4
The full range of Mahler’s Wunderhorn world becomes clear to listeners 5
only when they can hear all his settings one after the other. Mathias Hansen 6
had convincingly argued that these songs should be subdivided into three 7
smaller groups. The first contains all the songs dominated by dance rhythms 8
drawn from the world of folk music. Examples include ‘Trost im Unglück’, 9
‘Rheinlegendchen’ and ‘Es sungen drei Engel’, a song better known as the fifth 10
movement of the Third Symphony. (This is not the place to discuss the complex 1
relationship between the piano and orchestral versions of the Wunderhorn 2
songs.) A second subgroup comprises songs that are satirical, critical or admon- 3
itory in tone. ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ is undoubtedly the best 4
known of this subgroup, once again familiar from its orchestral manifestation 5
in the third movement of the Second Symphony. The third and smallest 6
subgroup is none the less the most important and deals with soldiers, deserters 7
and drummer boys, with the plebeian world of those downtrodden individuals 8
who until then had had no voice of their own. In short, it is the world of 9
Büchner’s Woyzeck and Berg’s Wozzeck. Among this subgroup are some of 20
Mahler’s greatest songs: ‘Der Schildwache Nachtlied’, ‘Lied des Verfolgten im 1
Turm’, ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen’, ‘Revelge’ and ‘Der Tamboursg’sell’. 2
In the case of the last of these, Mahler provided Natalie Bauer-Lechner with an 3
insight into his own creative process. The song, he explained, occurred to him 4
on the spur of the moment, as he was leaving the dining room in Maiernigg in 5
August 1901. He sketched it out in the entrance hall, entering it in the sketch- 6
book that he always carried around with him in his jacket pocket, then running 7
to a favourite spot of his next to a spring. It soon became clear to him that this 8
was not an idea for a symphony, which is what he had been looking for, but for 9
a song. He remembered ‘Der Tamboursg’sell’ in Des Knaben Wunderhorn – a 30
clear indication of how well he knew the collection, a copy of which he kept in 1
his ‘composing house’. When he arrived there and compared the musical idea 2
with the words, he discovered that they were a perfect match. 3
Countless similar examples of this ability to husband his artistic resources 4
may be observed in Mahler’s work. It was a quality of which he was always 5
as proud as any anxious husbandman watching over his land.5 A glance at 6
‘Revelge’ – one of the most astonishing of his songs – may serve as an example 7
of the whole complex of Wunderhorn settings. Goethe emphasized the charm of 8
these poems in a famous review, a charm that subjugated even those who were 9
relatively well educated, their view of the songs being comparable to that of old 40
age’s view of youth: 41R
174 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Here Art is in conflict with Nature, and this developing process, this recip-
2 rocal influence and this sense of striving seems to seek out a goal, a goal that
3 it has already in fact achieved. Wherever it manifests itself, the true poetic
4 genius is complete unto itself; although it may encounter imperfection on a
5 linguistic, technical or other level, it possesses that higher inner form that is
6 ultimately at the disposal of all, and even in the dark and dismal element it
7 often creates a more glorious impression than it may later do when that
8 element is clear and transparent. The lively poetic contemplation of a limited
9 state raises the individual to a universe that may itself be limited but which is
10 none the less untrammelled, so that we believe that we can see the whole
1 world within this tiny space.
2
3 In his brief characterization of the individual poems, Goethe writes of
4 ‘Revelge’ that it is ‘invaluable for him whose imagination can follow it’.6 What
5 is so great about Mahler’s setting is its ability to see the whole world within its
6 confines. (Arnim and Brentano spell the word ‘Rewelge’, while Goethe prefers
7 the form ‘Revelje’. It derives from the French verb ‘réveiller’, meaning ‘to wake
8 up’, so that the correct spelling is ‘Réveille’, a military waking signal.) Listening
9 breathlessly to the song, most audiences will fail to notice that it is cast in a
20 hybrid form comprising both dialogue and narrative. It begins with the
1 desperate cry of a fatally wounded regimental drummer, who sings the first
2 two verses, in the course of which he asks a comrade to carry him to his quar-
3 ters. But in the third verse the comrade refuses to help him: his company has
4 been defeated, and he faces certain death. In the fourth and fifth verses the
5 drummer complains about the lack of solidarity and decides that in the face of
6 death he will play his drum again. According to writers on Mahler, the last
7 three verses describe the dying man’s febrile visions. But text and music tell a
8 different story, for what they in fact depict is the formation of a procession of
9 the living and the dead in the spirit of a dance of death. With his constant
30 drumming, the drummer wakes his dead comrades, and this company of
1 corpses succeeds where their living comrades fail, the terrible sight of them
2 causing the enemy to flee. Led by the drummer, the victorious regiment of
3 corpses passes in front of his lover’s house, so that when she wakes up in the
4 morning, she sees the assembled company, with her drummer boy at its head.
5 Mahler turns this ghostly sequence into a powerful funeral march in the style
6 of Callot and Büchner. More than once he described the opening movement of
7 his Third Symphony as a kind of rhythmic study for this song, encouraging the
8 suggestion that the first and final movements of his Sixth Symphony may be the
9 logical consequence of ‘Revelge’. Grounded in the implacable beat of the drum,
40 the musical argument moves with fatal logic towards the military dance of
41R death. From the line ‘Ich muß wohl meine Trommel rühren’ (‘I think I have to
beat my drum’), the funeral march acquires a demonic dimension that seems 1
almost disproportionate in the context of a song lasting only eight minutes. 2
This company of skeletons marches along, as though whipped into a frenzy by 3
the Furies, while maintaining the strict rhythm of the drumbeat. Meanwhile, 4
the orchestra cries out in a paroxysm of apocalyptic distress. Each verse ends 5
with a positively mindless refrain, ‘Trallali, trallaley, trallalera’. In the final 6
strophe, the skeletal soldiers take up their positions in front of the house of the 7
drummer’s sweetheart. Here Mahler encapsulates the whole of the song with its 8
funereal rhythms. The trumpets and strings are now muted, the cymbals 9
attached to the bass drum, everything clattering and scurrying past in a hushed 10
pianissimo as the dead ride along, quickly but almost soundlessly. Nowhere 1
does Mahler come closer to his favourite author, Jean Paul, than he does here: 2
3
All the graves gaped wide, and the iron gates of the charnel house were 4
opened and closed by invisible hands. Along the walls flitted shadows cast by 5
no living creature, while other shadows walked upright in the open air. Only 6
the children still slept in their open coffins. In the heavens a grey and sultry 7
mist hung in large folds, drawn closer and tighter like a net by a giant shadow, 8
while the heat continued to grow. Above me I heard the distant crash of the 9
avalanches, beneath me the first step of a mighty earthquake.7 20
1
Mahler himself regarded ‘Revelge’ as the greatest of his works ‘of this kind’.8 2
The Rückert settings date from the final phase of Mahler’s interest in the lied – 3
only in the light of ‘Revelge’ does one hesitate to describe them as the high point 4
of that interest. Rückert’s importance for Mahler has already been mentioned. 5
Once Mahler had left behind him the world of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, his 6
only possible alternative – however surprising this may seem – appeared to him 7
to be the more intimate and far more artful poetry of Friedrich Rückert. The 8
atmosphere of Des Knaben Wunderhorn having left its mark on the composer’s 9
conception of his first four symphonies and having merged inextricably with 30
it, it seems as if the discipline and self-denial of Rückert’s poetry was a necessary 1
counterweight that allowed him to achieve the conceptual audacities of the 2
middle-period symphonies. Certainly, the ten Rückert settings coincide exactly 3
with the period when Mahler was working on these symphonies. 4
Mahler himself spoke only rarely about his five Rückert Lieder, but when he did, 5
it was to stress their intimate character. Natalie Bauer-Lechner felt that ‘Blicke mir 6
nicht in die Lieder’ was so characteristic of Mahler’s world of emotion that he could 7
have written the words himself. He himself thought that it was the least significant 8
and most innocuous of the set but that precisely for this reason it could expect to 9
generate a response. In his view, ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’ reflected the sense of 40
understated happiness that people feel in the presence of a loved one on whom they 41R
176 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 can count without the need for a single word to pass between them. ‘Ich bin der
2 Welt abhanden gekommen’ was ‘brim-full of emotion but does not overflow’. It was,
3 he said, his ‘very self’.9 Alma also claimed that in writing this song Mahler had
4 thought of the tombs of cardinals in Italian churches, where the bodies of the men
5 in question lie on flat stones with their hands clasped and their eyes closed. ‘Liebst
6 du um Schönheit’, he added on another occasion, was a particularly private expres-
7 sion of his feelings for his wife.10 Mahler clearly took pleasure in returning to a
8 greater intimacy and purity of expression as a counterbalance to the expressivity
9 of the middle symphonies and the later Wunderhorn songs and, indeed, he may
10 even have felt a need to recapture the simplicity of the earlier songs and of the
1 Fourth Symphony. This greater simplicity is also reflected in the compositional
2 style, with its filigree, porcelain-like orchestration: this is chamber music rather
3 than symphonic music, with atmospheric values and a reduced emotional and
4 dynamic range instead of the large-scale drama of works that pack a heavier
5 emotional punch. Mahler’s subjectivism, which is markedly extrovert in the middle
6 symphonies, is here turned inwards, withdrawing into its shell. Voice and accom-
7 paniment become interwoven motivically and thematically. In ‘Revelge’, the vocal
8 line struggles for supremacy with the march rhythm, groaning, screeching and
9 whispering. In ‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’, by contrast, vocal line and orchestra
20 are impeccably well-behaved, each permanently granting the other precedence,
1 becoming entwined with a delicacy that none the less leaves a bitter aftertaste.
2 Only the fourth song, ‘Um Mitternacht’, causes us any difficulties. Most
3 writers on Mahler give this song a wide berth, only Mathias Hansen taking the
4 bull by the horns and describing it as an ‘extraordinarily problematical piece’.11
5 Mahler certainly abandons the interiority of the other four songs and reveals a
6 lack of concern that is positively bewildering. The opening, it is true, conforms
7 in character to what has gone before it, while standing apart in terms of its
8 unusual instrumentation, which dispenses entirely with the strings. But at the
9 words ‘Um Mitternacht hab’ ich die Macht in deine Hand gegeben! Herr über
30 Tod und Leben’ (‘At midnight I handed over all power to You, Lord of life and
1 death’), Mahler generates a state of extreme frenzy that resembles nothing so
2 much as one of Adorno’s ‘breakthroughs’, using the full force of the brass and
3 glissandos on the harp and piano. (Curiously enough, the piano is fully inte-
4 grated into the orchestra here, an effect that was to be a favourite of Erich
5 Wolfgang Korngold and that he presumably learnt from Mahler.) The song
6 ends powerfully, as if underscoring a celebratory triumph, so that the work as
7 a whole sounds more like Elgar than Mahler. Indeed, we could even speak of a
8 ‘soul of hope and glory’ that was being illuminated here. The puzzle that this
9 song represents has yet to be solved.
40 The Kindertotenlieder raise fewer questions and, indeed, are among Mahler’s
41R most perfect and straightforward compositions. Ignoring Alma’s foolish reproach
that Mahler anticipated the death of their elder daughter in these songs, we shall 1
find few voices raised in dissent, few divergent opinions. For all their grief, these 2
songs breathe a spirit of gentle serenity that is abandoned only at the start of the 3
fifth and final song. Otherwise, the mood is one of extreme restraint and discreet 4
contemplation. The listener barely discovers what has happened. No sense of 5
catastrophe casts its jagged-toothed flames over the battlefield of fate. Instead, the 6
father observes the night’s sad events as if through a sheet of frosted glass. The 7
strophic form of the songs is distinctly old-fashioned and creates a sense of tradi- 8
tional values, but Rückert himself had already led the way in breaking down the 9
formal structures by means of a virtuoso variation technique, while additionally 10
linking lines and verses together. In Mahler’s hands, the sense of freedom is 1
complete. The narrator has learnt to control his feelings to the utmost, rather than 2
weeping convulsively. The asceticism of the emotional expression increases the 3
sense of inner tension until it is almost unbearable. Unhappy the performer 4
who externalizes these emotions. But asceticism and self-control do not acquire 5
a mask-like rigidity in the Kindertotenlieder, as they might easily do. Rather, they 6
assume an immensely enhanced melodic and thematic flexibility. The final song 7
briefly lets itself go, only to retreat once again into a state of suppressed emotion. 8
The ‘restlessly anguished expression’ of the beginning increases, only for it to fade 9
away again. By bar 101, the performance marking is ‘slow, like a lullaby’. This 20
ending has a great model – not that this diminishes its own greatness for even 1
a moment. The final song in Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin is ‘Des Baches 2
Wiegenlied’ (The Brook’s Lullaby) and begins with the words ‘Gute Ruh, gute 3
Ruh! Tu die Augen zu!’ (‘Rest, rest! Close your eyes!’). The brook has welcomed 4
into its watery embrace the miller’s unhappy apprentice and sings him a final 5
lullaby. With Rückert and Mahler, it is the father who sings to his dead children, 6
hoping that they may find eternal rest. The melody is infinitely consoling, a 7
lullaby of overwhelming tenderness. 8
9
30
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40
41R
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3 13
4
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6
7 Lowland Dreams: Budapest
8
9
(1888–91)
10
1
2
3
4 NTIL NOW, MAHLER had never managed to remain for as long as two and
5
6
U a half years with a single company and in a single town or city. Either he
himself failed to stay the course, or others failed to stay it with him – generally
7 the first alternative occurred with such speed that the second had no time to
8 take effect. Budapest marked a new departure in his life as a conductor and
9 director. It was also his most turbulent and eventful period to date, qualities
20 that it acquired not least because in retrospect it may seem like a dress
1 rehearsal for Mahler’s years at the helm of the Vienna Court Opera. Although
2 he spent only two years in Budapest, compared with ten in Vienna, we find the
3 same line of development in both cases, the events that unfolded in Budapest
4 constituting a much condensed version of those that took place in Vienna
5 some ten years later: he began enthusiastically enough, with hugely impressive
6 plans and a string of startling successes, while evincing boundless energy in
7 dealing with the resistance that he encountered. Slowly, but surely, however,
8 he grew increasingly tired and disenchanted, no longer prepared to assert
9 himself in the face of resistance and gradually losing interest in the task in
30 hand. In both cases he then made secret contact with outside organizations in
1 an attempt to prepare the next stage in his career. At the same time it is diffi-
2 cult to avoid the impression that he sought to precipitate his premature depar-
3 ture, a departure that ultimately became the be all and end all of his existence.1
4 It is curious to note how quickly Mahler could lose all pleasure in the tasks
5 that bound him to the world of the theatre and the music industry. As a
6 composer, he showed an almost incredible degree of energy and determination
7 over a period of twenty-two years, writing nine symphonies of vast dimen-
8 sions, not to mention Das Lied von der Erde and the initial sketches of a tenth
9 symphony, all of these works composed as a virtual sideline during his
40 summer vacations, while the rest of the year was given over to his work as an
41R administrator and conductor; and yet this energy could soon start to wane in
LOWLAND DREAMS: BUDAPEST 179
the opera house if he felt that the effort and commitment that he brought to 1
the task in hand had failed to produce the desired result as quickly as he had 2
wanted. This same trajectory is observable in all his engagements, whether it 3
was the nine months he spent in Laibach or his ten years in Vienna. Indeed, 4
one could even argue that it also influenced his final engagement in New York, 5
for all that he entered upon that engagement under very different auspices. 6
Buda and Pest had been merged in 1872, and yet it is clear from the headings 7
to his letters that when Mahler arrived in the city in 1888, he still viewed it as 8
Pest. One half of the city was called ‘Ofen’ in German, ‘Buda’ in Hungarian, and 9
lay on the right bank of the Danube, on the slopes of the limestone hills that 10
overlook the city. It was the older part of Budapest and was notable architec- 1
turally for its castle, coronation church and citadel. To the left of the river lay 2
Pest, the less hilly part of the city, its monumental buildings dating for the most 3
part from the nineteenth century and including the vast Houses of Parliament, 4
St Stephen’s Church and the opera house, which had opened in 1884 and which 5
bore a striking and by no means fortuitous similarity to the Vienna Court 6
Opera of 1869. The building still exists and now houses the Hungarian State 7
Opera. 8
When Mahler arrived in the city, its population numbered some four 9
hundred thousand. It was a genuine city, not far short of a metropolis. Nor 20
was it an accident that architecturally speaking Pest sought to rival Vienna. 1
Budapest’s view of Vienna was in many ways distorted by the country’s vicissi- 2
tudinous history and by local – and objectively justified – perceptions of the 3
city as inferior in status to Vienna. The Hungarian half of the monarchy was 4
divided into estates, and the Hungarian estates promoted an increasingly 5
nationalist, Magyar standpoint that reflected nineteenth-century trends in 6
general and that was combined with powerful anti-Viennese and anti-imperial 7
sentiments – the Kaiser in Vienna was also the king of Hungary. As in 8
Bohemia, Hungarian nationalism had a notable linguistic component, a 9
component that is additionally reflected in the way in which politics played a 30
part in the day-to-day running of the Budapest Opera. While the singers 1
performed in every conceivable language, German was frowned on and, if not 2
officially banned, was at least felt to be intolerable. If Mahler intended to 3
perform Wagner’s works and to introduce them to Hungarian audiences, then 4
he would have to perform them in a language other than German. His first 5
victory in Budapest was his decision to grasp this nettle and perform Wagner’s 6
stage works in Hungarian. 7
Relations between Vienna and Budapest had certainly not improved in the 8
wake of the revolutions of 1848–9. Under Lajos Kossuth, the Hungarians had 9
risen up against Austria but in 1849 had been forced beneath the Austrian 40
yoke, or that, at least, was how they saw the situation. The settlement of 1867 41R
180 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 ensured that the Hungarian half of the dual monarchy enjoyed the maximum
2 degree of independence that was possible under such an arrangement, but
3 in the eyes of many this was still far from adequate, not least because many
4 of the promises made in 1867 were not kept. Mahler’s failure in Budapest
5 was due in part to the fact that on taking up office he became caught in the
6 crossfire between the two camps: as a twenty-eight-year-old German-speaking
7 Bohemian Jew (Budapest, too, was a hotbed of fetid anti-Semitism), he was
8 far from being the ideal candidate in the view of those members of the
9 educated middle classes who harboured Magyar aspirations and for whom
10 only a Hungarian director would have been acceptable. True, Mahler grandly
1 announced that he would be learning Hungarian, but he never made good this
2 promise, a failure that lost him much of the support that he would otherwise
3 have enjoyed if he had made a serious attempt to engage with the Hungarian
4 language, rather than merely repeating a few words of welcome that he had
5 learnt to mimic like a parrot.
6 In spite of his national and linguistic handicap, Mahler was initially made
7 to feel welcome in the city, at least by those who were not strident nationalists.
8 The non-nationalist press, too, was supportive. He owed the warmth of his
9 reception not only to the reputation that had preceded him from Kassel, Prague
20 and Leipzig but also to the desperate state of the Budapest Opera. Magnificent
1 though the new opera house may have been, its artistic and organizational state
2 left much to be desired. The intendant, Count István Keglevic, was typical of the
3 opera-house administrators of the nineteenth century, a former soldier and a
4 member of the aristocracy, whose administration was so incompetent – to put it
5 mildly – that by the beginning of 1888 he had been relieved of his post.
6 Responsibility for running the opera passed to the Secretary of State, Ferenc von
7 Beniczky, who was to become one of Mahler’s most devoted friends. The day-to-
8 day running of the house lay in the hands of Sándor Erkel, an ineffectual director
9 who presumably owed his appointment to the fact that he was the son of Ferenc
30 Erkel, now in his late seventies and something of a national institution. Of
1 his eight operas, two – Hunyadi László (1844) and, especially, Bánk bán (1861) –
2 have come to be regarded as typical national operas. He had also written the
3 Hungarian national anthem. Exceptionally sprightly for his age, Ferenc Erkel
4 continued to play an important role in the musical life of his country, whereas
5 his son, who occupied the joint posts of general administrator and principal
6 conductor at the Royal Hungarian Opera, was rather less favoured by fortune.
7 During the early 1870s, the company’s music director had been Hans Richter,
8 who, even without conducting the works of his idol Wagner, had cast a long
9 shadow from which Sándor Erkel was unable to escape. The singers were all
40 Hungarian, but with few exceptions they failed to do justice to the great works
41R in the repertory – and Budapest audiences, being widely travelled, knew what
vocal standards were like in Vienna, for example. In principle, there was enough 1
money to engage foreign stars, who were happy to exercise their larynxes in 2
Budapest and to pocket the resultant fees. But the result of this reliance on 3
foreign singers meant that the international repertory was sung in at least two 4
languages, sometimes even more. When Verdi was performed, the visiting stars 5
would sing in Italian, while the comprimarii and the chorus sang in Hungarian. 6
All concerned had grown used to this state of affairs, but artistically sensitive 7
souls were inevitably disturbed by it. Sándor Erkel was clearly competent as a 8
conductor but too weak and submissive to be able to change a system notable 9
for its endemic inefficiency and wilfulness, with the result that the company’s 10
standards sank perceptibly. 1
Beniczky was the most honest of men and by no means inexperienced as a 2
politician but he had next to no idea how to run a theatre, still less an opera 3
house. In seeking to replace Richter, who had moved on to Vienna, he thought 4
along Wagnerian lines and approached Felix Mottl, who was the leading 5
Wagner conductor of his day after Richter and Hermann Levi and who had 6
been principal conductor in Karlsruhe for a number of years. Mottl had also 7
conducted at Bayreuth. But he quickly turned down Beniczky’s approach. 8
Meanwhile, a young and ambitious conductor was whiling away the summer of 9
1888 in his home town of Iglau, with the odd foray to Munich and Prague, 20
where he worked on the local première of Die drei Pintos. He had been released 1
from his contract in Leipzig in May 1888, but had no new appointment in 2
prospect, and it was not long before he started to worry about his future, afraid, 3
as usual, that he would have no work in the coming season. A letter that he 4
wrote from Iglau to Max Steinitzer, who was close to him at this time, strikes a 5
dramatic note, although we need to remember that the uncertain fate of his 6
First Symphony and the cooling of his feelings for Marion von Weber will have 7
contributed to this mood of despair: ‘Steinitzer, I’m in a bad way! . . . For now I 8
can say only that I’ve no prospects of obtaining another engagement, and I 9
freely admit that this worries me a lot. I now need some intense activity if I’m 30
not to go under! Write soon! Please! And don’t give up on your extremely 1
muddled friend, Gustav Mahler.’2 Mahler was not the man to adopt such a tone 2
lightly but intended this as a serious diagnosis of his current mental confusion 3
and chaotic lifestyle. The insane enthusiasm with which he threw himself into 4
a whole series of new appointments during these years was due to the fact that 5
he regarded them as lifelines that he hoped would help him to escape from his 6
state of emotional confusion and his muddled private life, only for him to 7
plunge even deeper into the swirling whirlpool of existence. None the less, his 8
years in Budapest were at least free from any serious erotic involvements. 9
The triumvirate that laid the tactical ground for Mahler’s appointment in 40
Budapest consisted of an old friend and two complete strangers. The old friend 41R
182 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was Guido Adler, at this date in his career a music historian – he later went on
2 to become a musicologist at the University of Vienna, where he did much to
3 promote Mahler’s posthumous reputation. Like Mahler, he grew up in Iglau
4 but was five years older. In 1888 he was already teaching the history of music
5 at Prague University. The two other members of the group were David Popper
6 and Ödön von Mihalovich. Popper was an eminent cellist from Prague who
7 had been teaching at the Budapest Academy of Music since 1886, while
8 Mihalovich – the only Hungarian member of the group – had been the
9 director of the Academy of Music since 1887. He felt powerfully drawn to
10 German music and, more especially, to the New German School associated
1 with the names of Wagner and Liszt. A pupil of Hans von Bülow, he avoided
2 the blinkered views of the Hungarian nationalists.3 Surviving letters suggest
3 that it was almost certainly Adler who championed Mahler’s appointment,
4 appealing to Popper, whom he knew from Prague and who was one of the
5 leading cellists of his day as well as being active as a composer. Adler asked
6 Popper to make it clear to Mihalovich that Mahler was well suited to a post
7 that had already attracted considerable interest. Within weeks of Mottl’s deci-
8 sion not to accept the offer, the terms of Mahler’s appointment were already
9 being discussed. The contract was probably ready for signature by the middle
20 of September, and by the 30th of the month Mahler was already striding into
1 the offices of the Royal Hungarian Opera with all his typical élan.
2 An eyewitness account of his arrival is provided by Ludwig Karpath, a native
3 of Budapest who went on to become a writer on music in Vienna and whose
4 memoirs, Begegnung mit dem Genius (1934), are a source of prime importance,
5 especially for Mahler’s years in Vienna – self-important, garrulous and gossipy
6 by turns, these reminiscences none the less need to be treated with consider-
7 able caution. In his colourful account of 30 September 1888, Karpath recalls
8 wandering around outside the opera house in his native city, hoping to catch a
9 glimpse of famous artists:
30
1 Then I saw a clean-shaven little man who, without taking notice of anyone,
2 came through the office with rapid step and dashed up the stairs to the
3 Director’s office. ‘That’s the new Director!’ observed the lanky porter.
4 ‘What? There’s a new Director, and nobody knew about it? Surely
5 the opera has a long-standing Director, Alexander [Sándor] Erkel, isn’t he in
6 office any more?’
7 ‘More than that I don’t know,’ replied the porter. ‘I was just told that
8 I should let this gentleman into the building – he came here this morning
9 too – because he’s the new Director.’
40 ‘What is his name?’ I enquired further.
41R ‘Gustav Mahler,’ replied the porter.
It was the first time in my life I had heard the name, and I was rather 1
unwilling to credit the appointment as Director of the Royal Opera House of 2
this man who looked so young. [. . .] The appointment had been prepared 3
with the greatest of care, and so secretively that literally no one had any idea 4
of it. Let it not be forgotten that Mahler was at that time still a Jew – he was 5
baptized only later, in Hamburg – and this fact alone was such as to cause 6
a sensation. Just as great a commotion was raised over the salary, by the 7
standards of the time exorbitantly high, of ten thousand florins per annum 8
for a period of ten years.4 9
10
Mahler brought to his new post a mixture of extreme enthusiasm and bril- 1
liant tactical skill. He began by summoning to the opera house representatives 2
of the leading local papers and played the nationalist card. Knowing that as a 3
German-speaking Austrian Jew, he would be viewed with distrust by members 4
of the growing nationalist and separatist movements in Hungary and would not 5
be protected by the aura of a famous name, he presented himself as a champion 6
of the Magyar cause. Although it was no secret in the dual monarchy that opera 7
performances in Hungary were often given in two languages, Mahler feigned 8
ignorance and pretended to be disagreeably surprised by the news. This was an 9
unfortunate state of affairs, he noted, and one that needed addressing without 20
delay, both on artistic grounds (only in this way could the composer’s inten- 1
tions be realized) and on nationalist grounds: ‘I shall consider it my first and 2
foremost duty to exert all my energy in making the opera a truly Hungarian 3
national institution.’5 He also announced that he would not be appearing as a 4
conductor – and also, we may add, as a stage director – until December, when 5
he would be staging Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in Hungarian with a cast 6
made up entirely of local singers. (In the event, the performances did not take 7
place until late January 1889.) 8
A few days after meeting the press, Mahler addressed the company itself, 9
delivering a speech that has survived in the form of a draft. In the course of his 30
address, which was delivered on 10 October, Mahler adopted a far more 1
general tone than he had done when talking to local journalists. After all, the 2
members of the Royal Hungarian Opera had no doubt had their fill of plati- 3
tudes about ‘performing our tasks with the utmost rigour and demonstrating 4
complete absorption in and devotion to the work as a whole’.6 But they were 5
soon to discover for themselves that their young director was entirely serious, 6
a seriousness that was to fill them with a mixture of astonishment and dismay 7
following his decision to force them out of the rut into which their lives had 8
sunk. Mahler’s principal fight was with the orchestra, less so with the singers, 9
who felt that their honour as artists had been impugned. In spite of these 40
attempts to reform the situation, Mahler found much of the press against him. 41R
184 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Not without reason, a number of local journalists made fun of the conductor
2 from Bohemia who did not speak a word of Hungarian but who wanted to
3 turn the Royal Hungarian Opera into a Magyar institution. But Mahler had the
4 backing of a number of influential figures on the city’s cultural scene, most
5 notably Ferenc von Beniczky and Ödön von Mihalovich. Beniczky had intro-
6 duced Mahler to the company with a welcoming speech remarkable for its
7 warmth, while the hopes and trust that were placed in the new director were
8 clear from his salary and ten-year contract. That Mahler came nowhere near
9 fulfilling the terms of this contract is another story.
10 One of the terms of this contract stipulated that the house must employ a
1 new stage manager and a new stage director, both of whom must be Hungarian.
2 Beniczky was particularly keen on this clause as he, too, was ambitious and
3 wanted to raise the profile of the Budapest Opera. It seems from newspaper
4 reports of the period that both of these new employees had the additional task
5 of improving the standard of sung Hungarian. Apparently, then, the company
6 included non-Hungarian singers who learnt to sing Hungarian more or less
7 phonetically. The first opera to be staged under Mahler’s direction was Bizet’s Les
8 Pêcheurs de perles, a work of which he was particularly fond, just as he was of
9 Bizet’s music in general. The performances were not conducted by Mahler, nor
20 was he responsible for the stage production. For reasons that remain unclear, the
1 production turned out to be a fiasco. Perhaps the composer’s sense of drama, as
2 yet not fully developed in this work, struck local audiences as too anaemic, accus-
3 tomed as they were to brighter colours. The next production, Donizetti’s La Fille
4 du régiment, proved more successful, while Konradin Kreutzer’s Biedermeier idyll
5 Das Nachtlager von Granada was even better. The fact that Mahler failed with
6 Bizet’s opera but succeeded with Kreutzer’s was bound to cause him to reflect on
7 the taste of audiences at the Budapest Opera, and the result of his reflections
8 could hardly have pleased him. But, however much he may have brooded on this
9 new situation, the difficulties and the hostility that he had to face left his fighting
30 spirit initially intact.
1 In December 1888 he wrote to his old employer and benefactor in Leipzig,
2 Max Staegemann, mentioning ‘the most ridiculous difficulties in all directions’
3 and adding, significantly: ‘But I shall not give up!’7 He would not give up until
4 he had scored his first success, which could mean only the local premières of
5 A Rajna Kincse and A Walkür – Das Rheingold and Die Walküre – on 26 and
6 27 January 1889, in a Hungarian translation specially prepared for the occa-
7 sion by Antal Rado and Gergely Cziky. As was usual at this period, neither the
8 stage director nor the conductor was mentioned on the playbill, but the
9 director of the Royal Hungarian Opera naturally assumed both of these tasks,
40 in the former case assisted by the new stage manager, Ede Ujházy, who no
41R doubt also acted as an interpreter for Mahler and the rest of the company.
Towering above the ensemble was a single star singer, the soprano Arabella 1
Szilágyi, who sang Brünnhilde in 1889 and who went on to become one of the 2
house’s best-loved singers. The first two parts of the Ring proved a resounding 3
triumph and at least for a time they helped to consolidate Mahler’s position. 4
Beniczky, who had been largely responsible for Mahler’s appointment, was 5
immensely relieved, for if Mahler had been a failure, his own fate would no 6
doubt have been sealed as well. In an open letter, he thanked his new director: 7
8
With the production of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre you, Sir, have 9
brilliantly achieved two points of your artistic programme, for on the one 10
hand you have shown what one is capable of achieving through sheer hard 1
work, while on the other hand you have also proved that with our national 2
resources, so often and so unjustifiably disparaged, even the most difficult 3
artistic tasks may be carried out; you have shown that it is possible to produce 4
the greatest artistic creations of the present day, without the addition of 5
people from outside, and in the Hungarian language. This circumstance will 6
certainly fill every patriot with real joy and contentment.8 7
8
Local journalists, whether German- or Hungarian-speaking, fell over each 9
other in their praise of the house’s achievement in performing the first two 20
parts of the Ring on consecutive evenings, and of performing them, moreover, 1
in Hungarian with an ensemble that had not previously sung these works. 2
The liberal newspapers praised the achievement as such, concentrating on the 3
artistic success of the performances, while the nationalist papers stressed the 4
fact that both works had been sung in Hungarian with an entirely home-grown 5
company. All observers agreed that Mahler’s conducting had swept all before 6
it, a demonstration of the highest musical competence and overwhelming 7
power, even if there had been a number of disagreements with the orchestra 8
during the rehearsal period. Comments on the staging are comparatively rare, 9
but it seems that both productions borrowed heavily from the ones that 30
Wagner himself had staged in Bayreuth in 1876 – Mahler was currently on 1
good terms with the composer’s widow, Cosima. Mahler’s victory was total, 2
and yet it was to prove astonishingly short-lived, a circumstance that emerges 3
not least from the fact that he was not even able to complete the Ring: the local 4
premières of Siegfried and Götterdämmerung took place without him. He 5
made the mistake of announcing that the Ring would be completed during the 6
1889/90 season but then – for reasons that are not entirely clear – he aban- 7
doned those plans, a change of programming that played straight into his 8
enemies’ hands. Although those enemies had fallen temporarily silent, they 9
had not given up their fight. Wagner had died only a few years earlier, and his 40
works – especially the Ring – were regarded as quintessentially Germanic, so 41R
186 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 that, even if sung in Hungarian, they could hardly be passed off as Hungarian
2 national operas. But where were these national operas? Apart from the afore-
3 mentioned works by Ferenc Erkel, there was no real operatic tradition in
4 Hungary. Not even the cosmopolitan Liszt had made any real contribution to
5 the genre, while the fact that Hungary’s leading twentieth-century composer,
6 Béla Bartók, wrote only a single opera that occupies a place apart in his output
7 is an indication of the problematical nature of the situation. And here
8 was Mahler, a Bohemian Jew obsessed with Wagner, an obsession that was
9 far from being shared by all. Wilhelm Kienzl, the composer of the Der
10 Evangelimann, visited Budapest in the spring of 1889 and was introduced to
1 Mahler, who apparently told him that he felt an ‘unutterable longing for
2 German singing’.9 But it was a longing that he was unable to express to
3 outsiders, of course.
4 Kienzl also met Ferenc Erkel, whose son, Sándor, was unhappy with his post
5 as assistant conductor and making life difficult for Mahler. Ferenc Erkel was not
6 only disgruntled at the fact that his son had failed to achieve the position that he
7 felt was his due at the Budapest Opera, he also told Kienzl that although he did
8 not know Mahler as an artist, he regarded him as a ‘Germaniser, who does not
9 represent a benefit to Hungarian musical life’.10 The Erkels exerted a powerful
20 influence on the cultural life of the capital, for although Sándor’s contribution
1 may have been insignificant, his father was unanimously regarded as a national
2 institution. It is easy to imagine, therefore, that Mahler’s chauvinistic enemies
3 would have fallen silent only briefly, quite apart from the issue of anti-Semitism,
4 which was a problem in Hungary no less than it was elsewhere. Although the
5 local journalists may have lacked the courage to express their views on this point,
6 Ferenc Komlóssy had no such inhibitions when addressing the Hungarian
7 House of Parliament during a debate on the opera house’s budget in May 1889,
8 in the course of which he proudly informed his colleagues that it was his ‘duty’
9 to make his ‘anti-Semitic views’ known.11
30 It looks as if the new productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre more
1 or less exhausted Mahler’s enthusiasm, although we would probably be doing
2 him an injustice if we insisted on this point. After all, he conducted a number
3 of other outstanding performances in the course of the following seasons.
4 Foremost among these was Don Giovanni, with which he opened the new
5 season in mid-September 1890. Later that same season, Lohengrin can also be
6 numbered among his major successes. Lilli Lehmann, the greatest dramatic
7 soprano of the turn of the century, gave several performances in Budapest
8 during the winter of 1890/91, including Donna Anna in Don Giovanni. Even
9 today, her recording of ‘Or sai chi l’onore’ still has the power to astonish us,
40 revealing, as it does, the full dramatic force of which this great singing actress
41R was capable. As such, she was no doubt the model for Mahler’s protégée, Anna
von Mildenburg. In her colourful reminiscences, translated into English as My 1

Path Through Life, Lehmann describes her time in Budapest, including an 2
account of the young Mahler’s fiery, unbridled temperament and his curious 3
errors of judgement in his choice of tempos for Don Giovanni: 4
5
We often walked, rested, and leaped with him over hedges and ditches in the 6
beautiful environs of Budapest, and had a jolly time. I was a friend to Mahler, 7
and retained affection for him always. I honoured him for his great talent, his 8
tremendous capacity for work, and his rectitude towards his art, and I stood 9
by him in all the vicissitudes of his life, because of his great qualities, that 10
were often mistaken and misunderstood. I comprehended even his nervous 1
conditions, that sometimes unjustly afflicted those who could not keep pace 2
with his talent and his indomitable ambition and industry, because I, also, 3
formerly believed that only a strong will was needed to perfect what one is 4
able to perfect himself, that is, to strive beyond his strength. I have known for 5
a long time now that that is not so. We were good friends, even if we were of 6
opposite opinions.12 7
8
Lilli Lehmann’s initial impression of Mahler dates from December 1890, only 9
three months before he left the Budapest Opera. The performance of Don 20
Giovanni on 16 December in which she appeared as Donna Anna – for a star 1
like Lehmann, Mahler was willing to make an exception, so that she sang the 2
part in Italian, while the rest of the cast performed in Hungarian – was also 3
attended by Brahms, who was in Budapest to play his Second Piano Concerto 4
on the 17th. Brahms’s friends in Budapest finally managed to talk him into 5
attending the performance of Don Giovanni – he had initially turned down 6
their invitation, arguing that he preferred to read the score and had never seen 7
or heard a decent performance of the work. He would even prefer a cold beer, 8
he insisted. But in the end he allowed his friends to drag him along to their 9
box, where he demonstratively settled down on a sofa at the back in the hope 30
of enjoying a rest. But it was not long before he was making increasingly inar- 1
ticulate noises indicative of his enthusiasm, and at the end of the first act he 2
was heard to shout out: ‘Most excellent, admirable, what a deuce of a fellow!’ 3
He then ran on to the stage and embraced Mahler with typically grumpy 4
cordiality. It was thanks, in part, to this impression that Brahms later 5
supported Mahler’s candidature when the latter was being considered for the 6
post of director of the Vienna Court Opera. 7
By December 1890, when Lilli Lehmann and Brahms expressed their enthu- 8
siasm for his conducting, Mahler was already resolved to leave Budapest. Secret 9
negotiations with the director of the Hamburg Opera, Bernhard Pollini, had 40
begun the previous October, but still too late for him to take up his new post at 41R
188 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the start of the 1890/91 season, so that it was not until the end of March 1891
2 that he joined the Hamburg company. In fact, his increasing lack of commitment
3 to the Royal Hungarian Opera was due to factors not entirely related to
4 Budapest, its opera house and Hungary in general. Rather, family commitments
5 and health problems played a part in his decision. His father had died in Iglau
6 on 18 February 1889. Mahler’s relations with his father had never been particu-
7 larly close, and it may well be that his death after a long illness left Mahler
8 comparatively unaffected. But the same could not be said of his mother, who
9 died on 11 October 1889, even if we have no direct evidence to support this
10 claim. Whatever the truth of the matter, Mahler had no time to grieve. His father
1 died during his first season in Budapest, his mother shortly after the start of his
2 second, leaving him little opportunity to return to Iglau to make the necessary
3 arrangements. Moreover, his sister Leopoldine had died in Vienna only two
4 weeks before his mother, apparently from a brain tumour. Just twenty-six years
5 old, she was married to a Ludwig Quittner, and the couple had two children.
6 Mahler was now the head of the family and had to care for his brother Alois, who
7 was twenty-two and idling away his life in Brünn; for his sister Justine, who, only
8 twenty, had shouldered the burden of looking after their ailing and then dying
9 parents and who had suffered a physical and mental breakdown in consequence;
20 for his brother Otto, an artistically gifted sixteen-year-old who was studying
1 music at the Vienna Conservatory but whose erratic behaviour was already
2 causing concern; and for his fourteen-year-old sister Emma, who, like Otto, was
3 taken in by the Löhrs. Following her parents’ death, Justine moved to Budapest
4 to be with her brother, who had finally abandoned his usual hotel rooms and was
5 then living in rented accommodation at 3 Theresienring.
6 A second source of worry arose at this time, for it was in Budapest that Mahler’s
7 lifelong medical problems began, starting with a recurrent problem with haem-
8 orrhoids usually dismissed as tiresome and painful but not life-threatening. This
9 is certainly true today, when the condition is generally no cause for concern. Even
30 in Mahler’s day the condition was operable, albeit at considerable discomfort to
1 the patient. The first such operation on Mahler took place in Munich in mid-July
2 1889, but two months later he was still in pain and had to take morphine, a drug
3 which, for want of any alternative, was then prescribed with negligent liberality.
4 This was by no means the end of Mahler’s rectal discomfort, for in February 1901
5 he suffered such massive internal bleeding that he almost died. These bouts of
6 illness all take their place within an aetiology of inflammatory diseases. In short,
7 the bacterial endocarditis that killed him in 1911 was by no means an unfortu-
8 nate but isolated incident at the end of his life but the culmination of a long
9 history of illness to which we shall be returning from time to time.
40 Given all these emotional worries and other demands on his time, it comes
41R as no surprise to learn that Mahler had no private life at this period. And he had
little time for composition either. True, his First Symphony received its first 1
performance in Budapest on 20 November 1889 under the innocuous title of ‘A 2
Symphonic Poem in Two Parts’. Shortly before this he had performed three of 3
his Wunderhorn songs at a concert with the coloratura soprano Bianca Bianchi. 4
He wrote a number of other songs during the summer of 1890, which he spent 5
with his brothers and sisters and the Löhrs at Hinterbrühl near Vienna. But 6
he made little progress on his Second Symphony, the opening movement of 7
which – ‘Todtenfeier’ – he had completed in Prague. Compositionally speaking, 8
the time that he spent in Budapest was the most unproductive of his entire life, 9
and even if there is no evidence to confirm this, we may be certain that this was 10
one of the reasons why he became so disenchanted with the city. Running the 1
opera company consumed him, leaving him no time for what he had long since 2
realized was his true calling. 3
Mahler’s final months in Budapest are quickly summarized. Press reactions 4
to the first performance of his First Symphony were negative at worst and 5
neutral at best. In November 1889 there was an argument in the press over 6
changes that he had made to Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots. Exceptionally, we 7
have to concede that Mahler was wrong and that the journalist, although far 8
less significant a figure, was right. The matter is of sufficient interest to merit a 9
more detailed discussion, but we must content ourselves with noting that 20
Mahler, echoing Wagner’s dismissal of a work whose merits he failed to recog- 1
nize, peremptorily cut the whole of the final act, justifying his decision by 2
pointing out that it was likewise usual at this time to cut the whole of the final 3
scene of Don Giovanni, following the hero’s descent into Hell. Few directors 4
would risk cutting this sextet today, and yet this scene is by no means as 5
important as the fifth act of Les Huguenots. At the beginning of 1890 a 6
Hungarian-language newspaper demanded that Mahler make good the prom- 7
ises that he had made with regard to the championship of Hungarian operas, 8
including his announcement that he would learn Hungarian. For all its polem- 9
ical tone, the piece in question raised a number of legitimate points. By the 30
autumn of 1890 it had become clear that Ferenc von Beniczky, one of Mahler’s 1
most important allies, would shortly be leaving his post. His prospective 2
successor was Count Géza Zichy, a member of one of Hungary’s foremost 3
families and an important figure in the musical life of the country. Although 4
Zichy had lost an arm in a hunting accident, he went on to train as a concert 5
pianist, just as Paul Wittgenstein was later to do. He had also written a number 6
of operas, none of which was performed under Mahler’s directorship. Unlike 7
the cosmopolitan Beniczky, Zichy made no secret of his Hungarian nation- 8
alism. His appointment was announced on 30 January 1891. Central to the 9
speech that he delivered on taking up his new office was a passage that was 40
repeated in all the newspapers and that must have made it clear to Mahler that 41R
190 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 his days in Budapest were numbered: ‘You know my past, which may have
2 been poor in achievements but which in its direction and its aspirations has
3 always been consistently Hungarian. Here, too, I can only say that I mean to
4 create a Hungarian art on a European level, for the present still with the help
5 of foreigners, but later by dint of our own efforts alone.’13
6 As a foreigner, Mahler must have felt under personal attack, but he could
7 take a relaxed view of the situation, because a week before Zichy had taken up
8 his new post, he had signed a contract as principal conductor at the Hamburg
9 Opera, an appointment as yet known to very few people in Budapest. It was a
10 regressive step in terms of his position within the Hamburg hierarchy, but it
1 represented a considerable advance in terms of the artistic potential of a house
2 which, although only a municipal theatre, was extremely well financed, with a
3 number of outstanding singers on its books. Once again Mahler had played his
4 cards exceedingly well. After all, he had signed a ten-year contract, of which he
5 had served only a quarter. He saw his chance within days of Zichy’s appoint-
6 ment, when the rights of the director were severely curtailed and many of his
7 powers transferred to the company’s intendant, amounting to a provocative
8 snub of Mahler, who used the opportunity to turn the tables on the count.
9 Knowing that Zichy wanted to get rid of him and that he had no wish to
20 endure him for another seven and a half years, he generously offered to leave
1 early on condition that he received compensation amounting to two and a half
2 times his annual salary, a total of twenty-five thousand florins. Zichy agreed,
3 and on 14 March Mahler announced his resignation, while omitting to inform
4 the good people of Budapest that he had already signed a contract with
5 Hamburg. Be that as it may, many members of the audience realized too late
6 what they were losing, even though there was nothing that they could have
7 done to prevent it: on 16 March 1891 Sándor Erkel conducted a performance
8 of Lohengrin, undoubtedly Mahler’s most important new production in
9 Budapest. Mahler’s supporters were left to regret the departure of a director
30 who, as a number of German newspapers pointed out, had been ‘forced out of
1 his position by the new Commissioner, Count Zichy, because he is a German’.
2 The first act was repeatedly interrupted by calls for Mahler until ‘detectives
3 restored order in the gallery’. But wherever Mahler may have spent the
4 evening, his heart was already in Hamburg.
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
14 3
4
5
6
The Conductor 7
8
9
10
1
2
3
Er reicht den Violinen eine Blume 4
Und ladet sie mit Schelmenblick zum Tanz. 5
Verzweifelt bettelt er das Blech um Glanz, 6
Und streut den Flöten kindlich manche Krume. 7
8
Tief beugt das Knie er vor dem Heiligtume 9
Des Pianissimos, der Klangmonstranz. 20
Doch zausen Stürme seinen Schwalbenschwanz, 1
Wenn er das Tutti aufpeitscht, sich zum Ruhme. 2
3
Mit Fäusten hält er fest den Schlußakkord. 4
Dann staunt er, hilflos eingepflanzt am Ort, 5
Dem ausgekommenen Klang nach wie ein Clown. 6
7
Zuletzt, daß er den Beifall, dankend, rüge, 8
Zeigt er belästigte Erlöserzüge, 9
Und zwingt uns, ihm noch Größres zuzutraun.1 30
1
[He hands a bouquet to the violins and with a mischievous look invites them 2
to dance. Desperately he begs the brass to produce more sheen and like a 3
child offers many a crumb to the flutes. He bends his knee before the shrine 4
of the pianissimo, that monstrance of sonority. But storms tear his tail coat to 5
shreds when he whips up a tutti to his own greater glory. With his fists he 6
sustains the final chord. Then, helplessly rooted to the spot, he stands there 7
like a clown, listening to the note as it dies away. Finally, as if to reprehend 8
the applause, by way of thanks he reveals the offended features of a redeemer 9
and forces us to expect yet greater things of him.] 40
41R
192 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 As a lyrical poet, Franz Werfel has been almost completely forgotten. If German
2 scholars still mention him at all, it is in the context of German Expressionism,
3 but a poem like the one that he wrote in 1938 under the title ‘The Conductor’
4 continues to lie undetected in complete editions of his writings. And yet this
5 sonnet is a masterpiece of gentle irony aimed at the typical maestro. There are
6 hardly any poems about conductors in German literature, the only two that
7 come to mind being Werfel’s and one by Stefan Zweig that is directly connected
8 with Mahler. It would be easy to assume that Werfel’s poem, too, was inspired
9 by Mahler, but its subject is in fact Bruno Walter, a not entirely uncritical friend
10 of Alma’s from the days of her marriage to Mahler and also a friend of Werfel.
1 Walter played the organ at Werfel’s funeral in Beverley Hills, by now an old man
2 who had survived the much younger Werfel. Alma’s third husband, Werfel was
3 a musically gifted amateur tenor who knew Verdi’s operas by heart and who
4 joined forces with Fritz Busch in Dresden in the 1920s and helped to pioneer
5 the Verdi revival in Germany, not least through his new German translations of
6 a number of Verdi’s operas. In the present poem he casts a keen but loving eye
7 at the typical maestro who genuflects before the ‘monstrance of sonority’, a
8 wonderful metaphor for the floating pianissimo of a full orchestra producing
9 the gentlest of sounds. He also writes of ‘the offended features of a redeemer’
20 who forces his audience to expect even greater achievements. In both cases
1 Werfel’s language is equally witty and apt as a description of the facial expres-
2 sions that all conductors, famous or otherwise, tend to reveal to their audiences
3 at the end of a concerto, symphony or opera.
4 But Werfel’s picture of a conductor is that of a demonstrative, narcissistic,
5 amiable and polite representative of the profession and, as such, far closer to
6 Bruno Walter than to Mahler, who did not leave the same impression either on
7 his audiences or on his various orchestras. The picture of Mahler that emerges
8 from the eyewitness accounts of his contemporaries is similar to the one that Elias
9 Canetti sketches in a handful of pages in his main theoretical work, Crowds and
30 Power, a passage that is undoubtedly the most penetrating ever to have been
1 written about a conductor from the standpoint of the ‘power’ that he exerts. True,
2 music was never central to Canetti’s life, but he was briefly connected to the
3 Mahler family by dint of his intense emotional entanglement with the conductor’s
4 daughter Anna. (His demeaning account of Alma will be quoted later.) For
5 Canetti, there was no more graphic expression of power than the activity of the
6 conductor. We may assume that like Werfel he often heard Bruno Walter
7 conducting in Vienna, in addition to which he was friendly with Hermann
8 Scherchen. According to Canetti, a person who knows nothing about power can
9 deduce all its component parts by observing a conductor at work, at least if that
40 person is willing to abandon the view that the principal function of conducting is
41R to produce music. The first point to note is that the conductor is the only person
THE CONDUCTOR 193
in the whole room who stands, and who stands, moreover, on a raised podium. 1
The score is a statute book for the performance. The orchestral players have only 2
their individual parts, the audience normally only a programme booklet. The 3
conductor alone knows the full impact of what he is doing. Mahler would punish 4
latecomers by staring at them and he allowed weak singers to feel the full force of 5
his disappointment by making stabbing movements at them with his baton. 6
Throughout the performance, the conductor is seen by the crowd in the hall or 7
auditorium as a leader. He stands at the front and leads the way, but instead of his 8
feet, it is his hands that lead them: 9
10
His eyes hold the whole orchestra. Every player feels that the conductor sees 1
him personally, and, still more, hears him. The voices of the instruments are 2
opinions and convictions on which he keeps a close watch. He is omniscient, 3
for, while the players have only their own parts in front of them, he has 4
the whole score in his head, or on his desk. At any given moment he 5
knows precisely what each player should be doing. His attention is every- 6
where at once, and it is to this that he owes a large part of his authority. He 7
is inside the mind of every player. He knows not only what each should be 8
doing, but also what he is doing. He is the living embodiment of law, both 9
positive and negative. His hands decree and prohibit. His ears search out 20
profanation. 1
Thus for the orchestra the conductor literally embodies the work they are 2
playing, the simultaneity of the sounds as well as their sequence; and since, 3
during the performance, nothing is supposed to exist except this work, for so 4
long is the conductor the ruler of the world.2 5
6
Although Canetti never saw Mahler conduct, his description, intentionally 7
or otherwise, brings us a little closer to the phenomenon that was Mahler, certainly 8
closer than Werfel’s poem. Another description comes from the internationally 9
famous contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink who, it is claimed, pursued Mahler 30
with her obvious amorous intentions, intentions which, exceptionally, he ignored. 1
In her memoirs she offers a relatively critical account of the conductor, while none 2
the less helping to explain the tyrannical side of his conducting that many 3
observers noted. Her memoir makes it clear how the diminutive conductor 4
exploited the powers invested in him and carried that abuse of power to the point 5
where many orchestras and many players came to hate him: 6
7
But Mahler – poor Mahler! He was thin and nervous and sensitive, trembling 8
to all music. It was always that he wanted and sought endlessly for perfection. 9
He forgot that there is no perfection in this world. In his own mind and ideals, 40
yes, but he forgot that when the orchestra was before him it was only eighty or 41R
194 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 a hundred men who were not geniuses like himself, but simply good workers.
2 They often irritated him so terribly that he couldn’t bear it; then he became a
3 musical tyrant. And this people couldn’t understand or forgive. They didn’t see
4 why he was so merciless, and so it was that he was misjudged wherever he went.
5 It was a tragedy for him, this attitude, for deep in his heart he had charity, and
6 he was the most lovable and kindest creature you could imagine – except when
7 conducting. When the baton was in his hand, he was a despot!3
8
9 It is clear from this why Mahler always had difficulty with orchestras and choirs
10 and why his engagements as a concert conductor in Hamburg and later with the
1 Vienna Philharmonic ended prematurely on a note of embittered stridency.
2 Mahler clearly had no idea how to deal with what we would now call a collec-
3 tive in the theatre. In the case of many singers, but by no means all of them, he
4 was able to communicate his ideas so well that they later recalled him with
5 affection and gratitude. He forged a musical bond while preparing their parts
6 with them and could influence them either individually or in small groups,
7 making his intentions clear and inspiring them with his enthusiasm for the
8 masterpieces of the repertory, assuming that they themselves were susceptible
9 to such enthusiasm. But his approach to the orchestral collective quickly degen-
20 erated from the dictatorial to the aggressive, a development that may have been
1 due to his own awareness of his lack of leadership skills. In his calmer moments
2 he saw the problem very clearly. On one occasion in Hamburg, Natalie Bauer-
3 Lechner asked him why the local musicians were so hostile towards him, when
4 he was merely urging them on in the service of the music. Instead of being
5 hostile, she argued, they really should have been grateful to him:
6
7 There you’re quite wrong! Do you really think these people are interested in
8 learning and making progress? For them, art is only the cow which they milk
9 so as to live their everyday lives undisturbed, as comfortably and pleasantly as
30 possible. And yet, there are some amongst them who are more willing and
1 better than the rest; one ought to have more patience with them than I am able
2 to manage. For if one of them doesn’t immediately give me what is on the
3 page, I could kill him on the spot; I come down on him, and upset him so
4 much that he really hates me. In this way I often demand more of them than
5 they are capable of actually giving; no wonder they don’t forgive me for it!4
6
7 Canetti’s psychological profile of the power-hungry conductor is of course
8 incomplete if we fail to take account of the music, whether in the concert hall
9 or the opera house. One cannot say that Mahler felt uncomfortable with
40 his position of power on the podium, for he was undoubtedly conscious of his
41R influence, a point that emerges with some force from his ambitious rise; but his
THE CONDUCTOR 195
deep despair and the way in which he exercised control – a way that was coun- 1
terproductive and certainly not suited to cementing and extending his position 2
of authority – show beyond doubt that for him the music was more important 3
than the power that was derived from it. 4
In order to appreciate what was so unsettling and controversial about 5
Mahler’s conducting, we need to recall that until the end of the nineteenth 6
century, conductors remained relatively static and calm on the podium. In an 7
age when important symphonic works were increasingly being interpreted as 8
a substitute religion, conductors were gradually turning into the high priests of 9
this art. Their office acquired a hieratic aspect, and the larger the orchestras 10
that they conducted in ever bigger halls, the more cloud-girt their position on 1
the dais became. It was even said of Berlioz – that eccentric genius among 2
composers in the middle of the nineteenth century – that the concerts at which 3
he performed his own works were remarkable for their majestically measured 4
gestures, even if his mane of luxuriant hair created the impression of eccen- 5
tricity. Mahler’s immediate predecessors at the Vienna Court Opera, Wilhelm 6
Jahn and Hans Richter, were also said to be undemonstrative on the podium, 7
especially when they remained seated, as they normally did at opera perform- 8
ances. Only in the concert hall did they stand. Mahler followed their precedent 9
in both these respects. A calm deportment on the podium also has something 20
to do with physical size, of course. Even today, relatively small conductors tend 1
to gesticulate wildly, as is clear from film clips that allow us to compare two 2
of the leading Mahler conductors of the twentieth century, the extremely tall 3
Otto Klemperer and the comparatively small Leonard Bernstein. Quite apart 4
from his other affinities with Mahler, Bernstein arguably comes closest to his 5
revered idol in terms of his extreme mobility, even if Mahler avoided the 6
sort of air-borne leaps that Bernstein famously favoured. One of the few 7
composers before Mahler who was similarly said to engage in effusive gestures 8
was Beethoven, but, unlike Mahler, he was not a professional conductor. The 9
composer Louis Spohr, who played the violin under Beethoven’s own direc- 30
tion, reports on the conductor’s strange and unusual movements: 1
2
When he wanted a sforzando he would vehemently throw out both his arms, 3
which previously he had held crossed across his breast. For a piano he would 4
crouch down, going down deeper as he wanted the sound to be softer . . . Then, 5
at the beginning of a crescendo he would rise gradually and when the forte was 6
reached he would leap up into the air. Occasionally he would shout with the 7
music in order to make the forte stronger, without being conscious of doing so.5 8
9
Other accounts of Beethoven as a conductor likewise describe an exceptionally 40
animated figure who paid no heed to the usual way of conducting. The baton 41R
196 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was introduced only in the course of the nineteenth century, slowly displacing
2 the older method of beating a stick on the ground or of using a slightly less
3 heavy piece of wood that was struck against the conductor’s desk in order to
4 beat time. Spohr was one of the first conductors to dispense with this stick and
5 to paint delicate lines in the air using a piece of rolled-up paper and, later, a
6 baton similar to the ones in use today. Wagner, too, is said to have been
7 extremely animated as a conductor, causing a stir and at the same time eliciting
8 dissent. As with Mahler, this may have been due to his lively temperament and
9 relatively small size. Hans von Bülow and Arthur Nikisch were regarded as the
10 most modern conductors of their day. Mahler was in close contact with both
1 men. But in both cases, their carefully choreographed movements on the
2 podium were comparatively calm, while remaining highly effective. Another
3 professional conductor of this period was Richard Strauss, who, although
4 friendly with Mahler, was in many ways his opposite. He too made his mark
5 by the extreme calmness of his demeanour. Tall and thin, Strauss was initially
6 a somewhat fidgety conductor, but he quickly adopted a far more economical
7 approach that struck contemporaries as particularly incongruous in the
8 context of the floods of sound that he unleashed in works such as his own
9 Salome and Elektra. He would stand perfectly still on the podium, his left arm
20 and hand dangling motionlessly at his side and giving the impression that he
1 would prefer to place his hand in his trouser or waistcoat pocket. He used his
2 right hand only from the wrist, true to his own maxims, which he later formu-
3 lated as ten golden rules. According to the second of them, ‘You should not
4 perspire when conducting: only the audience should get warm.’ (The sixth rule
5 reads: ‘If you think that the brass is now blowing hard enough, tone it down
6 another shade or two.’)
7 Throughout much of his career, Mahler was the exact opposite of this, taking
8 his place in the Beethovenian and Wagnerian tradition, while going far beyond it,
9 suggesting that it is a peculiarity of composers who are also conductors that their
30 approach to conducting is extremely animated, Strauss being the exception that
1 confirms the rule. At the height of his career, Mahler was described by friends and
2 enemies alike as a dervish on the podium. One small but by no means unimpor-
3 tant detail is worth noting: Mahler was the only famous conductor of his age to
4 appear completely beardless, a point that further underlined his ‘modernity’. All
5 other conductors, including Bülow and Nikisch, wore beards of various kinds,
6 and even the no less ‘modern’ Strauss had a luxuriant moustache that he was later
7 to trim back to less ostentatious proportions. Quite apart from the fashionable
8 trends of the years around 1900, a conductor’s beard was regarded as a sign of
9 authority and dignity. Anyone who dispensed with a beard had to find other
40 means of maintaining what Max Weber describes as the individual’s charismatic
41R hold over orchestras and audiences alike.
THE CONDUCTOR 197
In March 1901 a caricature by Hans Schließmann appeared in the humorous 1

journal Fliegende Blätter. It was headed ‘An ultramodern conductor’ and subti- 2
tled ‘Kapellmeister Kappelmann conducts his Symphonie diabolica’.6 Although 3
Mahler is not mentioned by name, every contemporary observer would have 4
recognized him in a caricature that is particularly informative for the masterly 5
way in which Schließmann uses it for a series of movement studies depicting 6
the conductor in no fewer than seventeen different poses. Even though 7
Schließmann clearly set out to caricature the conductor, he does so in a way 8
which, exceptionally, is innocent of any anti-Semitic associations. The name 9
‘Kappelmann’ suggests a portmanteau neologism made up of the German 10
words ‘Kapellmeister’ and ‘Zappelmann’ = ‘a fidget’. As such, the caricature says 1
much about the phenotype of Mahler as a conductor, revealing, as it does, a 2
wide range of movements and positions, extending from a crouching position 3
in which the legs are held apart to another in which the legs are placed close 4
together, with the result that the conductor, balancing on the tips of his toes, is 5
able to achieve a height of which he was otherwise incapable. Sometimes the left 6
arm is left nonchalantly hanging at the conductor’s side, while on other occa- 7
sions both arms are raised ecstatically aloft, apparently attempting to draw 8
down the music from the heavens. The baton whips through the air or is held 9
calmly, while the left hand coaxes the necessary espressivo from the orchestra. 20
Even more expressive, of course, are the silhouettes of Mahler that Otto 1
Böhler produced, presumably at the same time as Schließmann’s caricature.7 2
Böhler, who was famous for his silhouettes, depicted Mahler on the podium at 3
the Vienna Court Opera and shows him conducting sitting down, although this 4
did not, of course, prevent him from occasionally leaping to his feet whenever 5
he became excited. There is no sense of a caricature in Böhler’s work but a far 6
greater degree of observation and a more subtle form of delineation. Once 7
again, several images appear together on the same page, the technique that 8
Böhler uses allowing the essential aspects of the conductor’s movements to find 9
even clearer expression. In two of the silhouettes, Mahler is depicted turning to 30
the observer, and Böhler brings out to admirable effect the threatening char- 1
acter of Mahler’s flashing, reflecting spectacles, a feature described by many 2
other eyewitnesses. (We should recall at this point that anti-reflective spectacles 3
did not exist at this period.) Again the observer is struck by the uncommonly 4
animated nature of the conductor’s body and flapping arms. Above all, however, 5
we can appreciate the decisive function of the left arm and hand which, in 6
contradistinction to Strauss, were used to calm the players down, to excite 7
them, to dampen and fire them, to underscore a particular passage or to tease 8
out even more subtle emotions from the body of players that was the orchestra. 9
Mahler was evidently the most unusual conductor of his age. Even those who 40
barely understood what he was trying to achieve with his orchestras – and these 41R
198 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 people must have been in a majority – were both baffled and fascinated by his
2 wild movements on the podium. It cannot be denied, of course, that anti-
3 Semites seized hold of this circumstance and claimed that such movements
4 were typical of Jewish conductors. Jews, it was said, gesticulated wildly when
5 speaking and gesticulated equally wildly when conducting, whether they did so
6 sitting or standing. In welcoming Mahler to Vienna the local Reichspost used
7 the term mauscheln to describe the conductor in its edition of 14 April 1897,
8 transferring to his body language the characteristics of those speech patterns
9 that Jews were said to use in their futile attempts to speak correct German. A
10 caricature like the one by Fritz Gareis emphasizes this aspect and depicts a ‘Jew
1 in the Thornbush’, performing a veritable St Vitus’s dance on the podium.8 The
2 fact that especially when he was conducting his own music, of course, Mahler
3 was regarded as an ‘ultramodern’ conductor in the sense of nervous, decadent,
4 overwrought and sickly is an indication of the link between anti-Semitism and
5 anti-modernism that repeatedly affected perceptions of Mahler.
6 As many eyewitnesses noted, Mahler himself attempted in the course of his
7 career to find a simpler style of conducting, later admitting that as a young
8 conductor he had adopted far too artificial and studied an approach to the great
9 works that were close to his heart, pouring into them far too much of his own
20 personality. Only as a mature conductor did he achieve complete truth, simplicity
1 and straightforwardness.9 Anna von Mildenburg recalls how intensively he
2 worked with his singers and with individual sections of the orchestra. But it was
3 the critic Ernst Decsey – the author of biographies of Wolf and Bruckner – who
4 wrote one of the liveliest accounts of Mahler conducting, stressing the tyranni-
5 cally creative element of his conducting when he noted that he re-instrumented
6 a work by following the inspiration of the moment and bringing out particular
7 groups of instruments, while reducing the dynamic level of other groups, not
8 out of a sense of preciousness or arbitrariness but because he was intuitively
9 conscious of an alternative balance. Decsey places a positive gloss on the argu-
30 ments raised by reactionary critics and insists that as a modern, nervous and
1 sensitive individual Mahler was anxious not to miss any nuances. Whereas
2 conductors of the older generation such as Hans Richter used broad brushstrokes
3 to paint a broad line composed of almost unbroken swathes, Mahler produced a
4 series of dots, a kind of pointillism of the conductor’s podium, which Decsey
5 saw as something entirely positive. His impression of Mahler is atmospherically
6 dense and graphic, making it clear what attentive and unbiased observers could
7 see when they looked down into the pit of the Vienna Court Opera:
8
9 His body was racked with movement and in the semi-darkness he looked like
40 some kind of fairy-tale goblin engaged in a flurry of hocus-pocus. In the harsh
41R spotlight that lit up the rostrum his face was fascinatingly ugly and had a
THE CONDUCTOR 199
ghastly pallor, ringed as it was by his waving hair. Every little shift in the 1
orchestra was reflected in his sensitive features: one moment he would be 2
dampening something down, which would knot the skin round his eyes into 3
grim folds accompanied by a lifting of his nose; the next moment he would be 4
smiling in confluence with the sweet strains of the orchestra, radiating his 5
approval and enjoyment, so that it was a case of both devils and angels crossing 6
his visage in turn. Lightning flashed from his spectacle lenses with each sharp 7
movement of his head, and from behind the lenses his eyes shone forth, 8
watchful, assertive and demanding attention – every inch of his frame was 9
simultaneously both an instrument of command and a means of expression.10 10
1
Decsey observed something else, too, and it is a point that helps to explain 2
the enthusiasm that many great singers felt for the allegedly insufferable 3
conductor: Mahler was all eyes and missed nothing in the pit or on the stage, 4
having memorized the works in his repertory so well that he could sing along 5
with the performers and indeed did so at important passages. At the end of Act 6
Two of Tristan und Isolde, for example, Tristan has to sing the words ‘O König, 7
das kann ich dir nicht sagen’ (‘O king, that I cannot tell you’). Here Mahler 8
would not only prompt the words, duplicating the efforts of the prompter, but 9
the hypnotic, mesmerizing quality of his cue would also give the singer an idea 20
of how to interpret these words, an understanding evidently communicated as 1
if by telepathy. Mahler’s magnetism on the podium clearly conveyed itself to his 2
singers, or at least to those whom he liked and who liked him in turn and who 3
were willing to work with him on the score and on their own interpretations. 4
Leo Slezak, Anna von Mildenburg, Selma Kurz and Marie Gutheil-Schoder 5
were all immensely fond of him, convinced as they were that they had never 6
worked with so great a conductor and would never do so again. 7
Mahler’s fellow conductor and disciple Bruno Walter was in an even better 8
position than Decsey to assess his mentor’s gifts. Walter, whose talents as a 9
composer do not concern us here, confirms Decsey’s evaluation, while adding 30
other aspects based on his detailed knowledge of conducting. He, too, stresses 1
the improvisatory nature of Mahler’s style of conducting, an aspect that was 2
grounded, of course, in the most meticulous preparation – this also is a point 3
that he shared with Bernstein. The more deeply Mahler explored the works 4
that he conducted, the more spontaneous his interpretation appeared and the 5
more he seemed to be conducting a piece for the first time. Even his thirtieth 6
performance of a work seemed freshly minted and free from all routine. But 7
his apparent spontaneity was based on the most ruthless respect for the note 8
values, tempo, dynamics and other performance markings – it is no accident 9
that as a composer anxious to ensure that his own works were correctly 40
performed, he liberally scattered his scores with such markings to a degree 41R
200 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 hitherto unknown because he was tormented by the not entirely unjustified

2 fear that his fellow conductors would otherwise fail to realize his intentions.
3 This fear reached the point where he finally came to feel that he alone could
4 conduct his own works, with the result that he increasingly took time off from
5 his work in Vienna to conduct his music elsewhere, absences that irked the
6 Viennese and ultimately contributed to his resignation from office.
7 Perhaps the most astonishing aspect, however, is that in spite of his tremen-
8 dous mobility on the podium, Mahler’s beat was never unclear – countless
9 generations of orchestral players can confirm that precision is compromised by
10 over-hectic movements on the part of a conductor. Bruno Walter recalls that
1 singers and orchestral musicians were often guilty of minor imprecisions,
2 albeit far fewer than with other conductors, but that there were never any of
3 the usual problems of coordination between stage and pit, Mahler’s exem-
4 plarily clear beat guaranteeing that they stayed together. Not even during the
5 most extreme emotional outbursts did that beat forfeit its clarity and precision.
6 But Walter also noted that in the course of time Mahler’s conducting grew
7 increasingly calm and mellow: ‘In his last period in Vienna, the picture was
8 one of almost uncanny calm, with no loss in intensity of effect. I remember a
9 performance of Strauss’s Symphonia domestica in which the contrast between
20 the wild storms in the orchestra and the immobility of the conductor who
1 unleashed them made an almost ghostly impression.’11 The true essence of
2 Mahler’s conducting and of his influence as a conductor has of course been
3 irretrievably lost. We have no recordings of him conducting, as we do of
4 Nikisch, Strauss and Pfitzner, for example (although the technology existed to
5 make such recordings). The only thing we have – and its value is all the greater
6 in consequence – are the famous piano rolls made on a Welte-Mignon piano
7 which contain excerpts from his own works. But the nature of that recording
8 means that interpretative subtleties are difficult to hear, while the unusual
9 speeds – almost all the pieces are played considerably faster than we are used
30 to in modern interpretations – are all too apparent. But even if we had record-
1 ings of Mahler conducting, the technology was still in its infancy at that time,
2 and many of the nuances would be lost. The most knowledgeable of his
3 contemporaries knew, of course, that not even a description in words could
4 really bring them to life. For all his linguistic sensitivity, the composer Josef
5 Bohuslav Foerster, who was one of Mahler’s confidants, could only touch on
6 the impression the conductor must have made when he describes the
7
8 incomparably balanced scale introducing the Leonore Overture no. 3 via the
9 unusually long, breathtaking rest before the strings leap jubilantly up: a word
40 about the mystic impression left when in the final movement of the Ninth
41R Symphony, those thrilling bars rang out, introduced by a low B flat on the
THE CONDUCTOR 201
contrabassoon and seeming to come from a mysterious distance, so that 1

when they heard it listeners felt that invisible hosts of rapt enthusiasts were 2
approaching with an exultant ‘Hosanna’ on their lips, just as they did on the 3
very first Palm Sunday.12 4
5
Even Bruno Walter, who was otherwise noted for his precise way with words, 6
ultimately fails to convey the immediacy of the impression left by Mahler 7
when he concludes his account of Mahler as a conductor by noting that: 8
9
I want, however, to stress once more the fact that the decisive quality of his 10
conducting and the source of its power was the warmth of his heart. That gave 1
his interpretation the impressiveness of a personal message. That rendered 2
unnoticeable the meticulous study lying behind the result he achieved: its 3
virtuosity and accomplishment; that made his music-making what it was – a 4
spontaneous greeting from soul to soul. Here, on the borderland between art 5
and humanity, the nobility and potency of his mind were revealed. The secret 6
of his lasting fame as conductor and director is his ideal combination of high 7
artistic gifts with the ardent sensibility of a great heart.13 8
9
We must be content with this and try to understand what it was about Mahler 20
that led so many people to report their impressions of this hot-headed 1
conductor in words of such emotive impact and almost intoxicated enthu- 2
siasm so long after his death. It is an impression that perhaps emerges most 3
powerfully when we listen to Mahler’s music. The implacable expressive power 4
that is conveyed by his own works, at least when they are adequately 5
performed, must also have been apparent in his interpretations of the works of 6
other composers. We must surely be allowed to draw this conclusion. 7
8
9
30
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2
3
4
5
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8
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7 The Second Symphony
8
9
10
1
2
3
4 N MAHLER’S MIND, there was an extraordinarily close link between his First and
5
6
I Second Symphonies, at least as far as the opening movement of the later work
was concerned. In 1896 he left Max Marschalk in no doubt that the hero who is
7 borne to his grave in this movement is the same person as the one who dies at the
8 end of the First Symphony, where he is still attended by victory fanfares. Now he
9 is retrospectively laid to rest, and in the course of the next four movements ques-
20 tions about the meaning of life and suffering are posed, albeit not always with the
1 same urgency, for there are digressions and moments of rest on the journey that
2 Mahler described as intermezzos. These questions are answered in the fifth
3 and final movement.1 The genesis of the Second Symphony is longer and more
4 complicated than one might assume even for a work as ambitious and as long as
5 this – it lasts some eighty minutes in performance. The First Symphony had
6 already been completed when Mahler, staying in Prague where he was rehearsing
7 Die drei Pintos, put the finishing touches to the opening movement in September
8 1888. For the present, however, that was all. His move to Budapest and all the
9 wearisome duties bound up with it, together with the inordinate dimensions of a
30 work that Mahler planned from the outset would be his magnum opus, left him
1 little opportunity to make any further progress on the score. But his decision to call
2 the opening movement ‘Todtenfeier’ did not stem from any vague prospect of
3 completing a work that was in any case planned to be a complete symphony. The
4 title was fixed soon after he completed the movement in September 1888 and is a
5 clear reference to a key work of Polish literature, Adam Mickiewicz’s Dziady, a
6 remarkable mixture of epic and drama completed in 1832 and occupying a curious
7 halfway house between messianic mysticism and a profoundly nationalistic
8 critique of Russian hegemony in Poland, the narrative peppered with allusions to
9 contemporary political events. Mahler’s Second Symphony has no programme
40 that is directly attributable to Mickiewicz’s epic poem, but the poet’s views on
41R the power that the souls of the dead exert over the living must have chimed with
THE SECOND SYMPHONY 203
the composer’s view of the world, both then and later. There is no mystery 1
surrounding Mahler’s discovery of Mickiewicz: the first German translation of the 2
work had been undertaken by Siegfried Lipiner and was published in Leipzig in 3
1887, a year before Mahler began work on his symphony. He also began sketching 4
the second movement in 1888, whereas the third, fourth and fifth movements 5
were not written until the summers of 1893 and 1894, when Mahler was staying at 6
Steinbach on the Attersee. He completed the work in June 1894. 7
The first three movements were heard for the first time at a concert given by 8
the Berlin Philharmonic on 4 March 1895. Although the rest of the programme 9
was conducted by Strauss, Mahler himself took charge of his own composition, 10
the performance proving sufficiently successful for him to be invited back to 1
Berlin to conduct the entire work with the same orchestra on 13 December 2
1895. Mahler’s involvement in an incomplete performance, without the decisive 3
final movement, can be attributed only to his scepticism as to whether he would 4
ever have a chance to perform the entire piece. Natalie Bauer-Lechner was 5
unable to attend the performance, but Justine wrote to her to report on the 6
powerful impression that the complete work left on its listeners – it was the 7
first time that one of Mahler’s works had had such a decisive and unequivocal 8
impact on an audience, and it was no doubt this concert that convinced Mahler 9
that he could captivate people’s hearts with his music, a certainty that he never 20
lost, in spite of all the setbacks that he suffered. This also explains his dictum, 1
‘My time will come.’ Even the opening movement was greeted with tremendous 2
acclaim, but this was surpassed by the impact of the final movement, an impact 3
achieved by means of the huge resources involved: older men were not ashamed 4
to be seen crying, while younger men and women fell into each other’s arms. 5
The fluttering notes of the ‘bird of death’, as Mahler called it (on another occa- 6
sion he spoke of a nightingale), that are played on the flute before the pianissimo 7
entry of the chorus were heard in total silence, even though Mahler had feared 8
that the audience would lack the requisite concentration. It turned out to have 9
been fortunate that not many seats had been sold in advance, with the result 30
that most of the tickets had been given away to students from the Conservatory 1
and to local musicians – knowledgeable members of the public whose reaction 2
was gratifyingly different from the usual response of subscribers to new and 3
unfamiliar works. 4
Mahler himself offered a detailed account of the inner programme of his 5
Second Symphony and did so, moreover, on more than one occasion. Although 6
he had told the world that ‘all programmes should perish’, the fact that he consid- 7
ered it necessary and meaningful to draw up yet another such programme in 8
1901 attests to his inability to make up his mind on this point. On this occa- 9
sion, however, he was resolved not to allow any of these texts to enter the public 40
domain. Curiously enough, the 1901 explanations were intended for the king of 41R
204 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Saxony on the occasion of the first performance of the symphony in Dresden, a

2 performance conducted not by Mahler but by the Court Opera’s general music
3 director, Ernst von Schuch. Mahler also sent a copy to his sister, who in turn
4 passed it on to Alma. The 1901 programme agrees in the main with the others
5 that Mahler drew up for the critic Max Marschalk, for Natalie Bauer-Lechner
6 and, finally, for the first performance of the work in Berlin.2 In essence, they all
7 run as follows:
8 The opening movement is an Allegro maestoso that accompanies listeners
9 and mourners to the coffin of a man they once loved. His life and his sufferings
10 and aspirations pass before their mind’s eye, encouraging them to collect their
1 thoughts on the questions of life and death and of the afterlife, but above all on
2 the question as to the meaning of what we call life. The second movement is
3 marked ‘Andante moderato’ and, like the third and fourth, is intended as an
4 intermezzo. Its idyllic ländler-like tone is in such stark contrast with the obse-
5 quies of the opening movement that even Mahler himself came to have doubts
6 about its appropriateness. It encapsulates the memory of a single sunlit moment
7 in the hero’s life, when this life still seemed to him to be open-ended, unclouded
8 and full of promise. The memory of this moment almost leads the survivors
9 to forget what really happened and to lose sight of the hero’s death. The third
20 movement is headed ‘With a calmly flowing motion’ and is the work’s Scherzo,
1 revealing the hero in a sombre mood, beset by life’s tribulations and losing his
2 grip. In his own account of this movement, Mahler was unable to decide whether
3 his diagnosis applies to the deceased or to those who are standing beside the
4 grave. The threads of life become eerily confused. Disgust seizes hold of the
5 individual, and suddenly everything seems meaningless and confusing. Mahler
6 found an impressive image to explain the expressive quality that he had in mind
7 when writing this movement: when we return to the bustling world from an
8 exceptional situation such as the one that exists at the graveside of a person we
9 love, the milling mass of life may strike us as terrifyingly alien. It is as if we are
30 looking into a brightly lit ballroom at night and can see only the fleeting, turning
1 shapes but are unable to hear the music. The movements in the room seem
2 meaningless and ghostly, leading us to start up with a scream of disgust. The
3 fourth movement, ‘Urlicht’, is headed ‘Very solemn, but simple’ and is a setting
4 of a song of the same name from Des Knaben Wunderhorn. In it we hear a single
5 emotionally affecting voice, the voice of naïve hope on the part of a soul that
6 acknowledges its descent from God and reveals its desire to return there.
7 The final movement has several tempo markings, starting with ‘In the
8 tempo of the Scherzo. Flaring up wildly’. It restores the mood of the end
9 of the opening movement. A voice calls out, proclaiming the Last Judgement.
40 The Apocalypse is at hand. In conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner – and
41R this is important – Mahler stressed that the first three movements have a
narrative function, even if that function is retrospective, whereas ‘Urlicht’ 1

is so short as to be little more than a brief meditation. The final movement, 2
conversely, represents an inner event. Drumrolls are followed by the Last 3
Trump, the graves fly open and humanity draws near, rich men and poor, kings 4
and popes are all indistinguishable, recalling the Baroque theatrum mundi, 5
Calderón and Hofmannsthal’s Großes Welttheater. There is the sound of 6
screaming, the very earth quakes, then a sudden a ghostly silence. A solitary 7
bird calls out once again in the flute and piccolo and then, quietly and simply, 8
pianissimo and misterioso, the unaccompanied chorus intones the phrase 9
‘aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n, wirst du, mein Staub, nach kurzer Ruh!’ (‘You will 10
rise again, yes, you will rise again, my dust, after brief repose’). God appears in 1
all His glory, and the Last Judgement is replaced by omnipresent love. Mahler 2
himself later admitted that he had no idea how he had achieved the culmi- 3
nating climax of the work. The words of this chorale are based on a hymn by 4
Klopstock that Mahler heard at the memorial service for Hans von Bülow in 5
St Michael’s Church in Hamburg – writers have repeatedly, if erroneously, 6
referred to it as an ode, Josef Bohuslav Foerster even claiming that it comes 7
from Klopstock’s verse epic Messias. Mahler used only the first two verses, 8
adding the remaining two-thirds himself, so that the result may be regarded 9
as a genuine poem by Mahler inspired by Klopstock’s original and differing 20
markedly from the attitude of humility and orthodox Christianity typical of 1
Klopstock’s hymn. Instead, it comes closer to the sort of individualized, 2
pantheistic position characteristic of Mahler’s own faith. It is worth noting in 3
passing that more than a century before Mahler, Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, 4
the great German aphorist, copied out Klopstock’s text in his Sudelbücher. 5
Even though he added no commentary of his own, it seems clear that 6
Lichtenberg was motivated by the same enthusiasm and emotion as Mahler.3 7
It is evident that such a programme goes far beyond anything found in music 8
before this period – and it remains a programme even if it was intended for only 9
a limited readership and even if it is difficult to compare it with the normal type 30
of programme associated with normal programme music. Even the instru- 1
mental resources on which the symphony calls go beyond anything demanded 2
by Wagner and Strauss, more especially the off-stage orchestra in the final 3
movement, which consists of four additional trumpets and trombones and an 4
extra set of percussion. Mahler also demands three steel rods, two female 5
soloists (soprano and contralto) for the fourth and fifth movements and a choir 6
of mixed voices – at the first performance in Berlin this choir contained no 7
fewer than two hundred singers. All in all, this looks forward to the yet more 8
lavish resources of the Eighth Symphony. But the work’s ambitions go even 9
further. For the first time, Mahler tried to realize an ideal that he was to formu- 40
late on more than one occasion, namely, the idea of creating a world using all 41R
206 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the means at his disposal. And these resources not only include orchestral and
2 vocal forces that go to the very limits of what is feasible, but to tame and ulti-
3 mately yoke together the most extreme forms of musical and textual expression,
4 forms which had hitherto tended to create their effects independently of one
5 another. He adopted an identical attitude towards the traditional repertory and
6 in doing so went far beyond Beethoven, who had crossed the symphony with
7 the cantata in the final movement of his Ninth Symphony. Mahler does the
8 same in the final movement of his Second Symphony, which is a vast inde-
9 pendent symphonic movement up to the entry of the chorus, and then a brief
10 cantata. But he also adds a simple Wunderhorn song as an independent move-
1 ment for the contralto soloist (‘Urlicht’) and paraphrases a further Wunderhorn
2 song, ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’, in the third movement. Here
3 Mahler felt that the poem’s ironical attitude to life and to the activities of fish
4 (and human beings), which listen attentively to the saint’s sermon only to
5 return, unrepentant, to their former lives, was the best way of criticizing a world
6 that goes round and round in a circle of stupidity and self-interest. As Mahler
7 effectively admitted when he gave the opening movement the title ‘Todtenfeier’
8 and separated it off from the rest of the work, this movement is a symphonic
9 poem like Strauss’s Death and Transfiguration, only without the transfiguration
20 that comes in the final movement. It goes without saying that this hubristic
1 desire to compel the world to listen to the work of a composer still in his
2 mid-thirties was bound to involve inhomogeneity and heterogeneity. It is
3 impossible, after all, to reconcile elements of sonata form with a simple folksong
4 or to combine a ländler with a chorale and the caustic irony of St Anthony’s
5 sermon to the fishes with the ‘Resurrection’ chorus.
6 The most heterogeneous element of all is the second movement, a point that
7 Mahler himself conceded, without, however, contemplating any changes here.
8 In a letter to the conductor Julius Buths, who was planning to perform the
9 work in Düsseldorf, Mahler effectively apologized for the fact that the second
30 movement seemed out of place after the first, rather than as a necessary
1 contrast. That was his mistake, he went on, a weakness in the work’s structure:
2 the planned intermezzo had turned out to be too disruptive.4 The same letter
3 contains another interesting remark. According to all existing versions of the
4 full score, the fifth movement follows on from the fourth without a break, a
5 point that is nowadays respected in all performances of the symphony. Buths
6 had said that he wanted to have the concert’s main interval at this point in what
7 was already a long evening. Mahler agreed. It would surely be worth while
8 putting this suggestion into practice, at least once.
9 The hybrid aspects of the work are relatively easy to identify. The Second
40 Symphony has in no small way helped to fuel long-held prejudices against
41R Mahler’s music, which is said to be overblown and hollow and as such to be a
reflection of the years of rapid industrial and economic expansion of the new 1
German Reich. In his compelling examination of the work, Rudolf Stephan 2
argues, conversely, that: 3
4
The extreme subjectivity that is raised to a yet higher degree in this work, 5
acquiring a cosmic, soteriological dimension, now strikes us as strange and is 6
difficult to grasp any longer. But it was this dimension alone that suggested 7
and perhaps even demanded the use of all the available expressive resources 8
without regard for questions of taste or genre. The work’s striking syncretism 9
is not a sign of eclecticism or even a lack of discrimination but documents the 10
composer’s insight into the need for objective necessity. Anyone who wants 1
to create a world needs many different means.5 2
3
Adorno adopted a more critical attitude to the piece, noting on the one hand that 4
the Second Symphony is the work that allows most listeners to get to know 5
Mahler and to love him, a point on which many would agree, but at the same time 6
arguing that, unlike almost all Mahler’s other works, it loses some of its impact. 7
For all his enthusiasm for Mahler’s music, Adorno even uses the term ‘prolixity’ 8
in discussing the opening movement and observes ‘a certain primitiveness’ in the 9
final movement. And yet even here he cannot avoid imputing to the pianissimo 20
entry of the chorus at ‘aufersteh’n, ja aufersteh’n’ a suggestive power that remains 1
undimmed, a point that listeners can still put to the test today.6 2
A far more moving and immediate response was that of the young Alban Berg, 3
who attended Mahler’s last concert in Vienna in November 1907, by which date 4
Mahler had already left the Court Opera. The work on the programme was the 5
Second Symphony. After the concert, Berg wrote to Helene Nahowski, whom he 6
was later to marry: 7
8
It happened in the finale of the Mahler symphony, when I gradually felt a sense 9
of otherworldliness, as if in all the world there were nothing left but this music – 30
and me enjoying it! But when it came to its shattering and uplifting conclusion, I 1
suddenly felt a slight pang, and a voice within me said: What of Helene? It was 2
only then that I realized that I had been unfaithful to you, so I now implore your 3
forgiveness. Tell me, darling, that you understand and forgive me!?7 4
5
Berg was not wrong: Helene understood very well what he meant. 6
7
8
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7 Self-Realization: Hamburg
8
9
(1891–7)
10
1
2
3
4 Different Forms of Loneliness
5
On an inclement January day in 1894 a still relatively young Czech composer
6
set off for 14 Fröbelstraße, a street in Hamburg with a view of the as yet un-
7
developed marshland on the outskirts of the city. Josef Bohuslav Foerster was
8
a few months older than Mahler and had already written two symphonies and
9
a Stabat Mater but without achieving his breakthrough as a composer. If he
20
had moved from Prague to Hamburg, it was because his wife, the dramatic
1
soprano Berta Lauterer, whose career was moving faster than his own, had
2
taken up an engagement at the Hamburg Opera. By the date of his death in
3
1951, conversely, the then ninety-one-year-old composer was one of the most
4
distinguished of Czech composers, with a work-list that includes several
5
important symphonies and operas such as Eva, works which, like those of his
6
friend Josef Suk, have been rediscovered in recent years. Berta Foerster-
7
Lauterer soon came to the attention of the company’s principal conductor,
8
Gustav Mahler, when she took over the role of Eva in Die Meistersinger at short
9
notice and arrived at the rehearsals uncommonly well prepared. Mahler asked
30
her with whom she had studied the part. ‘With my husband,’ she replied,
1
whereupon Mahler turned to the orchestra with the words: ‘Gentlemen, this is
2
how a musician studies.’ Addressing the soprano, he expressed the wish to get
3
to know her husband. Foerster was understandably nervous when he set out to
4
visit Mahler, for he too had heard of the conductor’s reputation for rigour and
5
inflexibility, a reputation acquired during his three years as the Hamburg
6
Opera’s senior conductor. Mahler was living alone in his third-floor apartment
7
in the Fröbelstraße – it was not until later in the year that his sister Justine
8
joined him there. Foerster rang the bell hesitantly. Like most bachelors, Mahler
9
did not occupy the whole floor, but only two rooms. A friendly fellow lodger
40
directed the visitor to a door at the end of the corridor. Foerster knocked but
41R
SELF-REALIZATION: HAMBURG 209
received no reply. Curiously enough, the first room that he entered was the 1
bedroom, an arrangement presumably due to Mahler’s need for extreme quiet 2
while he was composing – evidently he preferred to have his bedroom, rather 3
than his workroom, adjoining the corridor. The only objects in this first room 4
were a simple bed and a slightly dusty laurel wreath with a ribbon bearing 5
the inscription: ‘To the Pygmalion of the Hamburg Opera – Hans von Bülow.’ 6
The great conductor, who lived in Hamburg, had presented Mahler with this 7
wreath in recognition of his work in breathing new life into the city’s opera 8
house. Foerster finally found the tenant in the second room. 9
Mahler soon set his visitor at ease, and when Foerster returned home, it was 10
in the knowledge not only that he had found a new friend but that he had met 1
the most important person he had hitherto encountered in his life. This initial 2
encounter forms the starting point for several chapters in Foerster’s autobiog- 3
raphy. Although Foerster later regretted not taking notes on his conversations 4
with Mahler in the way that Natalie Bauer-Lechner did, these chapters are 5
among the most vivid accounts of Mahler and are an important source espe- 6
cially for his years in Hamburg. This was the first time in his life that he was 7
continuously and sympathetically observed by a friendly eye. A second impor- 8
tant source for the Hamburg period is the memoir of the music critic Ferdinand 9
Pfohl, although its value is diminished by the fact that for various reasons Pfohl 20
broke off all contact with Mahler following the conductor’s departure from 1
Hamburg and adopted a highly critical tone motivated by wounded pride. 2
(Such an attitude can, of course, have the advantage of allowing the observer a 3
clearer view of his subject.) 4
The second room that Foerster saw on the day that he first met Mahler 5
was the conductor’s living room. It was almost completely filled with a piano, 6
a library and a desk. There was also a pianino next to the wall. Foerster’s 7
terminology needs explaining. At the end of the nineteenth century, a piano – 8
Foerster uses the word Klavier – was the successor of the fortepiano, a hori- 9
zontal, rectangular instrument that was strung in a horizontal plane (hence 30
Foerster’s ability to see that the instrument was covered in scores and sheet 1
music), while the pianino was what we would nowadays describe as an upright 2
piano with vertical strings. If Mahler preferred the pianino, it was no doubt 3
because of its fuller sound. Open on the music rest was the score of a Bach 4
cantata, a composer whom he was studying with a degree of interest that not 5
even musicians evinced at this time. On the walls were no family photographs 6
or the usual objects of devotion but only three reproductions: Albrecht Dürer’s 7
Melancolia, ‘the photograph of a drawing’ depicting Saint Anthony preaching 8
to the fishes – presumably a reproduction of Paolo Veronese’s painting (Mahler 9
had recently set the Wunderhorn song ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’) – 40
and The Concerto, a painting formerly ascribed to Giorgione but now believed 41R
210 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 to be the work of Titian. It depicts a monk playing a keyboard instrument, a rapt,

2 otherworldly expression on his face, and looking over his shoulder at a second
3 figure holding a viol-like instrument, while a third figure wearing an elaborate
4 hat stands to their right. Mahler told Foerster: ‘I could go on composing this
5 picture for ever.’1 Others, too, noted the profound similarity between the monk
6 and Mahler. In his own reminiscences of the composer, Bruno Walter reports
7 that even before he met him for the first time he had repeatedly drawn a parallel
8 between Mahler, about whom he had heard a great deal, and the monk in Titian’s
9 famous portrait, which by the end of the nineteenth century hung in countless
10 middle-class houses in the form of a reproduction. When the two men finally
1 met, Walter was even more struck by the similarity, which was typological rather
2 than purely physiognomic:
3
4 The picture gave the point of departure for our talk. Whether we then touched
5 on Giorgione’s strange prevision I do not remember, but I do recall our often
6 speaking about it later. I also know that Mahler’s likeness to the pious player
7 enhanced my sense of the mystery prefigured in the fifteenth-century portrait.2
8
9 During his early years in Hamburg, Mahler lived on his own, his lifestyle
20 giving many observers the impression of a monastic and even anchoritic exis-
1 tence. Certainly, there is no evidence of any goings-on with female members of
2 the Hamburg ensemble of a kind familiar from the earlier and later periods. Not
3 until Anna von Mildenburg entered Mahler’s life in the autumn of 1895 does this
4 situation appear to have changed. Even this affair was for a long time veiled in
5 obscurity, because their relationship had already been broken off by the time that
6 the soprano joined the Vienna Court Opera, while Mahler did all in his power
7 to prevent details from reaching the public. Anna von Mildenburg likewise
8 maintained a discreet silence, a silence surprising in view of her impulsive and
9 passionate nature both onstage and in her private life with Mahler. In her
30 reminiscences, which she published in 1921, she mentions Mahler, but not
1 her affair with him, even if its existence may be inferred from a close reading of
2 her remarks.
3 For a complete exposé we need to turn to the one hundred or so letters that
4 Mahler wrote to her and that were published by Franz Willnauer in 2006.
5 Together with the reminiscences of Foerster and Pfohl, these letters are the third
6 source of our information about Mahler’s time in Hamburg, and in terms of their
7 intimacy, they are, of course, unparalleled. A letter preserved in Vienna indicates
8 that in the 1920s Alma Mahler tried to regain these letters. Fortunately, Anna
9 von Mildenburg, long since married to Hermann Bahr, refused to agree, not
40 least because there is no doubt that Alma would have burnt them in her attempt
41R to prove to the world that she was the one and only love in Mahler’s life – anyone
knowing only her own view of the matter would be bound to conclude that 1
Mahler was a virgin when he married her. Conversely, Anna von Mildenburg’s 2
letters to Mahler have not survived. Presumably Mahler himself destroyed them 3
before or shortly after his marriage. 4
Mahler had already been working in Hamburg for three years when Foerster 5
got to know him. He had entered into negotiations with the director of the 6
Hamburg Stadttheater, Bernhard Pollini, as early as October 1890, while he 7
was still in Budapest, a démarche prompted either by his realization that his 8
position in the Hungarian capital was untenable or by his own unwillingness 9
to test that tenability. By January 1891 he had signed a contract as principal 10
conductor. On paper this looks like a demotion – after all, he had been opera 1
director in Budapest. But his post was the equivalent of what we would now- 2
adays call ‘general music director’ and meant that he would hold the highest 3
musical post in the company, while shedding the irksome duties that came 4
with his administrative responsibilities in Budapest. Above all, Mahler could 5
once again rehearse his favourite core repertory in German and rely on the 6
resources of a well-funded company that was held in great affection by 7
Hamburg’s middle-class music lovers. 8
Hamburg could lay claim to having the first public opera house after Venice. 9
It had opened on the Gänsemarkt as early as 1678, and by the years around 20
1700 was already an important centre of Baroque opera associated with three 1
composers above all: Reinhard Keiser and his opera Croesus; the young George 2
Frideric Handel, who played in the orchestra and wrote his opera Almira 3
for Hamburg; and, above all, Georg Philipp Telemann, who composed some 4
twenty operas for the company. In 1825 a new opera house was opened in the 5
Dammtorstraße, where it still stands to this day. Designed by no less an archi- 6
tect than Karl Friedrich Schinkel, it witnessed only the second production in 7
Germany of Wagner’s Rienzi in 1844, a production conducted by the composer 8
himself. Bernhard Pollini, who became its director in 1874, was born Baruch 9
Pohl and was fully assimilated into the German community, but in spite of 30
his change of name, he was unable to avoid the anti-Semitism of his age. With 1
his keen eye for young and talented artists such as Mahler and Anna von 2
Mildenburg, he raised the company to new artistic heights and placed it on a 3
sound financial footing. None the less, relations between Pollini and Mahler 4
were soon soured. According to Anna von Mildenburg’s Mahlerian view of the 5
situation, Pollini was an intriguer who ruthlessly exploited his discoveries, 6
while none the less paying them handsomely. She reports that many young 7
singers had to perform every other day to the greater glory of the house and 8
its intendant. If they failed to survive this ordeal, they were quickly and unsen- 9
timentally dropped. Pollini’s only interest was in a singer’s voice, with the 40
result that all of Mahler’s attempts to work with his singers on questions of 41R
212 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 musical and dramatic interpretation were dismissed as completely pointless

2 and disruptive to the smooth running of his company.
3 Mahler, too, was tremendously overworked, albeit not in such a way that he
4 risked losing his voice. He soon saw through Pollini’s tactics and, realizing how
5 thoughtless his actions were, sought to counter them. But in order to achieve his
6 ends, he had to keep Pollini in a good mood and avoid open confrontation. For
7 his part, Pollini was no doubt vaguely aware of Mahler’s genius, prompting him
8 to seek his senior conductor’s advice and to familiarize him with his plans and
9 decisions. The result was a relationship in which hatred simmered beneath the
10 deceptively calm surface of cooperation between colleagues. Gossip-mongers
1 were not slow to go running to Pollini and inform him that his principal
2 conductor had described the Stadttheater as a penitentiary. Pollini reacted by
3 making Mahler conduct Cavalleria rusticana ten times, while more congenial
4 tasks were allotted to a more complaisant colleague. In the longer term, however,
5 Pollini was unable to sustain his punitive measures for it soon became clear to
6 critics and audiences alike that the company had no other conductor who was
7 anywhere near as good as Mahler. There is a symbolic rightness to the fact that
8 Mahler’s departure for Vienna in 1897 coincided with Pollini’s death. But
9 Hamburg later had other outstanding conductors such as Nikisch and Klemperer,
20 who helped to maintain the house’s musical standards in the wake of Mahler’s
1 departure – Mahler had wanted to compete with Nikisch in Leipzig, while
2 Klemperer became one of the most enthusiastic of Mahlerian conductors
3 alongside Bruno Walter and Willem Mengelberg.
4 The speed with which the people of Hamburg recognized Mahler’s excep-
5 tional standing emerges from a review that appeared in the Hamburgischer
6 Correspondent on 1 April 1891. Its author was Josef Sittard, a member of the
7 conservative camp, who attended Mahler’s first two performances in the city.
8 Mahler’s reputation was based on the successes that he had previously
9 achieved conducting Wagner and in works like Fidelio and Don Giovanni, with
30 the result that whenever he took up a new appointment he set the greatest
1 store by introducing himself to his new audience with one of these works –
2 throughout his whole life he was conscious of his impact as a conductor. In
3 Hamburg he persuaded Pollini to let him make his debut with Tannhäuser on
4 29 March 1891, following this up with Siegfried two days later. Sittard’s review
5 appeared on 1 April – at this period it was still usual for reviews to appear the
6 day after the performance. In it he wrote that the new conductor had surpassed
7 all the expectations placed in him – after all, Mahler had previously run the
8 Budapest Opera – and electrified his audiences with his performances:
9
40 Herr Mahler is a conductor who has in his command not only the notes in
41R the score, but, what is more, the spirit of the artistic work; and he also
possesses the gift of transmitting this spirit to the entire cast and carrying 1
them along with him. There is no entry that is not cued by him, no dynamic 2
shading that remains unobserved; Herr Mahler holds the reins in his hand 3
with an energy which binds the individual firmly to him, draws him, we 4
might say, with magical force into his own world of thought. The spiritual 5
and artistic influence that such a conductor exerts on an orchestra was partic- 6
ularly easy to recognize yesterday [at the performance of Siegfried]; at times 7
we thought we had before us a completely new instrumental ensemble. 8
How clearly, rhythmically defined, carefully nuanced and phrased everything 9
seemed; how the great climactic moments in the last two acts were enhanced! 10
If Herr Mahler displays the same qualities in classical opera as in Wagner’s 1
music dramas, then our Opera may count itself fortunate to have such a 2
brilliant conductor at its head.3 3
4
This review is extremely enlightening, which is why it has been quoted at 5
length. When judged by the standards of the day, it is couched in unusually 6
informative and precise terms, containing, as it does, a summary of all the 7
positive qualities that were to typify Mahler throughout the rest of his life, at 8
least whenever he conducted works by other composers. First, there was his 9
ability to grasp the essence of the work that he was conducting and to commu- 20
nicate that view to the other members of the cast and orchestra, inspiring them 1
to give of their best; second, there was the extreme precision of his cues to the 2
singers and players; third, the vast dynamic range of his performances; fourth, 3
his extreme care in his treatment of nuance and phrasing; fifth, his ability to 4
bring out the work’s rhythms with altogether exemplary clarity; sixth, the 5
climaxes were overpoweringly dramatic and well placed; and, finally, he had an 6
almost magical effect on his performers, especially his orchestral players, who 7
played as if transformed by the spiritual energy of his conducting. 8
There were two other people who were enthusiastic about Mahler’s conducting 9
and whose opinion is even more significant than Sittard’s. Tchaikovsky honoured 30
Hamburg with a visit in January 1892, when he came to the city to conduct 1
the local première of his opera Eugene Onegin. But the orchestra and the singers 2
realized at the rehearsals that as an opera conductor the Russian composer had 3
certain shortcomings. Wisely admitting to his own limitations, he handed over 4
the conducting duties at short notice to Mahler, writing to his nephew shortly 5
before the opening night: ‘The conductor here is not merely passable, but actually 6
has genius, and he ardently desires to conduct the first performance.’4 The success 7
of the first night fully justified Tchaikovsky. The other musician to be impressed 8
by Mahler was not a composer (except of a handful of minor works) but a pianist 9
and a conductor and, as such, arguably the most important figure in the genera- 40
tion before Mahler: Hans von Bülow. It is a source of great regret that no lasting 41R
214 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 friendship developed between the two men, but Bülow died in February 1894,
2 during Mahler’s years in Hamburg. At the same time Bülow’s Brahmsian lack of
3 sympathy for Mahler’s music would have militated against such a friendship.
4 (Much the same would have been true of Brahms himself.)
5 Mahler told Foerster about an incident as typical as it was embarrassing
6 for both the parties concerned. Encouraged by Bülow’s enthusiasm for his
7 conducting at the Hamburg Opera – it was to this enthusiasm that Mahler
8 owed the laurel wreath that hung above his bachelor’s bed in Hamburg – he
9 paid a visit to his famous colleague at the end of 1891 in order to show him the
10 full score of his ‘Todtenfeier’, later to become the first movement of his Second
1 Symphony. Bülow asked Mahler to play him excerpts from it, as this would
2 give him a better idea of the work than merely reading the score. Mahler
3 began, and after a while turned to observe his listener and was appalled to see
4 him holding his hands to his ears. Bülow, it has to be said, was known for his
5 eccentricities. And so Mahler continued to play, only to make the same obser-
6 vation again a few moments later. Was Bülow perhaps suffering from one of
7 the migraines to which he was notoriously prone? Mahler stopped playing but
8 was immediately urged to continue. When he had finished, Bülow, who was
9 known for his implacable put-downs (one recalls the time when Nietzsche
20 showed him one of his own compositions and Bülow described it as ‘the rape
1 of Euterpe’), gestured dismissively, adding: ‘Well, if that’s music, then I know
2 nothing about music.’5 In an earlier version of his reminiscences, Foerster
3 offers a slightly different wording, ‘then I no longer understand anything about
4 music’, suggesting a milder reaction to the score: if Bülow failed to understand
5 the work, it was because he belonged to an older generation. But as a
6 conductor, Bülow held his colleague in the highest regard. He himself had held
7 the post of conductor in Meiningen in the early 1880s, becoming principal
8 conductor of the Philharmonic Concerts in Hamburg in 1886. (The concerts
9 were the brainchild of the great Berlin impresario, Hermann Wolff.) Bülow
30 moved to the banks of the Elbe in 1887.
1 In short, there were many opportunities for Bülow to hear the young
2 and brilliant Mahler conducting at the Hamburg Opera and also at the occa-
3 sional concert in the city. True, Bülow’s initial contacts with Mahler had been
4 unfortunate – at Strauss’s recommendation he had obtained a copy of the score
5 to Die drei Pintos, only to dismiss the whole work as an ‘infamous, outmoded
6 concoction’.6 But of his subsequent enthusiasm for Mahler as a conductor there
7 is no doubt. As we have already had occasion to observe, Bülow’s eccentricities
8 were legendary – one recalls the time when he performed Beethoven’s then
9 rarely heard Ninth Symphony twice in succession in Meiningen, informing the
40 audience that they would be wasting their time fleeing the building as all the
41R doors had been locked. None the less, Mahler was evidently embarrassed by
Bülow’s reaction to Die drei Pintos and felt that on this occasion his colleague 1
had gone too far. And yet he was able to appreciate the praise that Bülow 2
reserved for his work as a conductor. In late November 1891, for example, we 3
find Mahler writing to Friedrich Löhr: 4
5
Bülow lives here, and I go to all his concerts; it is droll how he takes every 6
opportunity of sensationally ‘distinguishing’ me coram publico in his abstruse 7
fashion. At every fine passage he casts me coquettish glances (I sit in the front 8
row). – He hands the scores of unknown works down to me from the dais so 9
that I can read them during the performance. – The moment he catches sight 10
of me he ostentatiously makes a deep bow! Sometimes he addresses me from 1
the dais, and so on. 2
3
Mahler then gives an edited version of the ‘Todtenfeier’ incident, adding an 4
interesting variant on Foerster’s account of the episode: ‘When I played my 5
“Todtenfeier” to him, he became quite hysterical with horror, declaring that 6
compared with my piece Tristan was a Haydn symphony, and went on like a 7
madman.’7 8
There is no doubt that Bülow was the most important musician before 9
Strauss to recognize Mahler’s genius, even if that recognition was very one- 20
sided. But Bülow was already suffering from chronic ill-health. Like Strauss, he 1
travelled to Egypt in the hope that the southern climate would lead to an 2
improvement, but he died in a hotel room in Cairo on 12 February 1894 as the 3
result of a stroke. His memorial service was held in Hamburg’s St Michael’s 4
Church on 29 March and was attended by Mahler, among others. The service 5
included music by Bach as well as a chorale sung to words by Klopstock, who 6
had spent his most important years in Hamburg and died in nearby Ottensen 7
in 1803, Aufstehen wirst du mein Staub nach kurzer Ruh (‘You will arise, my 8
dust, after brief repose’). Later that same afternoon, Foerster called on Mahler 9
unannounced and found him bent over a score. He knew that until then 30
Mahler had not been sure about the shape that the final movement of his 1
Second Symphony should take. But when he entered Mahler’s apartment, the 2
latter exclaimed: ‘Foerster, I’ve got it!’ ‘I know,’ Foerster replied: ‘Arise, yea, 3
arise!’ Mahler had found the initial spark for his final movement, and Foerster 4
had guessed what it was. Hans von Bülow was the cause. 5
Mahler’s letters from his early years in Hamburg, when he was still living on 6
his own, reveal a sombre view of the world characterized by feelings of loneli- 7
ness and by worries about his family and about money – these last two worries 8
were closely connected. For much of his life he was tormented by very real 9
fears about his livelihood, fears that were finally allayed only when he felt 40
adequately provided for by his Viennese pension and by the handsome fees 41R
216 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 that he received in New York. He hated the coercive constraint of having to

2 earn his living as an opera conductor, even if the opportunity to conduct the
3 great masterpieces of the repertory remained a source of pleasure to him. His
4 fear of not having a job continued to torment him even when it was clear that
5 his growing fame as a conductor reduced the risk of unemployment. His
6 fear was too deep-seated to be amenable to rational argument. Nor can it be
7 fully explained on the basis of childhood experiences, for as far as we can
8 tell, his parents’ finances were never critical, however short of money they
9 may initially have been. Mahler arrived in Hamburg from Budapest with a
10 golden handshake of 25,000 florins, while his annual salary in Hamburg was
1 12,000 reichsmarks, before deductions were made for taxes and pension
2 contributions, Mahler having negotiated the relevant details with great finan-
3 cial tenacity. In short, his finances were by no means precarious, although it
4 has to be remembered that he not only had to look after himself, he also had
5 to care for four of his brothers and sisters. (Ernst had died in 1875, his married
6 sister Leopoldine in 1889. Mahler’s links with the latter appear to have been
7 relatively tenuous. Certainly, there is no evidence that her death provoked any
8 reaction in him.) Of the four survivors, Alois was a good-for-nothing; his
9 favourite sister, Justine, was unmarried and lived in Vienna, the only family
20 member on whom Mahler could rely when he tried to keep the family
1 together; Emma was both prematurely old and childlike; and, finally, there was
2 the problem child, Otto.
3 Mahler’s letters to Justine from this period are filled with worries of the most
4 basic and yet depressing kind. On one occasion, Emma wanted a doll, and so
5 Justine bought one for her. Otto spent two weeks on holiday with Mahler but
6 no sooner had he returned than he was keen to set off again, and, as before, it
7 was Justine who paid for him to do so. It is easy to understand that Mahler,
8 having to foot each bill, complained about his siblings’ egoism and lack of
9 consideration. It is clear from all these letters that as the eldest of the other
30 family members capable of dealing with the situation (Alois’s inconstant
1 lifestyle ruled him out of court), Justine was effectively the head of the family
2 in Vienna whenever Mahler himself was absent. Friedrich Löhr and his wife,
3 Uda, assumed the role of guardians in all matters that went beyond everyday
4 practicalities. The younger members of the family lived for a time with the
5 Löhrs, at least until such time as Justine and Emma moved to Hamburg in
6 1894. Otto’s fate was sealed with his suicide in February 1895. The only other
7 member of the family to show a talent for music, Otto had never been capable
8 of sticking to his studies. When Mahler went to Hamburg, he hoped that his
9 brother, then eighteen, would spend twelve months as a volunteer in the army
40 and learn a sense of discipline and order, but it turned out that he was unfit for
41R military service, and so he returned to his life as a wastrel.
Together with Justine, it was above all Friedrich Löhr and Mahler’s old 1
friend and legal adviser Emil Freund who shared the burden of responsibility 2
involved in caring for the composer’s family. In a letter that Mahler wrote to 3
Löhr from Hamburg in November 1891, we find him expatiating on this 4
theme: 5
6
I wish from the bottom of my heart that the time were near when at long last 7
Otto would have his examination and his year of military service behind him, 8
so that this infinitely complicated process of providing money would become 9
simpler for me; – it is beginning to wear me down and I long for the day when 10
I am no longer obliged to earn so much money. Besides, it is very doubtful 1
how much longer I shall be in a position to do so.8 2
3
Mahler’s final remark was another example of sheer defeatism, for a conductor 4
who had not only received a laurel wreath from Hans von Bülow but whom 5
Brahms and Tchaikovsky had praised to the skies and who had held a leading 6
position in Budapest and now in Hamburg had little cause to be afraid for his 7
future. But his defeatism stemmed from his negative mood during his early 8
period in Hamburg: ‘Only there is now too much winter in me – if only spring 9
would come again,’ he writes, significantly, in his letter to Löhr.9 This mood 20
emerges even more forcefully from a letter to Emil Freund, suggesting that 1
Mahler was suffering from what we would now call a midlife crisis. Now in 2
his early thirties, he had – according to the life expectancy of the time – 3
reached the halfway mark. (That he had in fact already passed the halfway 4
point is another matter.) It was a crisis that was bound up with several factors, 5
including his current burden of responsibility for his brothers and sisters; his 6
despair at the state of the musical world (‘Believe me, German artistic life the 7
way it is at present holds no more attractions for me,’ he wrote to Löhr in 1894. 8
‘In the last analysis it is always the same hypocritical, corrupt, dishonest behav- 9
iour wherever one turns’10); his despair at his continuing lack of success as a 30
composer – by holding his hands to his ears during Mahler’s performance of 1
‘Todtenfeier’, Bülow had made it clear that not just ignorant critics but even his 2
musical heroes failed to understand him; and, above all, his sense of loneliness 3
in a remote and inhospitable part of the country, a loneliness inspired not least 4
by his memory of his unhappy affairs in Kassel and Leipzig. And so we find 5
him writing to Freund: 6
7
I have been through so much in the last few weeks – without any evident 8
material cause – the past has caught up with me – all I have lost – the loneli- 9
ness of the present – all sorts of things – you know these moods of mine from 40
earlier years – when I would be overcome by sadness even while among my 41R
218 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 friends – when I was still all youth, vigour and stamina – so you can well
2 imagine how I spend these long, lonely afternoons and evenings here. – No
3 one with whom I have anything in common – whether a share in the past or
4 shared hopes for the future. – [. . .] Oh, anything, anything, but this eternal,
5 eternal loneliness! It was there when I was up in Norway, roaming about for
6 weeks on end without speaking a word to a living soul – and that after already
7 having had my fill of keeping silence – and now back in this atmosphere in
8 which I cannot get so much as a single breath of fresh air.11
9
10 If we did not know that Mahler was never visited by thoughts of self-harm, we
1 should have to describe this mood as suicidal. It is certainly indicative of his
2 current state of depression.
3 It is altogether remarkable that Mahler’s manifold triumphs as a conductor at
4 the Hamburg Opera could do nothing to lighten his mood, but it is clear from
5 this that however seriously he took his role there and however impassioned his
6 performances, he did not see this as his true task in life but at best – namely, in
7 the case of the great masterpieces that he saw it as his duty to serve – as a source
8 of pleasure and at worst as a burden imposed on him by his need to provide for
9 his family and, later, for his wife and children. In both cases, it helped him to
20 spend his summer vacations composing. Even at this stage it was already clear
1 to him that he would never be able to survive on his income as a composer. And
2 on this point he was to be proved right. His successes in Hamburg were consid-
3 erable, as is clear not only from the reactions of Brahms, Tchaikovsky and
4 Bülow but also from the reviews by all the leading local critics.
5 In Hamburg, Mahler made his mark above all as a Wagner conductor. In
6 contrast to Budapest, he had at his disposal an excellent team of Wagner singers
7 among whom the most prominent was the heldentenor Max Alvary. In his short
8 life, Alvary excited attention not so much through the solidity of his technique as
9 through his youthful and virile timbre and a physique that was ideal for the young
30 Siegfried. He had also studied architecture, allowing him to bring to his operatic
1 interpretations an unusual and striking physicality. An idiosyncratic and intelli-
2 gent artist, he was born Maximilian Achenbach, the son of a famous painter
3 in Düsseldorf, and was the first tenor to sing Wagner’s tenor roles without a
4 beard, a revolutionary development clear from a comparison of photographs of
5 Alvary and the great Albert Niemann, Wagner’s Paris Tannhäuser and Bayreuth
6 Siegmund. Alvary had been the Met’s first Siegfried in 1887 and four years later
7 sang Tristan and Tannhäuser in Bayreuth. He joined the Hamburg company
8 six months after Mahler and from then on was regarded as the ideal and most
9 modern interpreter of Wagner’s heavier tenor roles. Two years later, however, his
40 career suffered a serious setback when he was involved in an accident onstage in
41R Mannheim, an accident from which he never recovered. He died in 1898.
His work with Mahler culminated in a series of guest appearances in 1

London in the summer of 1892. It was Mahler’s only visit to the city. He had 2
been engaged to conduct the German opera season and conducted eighteen 3
performances between the end of May and the end of July at both Covent 4
Garden and Drury Lane. The great French composer Paul Dukas attended a 5
performance of his Fidelio, his enthusiasm continuing to resonate even many 6
years later: 7
8
One of the most wonderful musical memories of my life is of a perform- 9
ance of Fidelio in London, in the course of which he [Mahler] conducted 10
the Leonore Overture no. 3, interpreting Beethoven’s genius so marvellously 1
that I had the feeling of being present at the original creation of this 2
sublime work.12 3
4
The high point of this brief German season was a series of two complete cycles of 5
the Ring, only the second time that the work had been staged in the capital; the 6
first had been ten years earlier, when Angelo Neumann – Mahler’s former 7
director in Prague – had given four complete cycles under the direction of Anton 8
Seidl, who was later to become the leading Wagner conductor at the Metropolitan 9
Opera. The 1892 performances were a kind of co-production between Covent 20
Garden and the Hamburg Opera or, to be more accurate, between the Royal 1
Opera’s director, Augustus Harris, and Bernhard Pollini of the Hamburg Opera. 2
The orchestra was the Covent Garden band reinforced by a number of players 3
from Hamburg, and the cast was headed by Alvary – curiously enough, the cycles 4
were both prefaced by single performances of Siegfried designed to showcase 5
Alvary’s talents. The role of Wotan was divided between Karl Grengg and 6
Theodor Reichmann, that of Brünnhilde between Katarina Klafsky, Pegalie 7
Greeff-Andriessen and Rosa Sucher, who only recently had left Hamburg for 8
Berlin. Until then Mahler had been unable to speak a word of English but took 9
private lessons with a new friend of his, the physicist Arnold Berliner. However 30
ambitious his intentions, the results were modest, to judge by a touching and 1
comic little letter that he wrote to Berliner from London in June 1892: 2
3
Dear Berliner! 4
I shall only to give you the adresse of my residence, because I hope to hear 5
by you upon your life and other circumstances in Hambourg. 6
I myself am too tired and excited and not able to write a letter. 7
Only, that I found the circumstances of orchestra here bader than thought 8
and the cast better than hoped. 9
[. . .] 40
I make greater progress in English as you can observe in this letter.13 41R
220 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 We do not know what Berliner thought about his pupil’s progress in English,
2 but to the extent that Mahler evidently had to begin from a state of total ignor-
3 ance, he may not have been entirely dissatisfied. The English critic Herman
4 Klein, who got to know Mahler during this visit in 1892, later reported that ‘for
5 a man who knew so little English, I never came across any one so bent on
6 speaking that language and no other. [. . .] He would rather spend five minutes
7 in an effort to find the English word he wanted than resort to his native tongue
8 or allow any one else to supply the equivalent.’14 Eyewitness accounts of
9 Mahler’s time in New York likewise indicate that his English was poor and
10 heavily accented. Clearly he had no gift for languages. But he could be satisfied
1 with his success as a conductor in London. The Ring was well received, and
2 there was universal acclaim for the conducting of a musician completely
3 unknown in the capital – Hans Richter had originally been intended to
4 conduct the season. He was the star or, as he wrote home in English, striking
5 an ironical note: ‘Me top again!’15
6 After the performance of Fidelio on 2 July, the audience even started to chant
7 Mahler’s name, although some of the critics were shocked that the conductor had
8 had the temerity to perform the Leonore Overture no. 3 before the second act.
9 (Even in Hamburg, Mahler had already performed this piece before the final
20 scene, a practice he continued in his epoch-making production with Roller in
1 Vienna.) The most distinctive critic on the London musical scene at this period
2 was a certain Corno Di Bassetto – the pen-name of Bernard Shaw, who attended
3 the performance of Siegfried on 8 June. His detailed review is a mine of impor-
4 tant information about the standard of the performance, above all that of the
5 singers. Curiously, he was of the mistaken belief that Mahler had brought the
6 Hamburg Opera orchestra with him, leading him to conclude that the Covent
7 Garden band could have turned in a better performance. And his only comment
8 on the ‘energetic conductor, Herr Mahler’ was that ‘he knows the score thor-
9 oughly, and sets the tempi with excellent judgment’, suggesting that he was rather
30 underwhelmed by the conducting.16 A more enthusiastic response was that of
1 the opera fanatic Herman Klein, who retrospectively recalled the ‘magnetic
2 power and technical mastery’ of Mahler’s conducting.17 It is remarkable that, as
3 we saw with Josef Sittard in Hamburg, critics were already using the term ‘mag-
4 netism’ to describe Mahler’s conducting. The use of such a term is not entirely
5 unexpected, of course, in describing the effect of a conductor both then and
6 now, but the number of times with which it was applied to Mahler is none the
7 less striking.
8 The various eyewitness accounts of Mahler’s years in Hamburg, including
9 the supremely important reminiscences and jottings of Natalie Bauer-Lechner,
40 allow us to form a far more detailed picture of Mahler’s personality than we
41R have been able to do until now. At all events, it is clear that impartial observers
generally had the impression that they were in the presence of an extremely 1
important person, albeit one who, initially at least, did not excite great 2
sympathy. As we have already had occasion to note, the critic Ferdinand Pfohl 3
was far from impartial when recording his own recollections, but he was 4
presumably merely exaggerating a point that other observers could sense less 5
clearly and less intensely. Pfohl had got to know Mahler in Leipzig, but it was 6
only in Hamburg that there was any closer contact between the two men. 7
When Mahler left Leipzig and took his leave of Pfohl, the latter ‘had the 8
feeling’ that he had met ‘the most unsympathetic person of all time, and yet 9
in spite of this he filled me with the sort of interest that one feels for a snake 10
or a piece of fruit, when one does not know if it is poisonous and if one 1
may die from eating it’.18 When Pfohl and Mahler met each other again in 2
Hamburg, Pfohl’s opinion soon changed, not least because he was flattered 3
when Mahler drew him into his confidence. At no point in his life, conversely, 4
did Mahler ever really become friendly with a critic. Pfohl continued to 5
find Mahler a strange individual, as slow to praise others as he was to crit- 6
icize them. The most sharply worded of his reproaches was the Austrian 7
word ‘Trottel’ (‘simpleton’ or ‘idiot’) and its superlative, ‘Trottel aller Trottel’, 8
a term that Mahler once applied to the elderly Eduard Hanslick when 9
the latter wrote an uncomprehending review of a work by Richard Strauss. 20
Another, less articulate reaction was a bleating, almost snarling ‘ah-ah-ah’, 1
with particular stress on the final syllable, implying amazement, interest and 2
even incredulity. 3
Many eyewitness accounts attest to Mahler’s otherworldliness – ‘ich bin der 4
Welt abhanden gekommen’ (‘I am lost to the world’) is without doubt one of 5
the most personal lines he ever set to music, even if it applies to only one 6
aspect of his personality. If passers-by addressed him in the street, he would 7
involuntarily knit his brows as he was generally deep in thought and walked 8
at a considerable speed, walking being his preferred form of locomotion. 9
Anecdotes on the subject abound from his time in Vienna, while famous 30
photographs, taken of him in 1904 on his way to and from the Court Opera, 1
give us some idea of his blindness in this regard. One wonders whether he was 2
even aware of the tramcar that can be seen in one of these pictures. His love of 3
animals could assume the most delightful aspects. Pfohl recalls how on one 4
occasion Mahler took him with him on one of his walks, a secretive expression 5
on his face, in order to show him something special. The object in question 6
turned out to be a cow, grazing in a meadow not far from the opera house, a 7
sight that left Pfohl distinctly unimpressed. When a stray dog attached itself to 8
Mahler, he took it with him to his favourite restaurant at the Hotel Belvedere 9
and was inconsolable when the dog was driven away by the hotel staff. He was 40
also uncertain how to respond to a Hamburg prostitute when she accosted him 41R
222 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 and Pfohl in the street and wondered whether he should rescue her from her
2 fate, but in the end he settled for a donation of three marks.
3 There are also countless examples of Mahler’s absentmindedness. One day he
4 was dining at his favourite restaurant with other guests. A large bowl of stewed
5 fruit was passed round as the dessert, and when it came to his turn, Mahler
6 filled his bowl, then licked the ladle before replacing it in the fruit, not because
7 he had been badly brought up but simply out of thoughtlessness. A few years
8 later two other eyewitnesses, including the composer Karl Goldmark, reported
9 a very similar story to Pfohl: ‘Just imagine what happened to Mahler when he
10 was invited to a formal dinner with us!’ Pfohl already knew the answer: ‘He
1 licked the ladle!’19 Bruno Walter reports something similar. At a stage rehearsal
2 in Hamburg the stage manager needed some time to make certain arrange-
3 ments and the orchestra had to wait. Mahler waited by his stand, then lapsed
4 into thought and failed to hear the shouts from the stage, telling him that he
5 could continue. In the ensuing silence Mahler suddenly came to his senses
6 again and, striking his baton on the music stand, called out: ‘Waiter, the bill!’ ‘A
7 deep confusion of this kind is the compensation for, and perhaps the condition
8 of, concentration as absolute as his. For so-called distractions as cards or any
9 other game, he had no use.’20
20 Walter also noted that Mahler’s lifestyle was chronically disorganized and
1 characterized by a grasshopper volatility. The iron discipline that allowed him
2 to compose his monumental symphonies in the summer months was some-
3 thing that he evolved only in the course of time, probably starting in 1893, when
4 he spent his first vacation on the Attersee. But for Mahler such volatility was by
5 no means synonymous with a lack of concentration or carelessness. Walter, who
6 knew him better than most other people, used to say that he was always ready
7 for the next move once the raging floodtide of his thoughts and emotions had
8 come to rest again, but the moment of rest was short-lived, and it required only
9 some new idea to open the floodgates again. Not untypical of this characteristic
30 was his attitude to eating. Throughout his life Mahler tried various diets, no
1 doubt on account of his weak stomach, which repeatedly caused him problems,
2 but also because of his recurrent bouts of haemorrhoids and his tendency to
3 suffer from migraines, which he generally ascribed to an incorrect diet. These
4 migraines were sometimes so severe that he had to lie in a darkened room – one
5 such incident occurred in Paris in 1900, shortly before a concert with the
6 Vienna Philharmonic, with the result that the concert began half an hour late.
7 But it is impossible to discern any consistency to his eating habits. Here, too, we
8 find the same volatility. We have already noted that for a time he was a vege-
9 tarian, a regime he adopted under the influence of Wagner, but, as with Wagner,
40 it was a passing phase. During his time in Budapest, his favourite dishes appear
41R to have included salted and smoked meat, whereas according to Pfohl, it was
pot roast with dumplings and dried fruit that he preferred, a dish that one 1
would hardly describe as part of a calorie-controlled diet. His alcohol intake, 2
conversely, was extremely moderate, and there is no mention of his ever being 3
drunk or even tipsy. In Budapest and Hamburg he seems to have enjoyed the 4
odd glass of Pilsen beer (it may be recalled that the town of Pilsen was not far 5
from Iglau), whereas he later preferred fine wines. When concentrating on his 6
work during his vacations, he would drink only spring water. 7
Mahler smoked, but only in moderation. In Hamburg he tended to prefer 8
cigarettes, but after a good meal he also smoked cigars given to him by his 9
friends. If he had spent the morning composing to his satisfaction, he would take 10
out a cigar and with a smile of contentment place it on the table that had been 1
set for lunch. The famous photographs taken in 1905 and depicting him with 2
Max Reinhardt, the architect Josef Hoffmann, Alfred Roller and Hans Pfitzner 3
in the garden of his father-in-law Carl Moll are among the few that show him 4
smoking, and here he is certainly in good company, for both Reinhardt and – 5
surprisingly – Pfitzner are seen smoking cigars, Moll a cigarillo. Such pleasures 6
were entirely typical of groups of men of their standing. Following the discovery 7
of his heart insufficiency, Mahler was told not to smoke, a ban that he found so 8
intolerable that he took up smoking again soon afterwards. Letters that he wrote 9
from New York to his parents-in-law during the final months of his life contain 20
requests for cigarettes and cigar holders and also for ‘Nachmann’s smoker’s 1
wool’, which was placed in the holders as a filter. But it would be wrong to think 2
of Mahler as an addict, except in the case of his addiction to his work as a 3
composer. And even here, in the context of creative work, the word is best 4
avoided. 5
6
7
A Difficult Man
8
One can well imagine that Mahler was not an easy person to work with – in 9
theatrical and musical circles, such a person is generally described as a ‘good 30
colleague’, usually implying certain deficiencies as an artist. Even before the 1
young Anna von Mildenburg began preparing for her Hamburg debut as 2
Brünnhilde in Die Walküre in 1895, she had already heard alarming things 3
about the company’s principal conductor. During a session with one of the 4
répétiteurs, a small man with a sun-blackened face rushed in and, without 5
introducing himself or welcoming anyone, simply hissed ‘Carry on’, then 6
pushed the répétiteur away and sat down at the piano himself. The singer was 7
so nervous and tense and so perplexed by Mahler’s lack of any reaction that she 8
burst into tears. Far from comforting her, he began to shout at her, then, seeing 9
her tear-stained, terrified face, he burst into laughter, assuring her that so far 40
she had done very well. But then he started to shout at her again: ‘You’ll have 41R
224 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 to go on crying until you just sink into the general theatrical mire of medioc-
2 rity. Nobody cries then!’21 He then resumed his former friendly concern –
3 a reaction that was soon to develop into a passionate affair. Mahler was not
4 the sort of man whose life was ruled by harmony, balance and the need for
5 appeasement. Rather, his life was tumultuous, tempestuous and remarkable
6 for its excesses and immoderation, to paraphrase the critical Pfohl, who was
7 referring in the process to both the man and his music. For orchestral musi-
8 cians, he was a thorn in the flesh – it is easy to appreciate why the Vienna
9 Philharmonic soon tired of him, an attitude all the more understandable
10 when we recall the mentality of orchestral players then and now. The average
1 German and Austrian orchestral musician was badly off: at the Hamburg
2 Stadttheater, for example, musicians in the 1890s received little more than
3 subsistence wages. While Mahler was earning some 850 reichsmarks a month,
4 the second bassoonist was being paid eighty, a sum insufficient to feed him
5 and his family if his wife were not also working as a greengrocer, for example.
6 By way of comparison, this would be the equivalent of a present-day conductor
7 receiving 5,000 euros a month, while the second bassoonist received 500,
8 whereas in reality the latter earns between five and seven times that amount.
9 Mahler was justifiably indignant about this state of affairs and, like Meyerbeer
20 before him, he repeatedly tried to raise his players’ level of income, at least to
1 the extent that it was in his power to do so.
2 In theory Mahler was able to see that lack of enthusiasm and slovenliness
3 were the inevitable result of such conditions, but once he was hard at work and
4 encountered a lack of commitment or even thick-skinned obstructiveness, he
5 could quickly lose his composure. Most orchestral musicians and many singers
6 trembled in his presence and felt terrorized – not until he was working in New
7 York did this situation improve, when he grew more mellow and realized that
8 he was wasting his energy on such fruitless battles. Both Pfohl and Anna von
9 Mildenburg report that he had a way of spreading an atmosphere of icy terror
30 during his rehearsals and performances. During a rehearsal in Hamburg, Pfohl
1 recalls that he tormented a flautist whose performance was not to his liking,
2 making him repeat the phrase until he was so tired that he left the rehearsal in
3 tears. At the end of the rehearsal the orchestral attendant told Mahler that the
4 player was waiting outside with a large group of friends, fully intent on beating
5 the living daylights out of him. Mahler sent for the police and left the building
6 with an armed guard. On another occasion, this time during rehearsals for the
7 first performance of the revised version of his First Symphony in Hamburg
8 in September 1893, Mahler found himself at loggerheads with the timpanist,
9 who was unable to bring the necessary weight to the transitional passage that
40 leads into the final movement. Incandescent with fury, Mahler leapt down
41R among the players, seized the timpanist’s sticks and belaboured the drum with
terrifying force, achieving precisely the effect that the passage required. At 1
its climax, the sticks flew out of his hands, describing a wide arc over the 2
orchestra and prompting the remaining players and Mahler’s friends in the 3
rehearsal room to break into a round of applause. 4
During the actual performances, Mahler was unable to express his emotions 5
in this way, but he had other means in his armoury. If a musician played a 6
passage incorrectly or a singer sang a wrong note or came in at the wrong time, 7
Mahler stabbed at the miscreant with his baton, as though with a rapier, 8
turning his head and fixing the person in question with a furious look, a posi- 9
tion he maintained for several seconds, while continuing to conduct with his 10
free left hand. If he did not agree musically with what a singer was doing, he 1
would begin to gesticulate wildly on the podium, shrugging his shoulders, 2
looking questioningly at the person concerned, shaking his head and finally, if 3
all else failed, sinking back with a resigned expression and a tired beat, making 4
it clear to the singer that the chosen tempo was a musical and moral disaster 5
and that he was abandoning the fight only to ensure that the performance 6
continued. But the evildoer could be certain that at the end of the act or 7
performance he or she would receive a furiously worded note in his or her 8
dressing room. 9
In Vienna, Mahler was notorious for the fact that whenever latecomers tried to 20
slip into their seats at the front of the house unnoticed, he would lower his raised 1
baton and transfix the persons concerned with a piercing, stigmatizing stare, 2
confident that they would never again arrive late. He soon ensured that late- 3
comers were not admitted to the stalls until the act was over, a revolution at the 4
Vienna Court Opera, where anything was permissible, as long as the ushers were 5
adequately bribed. Many of the arrangements that we now find codified in 6
present-day programme booklets go back to Mahler (as does the total darkening 7
of the auditorium following Wagner’s example). Few contemporaries realized 8
that these measures were not an attempt on the part of an undersized 9
individual to assert his authority by repressive means but that his obsessions and 30
fanaticism sprang from his constant endeavour to ensure the musical integrity of 1
the performance, a point that even Pfohl was forced to concede. Bruno Walter, 2
who understood Mahler on the deepest level, expressed this same idea in rather 3
more flattering terms: 4
5
His abrupt impulsiveness perhaps explains the excitement nearly everybody 6
felt who came near him; especially, of course, singers and members of the 7
orchestra. He diffused an atmosphere of high tension. This was communi- 8
cated to those with whom he worked, and induced devout admiration in the 9
best of them. It produced performances illuminated by the fiery glow within 40
him which raised the Hamburg Opera to the top rank in Germany. Of course, 41R
226 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 there were weaker spirits, men of second-rate gifts, who were injured by his
2 absolutism; good will or ill, however, none could resist his sway.22
3
4 Anyone who knew Mahler only from contexts such as these would be aston-
5 ished to read Walter’s claim that Mahler’s most striking characteristic was his
6 warm-heartedness, but there is no doubt that he was fired by a deep sense of
7 compassion and fellow suffering, which finds expression not only in his love of
8 animals – although, curiously enough, he never kept a pet – but also in his
9 great empathy for the sufferings of the world and its inhabitants. Coupled with
10 this, however, was a certain blindness towards the realities of that world and
1 an assertiveness which, as we have seen, could occasionally be ruthless when-
2 ever his own interests were at stake. As such, this last-named quality amounted
3 to a kind of naïve and immoral egoism. Many of his closer friends and associ-
4 ates attest to his sense of humour, but it was humour in the spirit of his
5 favourite writer, Jean Paul, who writes in § 32 of his ‘Vorschule der Ästhetik’
6 (literally, ‘Preliminary School of Aesthetics’):
7
8 As the inverted sublime, humour does not destroy what is individual but,
9 rather, it destroys what is finite through its contrast with the idea. For such
20 humour, there is no individual folly, there are no fools, but only folly in
1 general and a foolish world. Unlike the common joker with his sideswipes, it
2 does not single out any individual folly but belittles what is great in order to
3 place the petty beside it, on which point it differs from parody; or it raises the
4 petty in order to place what is great beside it, in which regard it differs from
5 irony. In this way it destroys both, because in the face of infinity everything
6 is both the same and nothing.23
7
8 According to this definition, humour is the inverted sublime. No matter
9 how much Mahler was a metaphysician searching for the infinite, for the
30 metaphysical and for the meaning of a life that tormented him, he still enjoyed
1 keen wit and brilliant ideas, having both of these at his command and being
2 capable of laughing until he cried. What he loathed were obscene jokes and the
3 sort of Jewish jokes that many Jews used to tell in a display of auto-aggression.
4 If such jokes were told in his presence, he could be brusquely and icily dismis-
5 sive. The cliché of the man of sorrows bearing the grief of the world upon
6 his shoulders, which was peddled above all by Alma, is misleading. Even in
7 extreme old age, Mahler’s only surviving daughter, Anna, who was a sculptor
8 by profession, could still recall her father’s gentle smile, even if that smile
9 always appeared against the background of a profound seriousness. But we
40 need to recall that Anna knew her father only as an old man. She was six when
41R he died and remembered him only as a tired old man who was none the less
very affectionate towards her and who understood her much better than her 1
mother. 2
Mahler enjoyed wrong-footing other people to humorous effect, but often 3
failed to consider the feelings of the individual involved. However much she 4
may have loved him, Anna von Mildenburg was forced to admit that: 5
6
He hurt many unintentionally with his humour. Like most people when they 7
talk in jest, he did not always weigh his words. For in the next moment he had 8
quite forgotten about the individual who aroused his mirth and had forsaken 9
the particular for the universal, for the deepest, most painful and self-denying 10
introspection and the living truth. 1
It was not a common humour, avoiding cheap suggestiveness and preventing 2
him from sharing ordinary conviviality. . . . And they would look affronted and 3
disgruntled, forever scenting a personal attack in his words. He noticed it and 4
had to laugh at their darkened, suspicious, rejecting expressions. That really 5
offended them.24 6
7
Unfortunately, too few of Mahler’s surviving remarks attest to his sense of 8
humour, for such remarks are dominated either by the other aspect of his 9
personality or by purely routine concerns. As a result, two of the few examples 20
from his correspondence must serve as evidence for the rest. Even so, both 1
instances are sufficiently striking to demonstrate his gift for verbal humour. 2
Mahler was one of the first people in Hamburg to take up what was then the 3
new form of transport of cycling. In May 1895 we find him writing to a friend, 4
Wilhelm Zinne, and describing his earliest experiences of a velocipede: 5
6
I’m admired by all and sundry on my bike! I really do seem to be a born 7
cyclist and shall certainly be appointed Geheimrad once more. 8
I’m at the stage when all horses get out of my way – it’s only with bell-ringing 9
that I have trouble: if this becomes necessary I dismount (very smartly) – 30
I can’t yet bring myself to run down a taximeter, although they deserve it, 1
stationing themselves in the middle of the road with no consideration for the 2
fact that every road is too narrow for such an energetic cyclist. 3
Well, then – all hail, once more! 4
Yours sincerely 5
Gustav Mahler 6
Bicy-Clerk and Road Hogger.25 7
8
Many years later he sent a telegram to his wife, a woman singularly deficient in 9
even a vestige of a sense of humour. In style, it recalls the sort of letters that 40
Mozart sent to his cousin: 41R
228 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 in very best of health today to the hotel did make my way then took a bath so
2 nice and hot and drunk of coffee one whole pot poetic is today my cable as
3 only munich makes one able for here the arts are more than fable one feels
4 transposed to arcady and thats a thing that pleases me gustav.26
5
6 Mahler remained in Hamburg for six whole years, a period that on closer
7 inspection turns out to have witnessed some of the most decisive changes in
8 his life. His lifestyle in particular underwent a profound transformation when
9 his sisters Justine and Emma joined him in Hamburg in the autumn of 1894.
10 Justine continued to run his household for him until he married Alma in 1902,
1 the same year as that in which Justine herself married Arnold Rosé. It was in
2 1893 that Mahler began what was to turn into a lifelong habit of spending the
3 summer months working in one of his ‘composing huts’ with a regular daily
4 routine – in 1893 the place that he chose was Steinbach on the Attersee. He
5 also had a passionate affair with Anna von Mildenburg – the first affair in his
6 life of any seriousness. And, finally, he converted to Catholicism shortly before
7 the end of his appointment in Hamburg.
8 Until Anna von Mildenburg’s appearance on the scene, Justine Mahler –
9 eight years younger than her brother – was the most important woman in
20 Mahler’s life. When their parents both died in 1889, Justine was the only
1 person whom Mahler trusted implicitly on all practical matters. And he was
2 entirely right to do so. Only once did he show any irritation when he discov-
3 ered that she had for some time been conducting a clandestine affair with the
4 leader of his orchestra, Arnold Rosé, an affair that she legitimized immediately
5 after her brother was married. Emma, Justine’s precocious and yet childlike
6 sister, to whom Mahler had never been particularly close, had married Rosé’s
7 brother, Eduard, a cellist, in 1898. Two surviving photographs show Gustav
8 and Justine together. The first dates from 1889 and was taken in Budapest,
9 while the second was taken in Vienna ten years later. Neither of these two
30 photographs nor the later ones that depict the married Frau Rosé show her off
1 to the best advantage. Like her brother, she inherited the family’s narrow lips
2 and also the myopic-seeming eyes. Unlike Mahler, however, these features did
3 not form part of an uncommonly characteristic and sharply contoured whole.
4 It is difficult to describe her as attractive. As Mahler himself put it, she was a
5 simple, defenceless soul, but, unlike her three brothers and sisters, she had
6 inherited the family’s finer qualities. As such, she was very like her brother,
7 albeit not always equal to the challenges to which she was exposed. When she
8 effectively became the head of the family in 1889, she was only twenty-one but
9 the constant care that she had for some considerable time been lavishing
40 on her ailing parents had impaired her health, in spite of which she survived
41R her brother by twenty-seven years. Natalie Bauer-Lechner shared Justine’s
veneration for Mahler and in a previously unpublished passage in her reminis- 1

cences left a clear diagnosis of the family situation, which she knew intimately 2
from the inside: 3
4
Justi, who was in charge of Mahler’s brothers and sisters and also of his house- 5
hold, immediately filled me with interest and every feeling of sympathy. She 6
was not equal to the task that was allotted to her so prematurely, for she herself 7
needed guidance and education, advantages that neither she nor the others – 8
there had been thirteen children in all – had ever enjoyed, such was the utter 9
neglect and impoverishment that they all suffered at home. Her sickly state of 10
health, which was the result of the three years that she spent self-sacrificially 1
nursing her parents, both of whom were seriously ill, together with her youth 2
and her temperament, which, like Gustav’s, was quick-tempered, passionate 3
and far from pedagogically inclined, meant that she was really not suited to 4
mentoring either Otto or Emma. And then there was the worst of them all, 5
Alois, who was serving as a common soldier in Brünn, doing his three years’ 6
military service and constantly bombarding Gustav and her with worries and 7
demands of the most outrageous kind. To deal with these three would have 8
required the most all-powerful paternal authority – and even this might not 9
have been sufficient to deal with an almost pathological intractability and 20
unmanageability and even unbridled licentiousness on the part of Mahler’s 1
little tribe, who seemed to be possessed by a wicked demon.27 2
3
Justine’s relationship with her later sister-in-law, Alma, can be described only 4
as difficult, a state of affairs attributable to a combination of understandable 5
jealousy on the part of a woman who for a long time had loved no one with 6
greater intensity than the brother she idolized and the not entirely unfounded 7
conviction that for various reasons Mahler and Alma were far from ideally 8
matched as a couple. The young Alma’s radiant and voluptuous beauty may also 9
have caused further resentment on the part of the rather less prepossessing 30
Justine. At all events, there seems little reason to doubt the truth of a remark 1
that Alma imputes to Justine: during the second interval at the first night of 2
the legendary Mahler-Roller production of Tristan und Isolde at the Vienna 3
Court Opera in February 1903, Mahler lay down in his dressing room, 4
exhausted and ashen-faced, wishing that some one else would conduct the 5
third act for him. Justine is said to have gazed down at her brother as he lay 6
there, almost unconscious, and to have whispered to Alma, who was stand- 7
ing beside her: ‘One thing delights me – I had his youth, you have him now 8
he’s old.’28 9
Changes to the way in which Mahler spent his vacations were also far- 40
reaching. Until then, he had tended to divide up his summer months. As long 41R
230 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 as his parents were still alive and the family was living together in Iglau, he
2 would spend at least part of the summer there. He also went hiking with
3 friends, notably through the Fichtelgebirge, an area of northern Bavaria not far
4 from Iglau and very similar to it in terms of its rural character. In 1890 – his
5 first summer following the death of his parents the previous year – he travelled
6 to Italy in May, then spent some time with the Löhrs at Hinterbrühl near
7 Vienna. In August 1891 he set off on his own on a tour of Scandinavia, visiting
8 Copenhagen, Gothenburg and Oslo, the previous months having been spent
9 rushing between Vienna, Marienbad and Bayreuth, where he is believed to
10 have seen both Parsifal and Tannhäuser. But Mahler seems to have become
1 increasingly conscious of the fact that this way of spending his holidays was ill
2 suited to his nature, quite apart from the mind-numbing loneliness that he felt
3 in Scandinavia, where days would pass without his speaking to a living soul. It
4 may seem surprising that a loner like Mahler did not seek out loneliness.
5 Rather, he preferred to spend his holidays in a quiet place, surrounded by his
6 family, with frequent visits from friends, provided that he had sufficient time
7 and space to work on his scores undisturbed. Once he had finished the allotted
8 period of time working alone at his desk, he would positively seek out contact
9 with other people. And this was how he arranged his summer vacation in
20 1892, travelling to Berchtesgaden from London in the company of Justine and
1 Natalie Bauer-Lechner. His visit to Scandinavia seems to have shown him that
2 the coast was not for him. Instead, he preferred a combination of Alpine
3 scenery and mountain lakes, where he could hike and swim – mountaineering,
4 by contrast, gave him no pleasure at all.
5 In the spring of 1893 Justine set out to find an alternative resort, Berchtesgaden
6 having failed the test on account of its poor weather and other inconveniences.
7 She stumbled upon the Attersee, some thirty miles to the east of Salzburg, just
8 beyond the Mondsee and the Wolfgangsee. At this date, the Attersee was less fash-
9 ionable and less crowded than the Wolfgangsee and the Wörthersee in Carinthia,
30 but no less beautiful, relatively quiet and eminently affordable. On the eastern
1 shore of the lake Justine found a guest house ‘Zum Höllengebirge’. (It is now the
2 Gasthof Föttinger and is in Seefeld near Steinbach.) Here she rented five rooms at
3 a reasonable price – five rooms were needed not only for Mahler but also for
4 Justine, Natalie, who was not in fact there the whole time, Emma and Otto. They
5 had their own kitchen and could eat in their own dining room. The rooms were
6 furnished in a simple, almost primitive, way, and missing items of furniture were
7 made by a local carpenter and covered with a throw by the inventive sisters. The
8 pièce de résistance was a leather sofa that was moved around and placed wher-
9 ever it was needed.29 On the opposite shore lay Nußdorf, where two of Mahler’s
40 friends from his students days in Vienna were staying with their families: Victor
41R Adler and Engelbert Pernerstorfer.
Mahler arrived in Steinbach around 20 June 1893 after brief visits to Vienna 1
and Berlin and made himself at home. But his principal reason for making this 2
change to his holiday arrangements is that it had become painfully clear to him 3
during his time in Hamburg that he had had only sporadic opportunities to 4
devote himself to composition in any orderly way. Since taking 5
up his appointment in the city, he had done little more than write a number 6
of Wunderhorn songs and revise his First Symphony and the Lieder eines 7
fahrenden Gesellen. He must have realized to his horror that his true aim in life, 8
composition, was being reduced to short-breathed phases that would never 9
allow him to create the ‘new symphony’ that he had been wanting to write 10
since his days with Hans Rott. His new type of vacation proved him right: 1
within a matter of only a few weeks he wrote no fewer than four Wunderhorn 2
songs and, above all, the Andante and Scherzo of his Second Symphony, a task 3
in which he was helped by the loan of a baby grand piano placed at his disposal 4
by a local piano manufacturer. Even so, the guest house was insufficiently quiet 5
for Mahler as it was situated on the main road, and even at this early date, the 6
region was not entirely free from tourists. As a result, a local architect, Josef 7
Lösch from Schörfling, was asked in the autumn of 1893 to build a simple 8
brick house overlooking the water on the extensive meadow between the guest 9
house and the lake – on this side of the lake such an open space was very much 20
the exception. From the following summer, this would ensure that Mahler 1
could work completely undisturbed. 2
According to the original estimate, this modest building, which was described 3
in the plans as a ‘music pavilion’, cost 395 florins and 94 kreuzers. Mahler 4
was able to move into it as soon as he arrived in Steinbach in June 1894. The 5
building also housed the aforementioned baby grand, together with a table, a few 6
chairs and a simple stove that could provide heating if the weather was cold. 7
The first of Mahler’s ‘composing huts’, it still exists, more or less unchanged. For 8
decades it was used for other purposes, including – apparently – a laundry and 9
a slaughterhouse and, according to the guest house’s records, ‘for sanitary 30
purposes’, but all these traces have now been removed, and in 1984 it was 1
restored to its original form. And yet Mahler’s refuge now lies in the middle of a 2
campsite on which Austrian and German tourists, above all, perpetuate their 3
particular kind of caravan culture, their taste in music reminding the observer 4
that Mahler’s is not the only type of music to give pleasure to its listeners. It 5
was here in 1894 that Mahler realized his idea for the final movement of his 6
‘Resurrection’ Symphony and placed the coping stone on the work. Here, too, 7
he wrote much of his Third Symphony in 1895, the work representing a 8
response to the surrounding Attersee and Höllengebirge – in this context one 9
recalls Mahler’s comment to Bruno Walter, when the latter visited him in 40
Steinbach during the summer of 1896, at a time when he was working on the 41R
232 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 vast opening movement of the symphony, the last of the work’s movements to be
2 composed:
3
4 I arrived by steamer on a glorious July day; Mahler was there on the jetty
5 to meet me, and despite my protests, insisted on carrying my bag until he
6 was relieved by a porter. As on our way to his house I looked up to the
7 Höllengebirge, whose sheer cliffs made a grim background to the charming
8 landscape, he said: ‘You don’t need to look – I have composed all this already!’
9 He went on to speak of the first movement, entitled, in the preliminary draft,
10 ‘What the Rocks and Mountains Tell Me’.30
1
2 But 1896 was the last summer that the Mahlers and their entourage spent in
3 Steinbach. New tenants took over the inn, and it proved impossible for Mahler to
4 reach an agreement with them. When he climbed the Alpine meadow for the last
5 time and gazed back on his little hut, Natalie remembered him bursting into tears.
6 The ‘Schnützelputz-Häusel’, as Mahler called the property after a line in one of the
7 more whimsical poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, now belonged to his past.
8 Unlike the house in the poem, his own hut was not filled with dancing mice and
9 barking snails, but the time that he had spent there had proved to be exception-
20 ally productive, demonstrating once and for all that he could work like this in
1 the future, if possible using the whole of his summer vacation – in Hamburg,
2 this amounted to the three months from the beginning of June to the end of
3 August – and for whole periods cutting himself off from the family and friends
4 whose company he otherwise welcomed. Generally he would get up at around
5 six, then go for a swim in the lake, before making his way to his ‘composing house’,
6 where breakfast was already laid out for him. As soon as he had finished eating,
7 he would set to work. At around midday, he would be called to lunch, after which
8 he would have a brief rest, then spend the afternoon walking in the mountains.
9 The evening meal was taken relatively early, followed by a ‘convivial get-together’,
30 involving reading, conversation and piano playing, after which the participants
1 would retire for the night at a comparatively early hour.
2
3
Anna von Mildenburg
4
5 Anna von Mildenburg left only a single recording: the recitative to Rezia’s aria,
6 ‘Ocean, Thou Mighty Monster’, from Weber’s Oberon. It remains a mystery
7 why she did not leave more recordings at a time when the studios were full of
8 singers less famous than the leading dramatic soprano at the Vienna State
9 Opera and one, moreover, who had also appeared at Bayreuth. For all the
40 recording’s acoustic inadequacies, the dramatic thrust and vocal sovereignty of
41R her 1904 recording are plain for all to hear. None the less, she appears not to
have possessed a true hochdramatisch voice of the kind we generally associate 1

with Wagner’s heroines. Rather she seems to have had what German writers 2
would now describe as a jugendlich-dramatisch voice of a particularly pene- 3
trating kind. At the time of the recording, the singer was thirty-two and at the 4
height of her powers, revealing a fresh-toned, radiant voice that may, however, 5
have been ill-suited to the heavy Wagner roles in her repertory. The relatively 6
early decline in her vocal powers only ten years later may be connected with 7
the unduly heavy roles that she sang, and there is no doubt that she essayed 8
some of these roles too soon. It must be admitted that Mahler did little to 9
protect her from this, for all that he frequently warned her not to sing on 10
consecutive evenings, as the ruthless Pollini repeatedly demanded. The 1904 1
recording not only reveals her vocal authority, it also hints at a quality at least 2
as important as her purely vocal gifts: the overwhelming drama that she brings 3
even to as brief an extract as this. Like Lilli Lehmann, Anna von Mildenburg 4
was one of those singers who in an age dominated by marmoreal vocalism, 5
already looked forward to the sort of singing actor that we demand today, a 6
stage performer for whom singing is merely one expressive means among 7
many, the overriding concern being dramatic truth. 8
In October 1896, only a year after he had got to know the soprano, Mahler 9
wrote to Cosima Wagner, recommending her as Kundry and Brünnhilde. Anna 20
von Mildenburg was duly invited to sing Kundry at the 1897 Bayreuth Festival. 1
She returned to sing the same part in 1911, 1912 and 1914, and in 1909 she 2
was also heard as Ortrud in Lohengrin. Although she never sang Isolde or 3
Brünnhilde in Bayreuth, she made her mark in these roles at the Vienna Opera, 4
where she became the leading dramatic soprano of the Mahler era. Although 5
Mahler’s eyes may have been blinded by love in 1896, his comments to Cosima 6
were almost certainly an accurate reflection of the young singer’s vocal qualities: 7
8
As for her voice, it has such strength and staying power, that she overcomes 9
all difficulties with ease; her youth, therefore, does not present any obstacle 30
but rather sets off her own individuality to rare advantage. With her, you 1
would believe Wotan when he says: ‘Nicht kos’ ich dir mehr den kindischen 2
Mund’ [‘Nevermore shall I fawn on your childlike mouth’]. For roles such as 3
Sieglinde she lacks the so-called ‘femininity’. (Please do not misunderstand 4
me – but when one speaks of ‘femininity’ one usually stresses the passive and 5
surrendering nature of woman – it is this, and only this, that I mean.) On the 6
other hand, when the heroic, the demonic – when action is required, she is 7
in her element.31 8
9
In the light of Mahler’s comments about the ‘heroic’ and ‘demonic’ element in 40
Anna von Mildenburg’s stage manner, it is hardly surprising that Strauss and 41R
234 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Hofmannsthal regarded her as the ideal Clytemnestra in Elektra, a point that

2 emerges with some force from the few surviving photographs of her in this role.
3 A singer who studied at the Munich Academy of Music in the mid-1930s told
4 the present writer that her dramatic training with Anna Bahr-Mildenburg – she
5 took the name on marrying the Viennese writer, Hermann Bahr, in 1909 – left
6 an indelible impression. On one occasion the then elderly Bahr-Mildenburg
7 showed her class how to sing and act the part of Clytemnestra, and even though
8 her voice was then in ruins, the result had been one of the greatest theatrical
9 experiences in the student’s life.
10 Anna von Mildenburg was born Anna Mildenburg von Bellschau in Vienna
1 in 1872 and was not quite twenty-three when she joined the Hamburg Opera
2 in the autumn of 1895. She came from a military background and thanks to
3 her father’s postings had already travelled extensively by this date. The family
4 was living in Görz when her voice was discovered by the well-known writer of
5 comedies, Julius Rosen. As she recalls in her memoirs, Anna had already had
6 a few voice lessons but had no thought of becoming a singer. Only when she
7 moved to Vienna did she seek advice on the subject. Thanks to her father’s
8 connections, she even managed to see the director of the Vienna Court Opera,
9 Wilhelm Jahn, whom Mahler was later to replace. Jahn put her in touch with
20 one of the company’s leading dramatic mezzo-sopranos, Rosa Papier, although
1 only in her early thirties, had recently been forced to abandon her career as the
2 result of a vocal crisis and quickly became one of the most sought-after voice
3 teachers in the city, her pupils including a whole series of prominent singers.
4 We have already quoted Anna von Mildenburg’s colourful account of her first
5 encounter with Mahler in early September 1895, when the latter had just
6 returned from his summer vacation in Steinbach, hence the singer’s reference
7 to the conductor’s sun-blackened features. The occasion of their meeting was
8 Mahler’s interference in a coaching session for the role of Brünnhilde, a role
9 that would tax the resources of any young soprano. The first surviving letter
30 from Mahler to Anna von Mildenburg was even included by Alma Mahler in
1 her 1924 edition of Mahler’s letters, but it is entirely innocuous in tone, being
2 one of the numerous notes that Mahler dashed off to singers generally during
3 a performance, criticizing their contribution to the proceedings. The few
4 subsequent letters that Alma reproduced were edited in such a way either by
5 Alma or by the singer so that all matters of personal import were removed.
6 Only the informal pronoun ‘du’ was retained, a form of address that Mahler
7 never used towards any of his other singers. Even so, the attentive reader will
8 be aware of a significant undertone to Mahler’s comment regarding the singer’s
9 first Aida in Hamburg: ‘None but myself (who draws every breath with you)
40 noticed that you were labouring hard in your singing this evening.’32 By 29
41R November the fate of the lovers was sealed, for the letter that Mahler wrote to
the singer that morning to congratulate her on her twenty-third birthday 1

marks the beginning of an impassioned correspondence that makes it clear 2
that the intensity of his feelings for her was matched only by his feelings for the 3
woman who was later to become his wife. 4
This letter already strikes the note of unbridled ecstasy that was to charac- 5
terize this correspondence between the end of 1895 and Mahler’s departure 6
from Hamburg less than two years later. The laconic exchanges that followed 7
the end of their affair were in crass contrast to it. The letter of 29 November 8
was almost certainly written after their first night together: 9
10
My dearest Anna, 1
My greetings to you this morning! How happy I feel at being able to tell you 2
what today means for me. It is my birthday in the truest sense of the term! – 3
You see, my love? I’ve let slip my birthday. You hinted a few days ago that the 4
number 23 is a significant one in your life. – Did you have any inkling what 5
your 23rd birthday would mean for you? In only a few hours’ time I shall gaze 6
into those dear eyes of yours. I can barely wait. Will the day come when I may 7
always do so? Come soon! – I shan’t break off at today’s rehearsal. I’m very 8
much afraid that I’m now going to be a very ‘unconscientious’ conductor. – 9
Since gaining such blissful knowledge, I have lost my conscience. Tell me 20
today, when we’re unobserved, whether you love me. My beloved, you’ll often 1
have to tell me that you do before I’m absolutely certain. You are the ‘enemy’ 2
before whom I’ve capitulated so quickly – and to whose tender mercies I’ve 3
abandoned myself! Will you show me favour or disfavour? How happy I’d be 4
if it were to be your favour! Yes? Yes? Tell me! My love! Until later! Your 5
Gustav!33 6
7
Curiously enough, Alma claims in her memoirs that Mahler never had 8
an ‘intimate relationship’ with Anna von Mildenburg. Although Alma was 9
unaware of the content of these letters, it must have been clear to her what had 30
taken place in Hamburg, even if Mahler himself had denied it for tactical 1
reasons. He was clearly not one of those men who boast to their fiancées about 2
their premarital escapades. That she knew about his relationship is suggested by 3
her attempts to belittle the singer, whom she refers to only as M. After all, Anna 4
von Mildenburg was engaged at the Vienna Court Opera from 1898 and was 5
one of Mahler’s closest colleagues there. For a time she even lived close to the 6
Mahlers. She was no beauty. In the first place, she was extremely tall, although 7
this was a positive attribute in the heroic roles that she assumed onstage. She 8
was also large-boned and powerfully built, without, however, seeming over- 9
weight. Mahler later told Natalie Bauer-Lechner that when she joined the 40
company in Hamburg she had to work hard to seem less ungainly both on and 41R
236 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 off the stage: she moved awkwardly and trod on all her dresses if they were not
2 tied up. Mahler trained her to walk properly and urged her to go out without an
3 umbrella and muff in order to learn how to use her hands. Once she had
4 acquired a certain poise, he rehearsed her detailed moves onstage and in that
5 way turned her into the greatest singing actress of her age, a performer repeat-
6 edly compared to Eleonora Duse.34 With its angular features, her large face had
7 something masculine about it. As is clear from surviving photographs, her eyes
8 were large and eloquent, dominating and domineering, blazing and impas-
9 sioned. This does not mean that she was not feminine – the aforementioned
10 passage from Mahler’s letter to Cosima Wagner refers, rather, to the fact that
1 she was not passive by nature and that she lacked the melting, self-sacrificial
2 quality needed to play a part like Wagner’s Sieglinde. Mahler’s close correlation
3 between the personality of the performer and the interpretation of the role that
4 he or she was playing is bound to strike the modern reader as strange.
5 Anna von Mildenburg was clearly no shrinking violet but a wild, domi-
6 neering woman, an aspect of her personality that her lover initially had no
7 reason to bemoan. Mahler’s letters to her leave us in no doubt about the inten-
8 sity of their passion, an intensity missing from the letters that he exchanged
9 with Alma during the early stages of their courtship. Not until the crisis that
20 affected their marriage in 1910 does their correspondence strike a similar note
1 of passion. Nor is there any doubt about the physical intensity of the feelings
2 between the young soprano and a man who, already several years older, can
3 scarcely have had much experience in such matters. But it was not only sexual
4 desire that bound Mahler and Mildenburg together. His letters also suggest
5 that this was probably the first and – at the risk of soundly callously dismissive
6 of Alma – the last time in his life that he loved a woman and was loved in
7 return by someone who on the strength of her own artistic gifts understood
8 him as an artist and as a musician. Only Natalie Bauer-Lechner understood
9 him better, but, much to her dismay, Mahler’s feelings for her amounted to
30 no more than respect, and when Alma arrived on the scene, Mahler coolly
1 discarded her – one of the great mistakes in his life. Anna’s letters to Mahler
2 have not survived, and so it is only from his letters to her and from her later
3 reminiscences that we can deduce that she understood him. For all their
4 brevity, these reminiscences breathe a greater degree of understanding than
5 the whole of Alma’s garrulous memoir. If he had not presupposed so much
6 interest on Anna’s part, he would not have written to her in such detail when-
7 ever they were apart, most notably in December 1895, when he was in Berlin
8 to prepare for the first performance of his Second Symphony and wrote to her
9 almost every day.
40 Even deeper insights into Mahler’s creative process were vouchsafed to Anna
41R during the summer of 1896, when he was working on his Third Symphony at
Steinbach on the Attersee. His most important letters on the subject were 1
written to Anna and include explanations of the programmatical titles to the 2
individual movements, titles he later discarded. On each occasion he asked his 3
correspondent to understand that he had to concentrate on his work and that 4
he did not have much time for her, in spite of which he wrote to her almost 5
daily. The decisive factor was that he was dealing with an exceptionally gifted 6
performing artist capable of great emotional intensity and could assume an 7
understanding which, if not intellectual, was certainly intuitive. But intellectu- 8
ally, too, Anna von Mildenburg revealed what for a singer was an above-average 9
degree of intelligence, an intelligence that emerges from her later autobiograph- 10
ical writings – even if we concede that her husband, the writer Hermann Bahr, 1
may have helped to edit them – and above all from her important book on 2
the interpretation of Wagner’s music dramas. Taking Tristan und Isolde as its 3
starting point, this substantial study very much breathes the spirit of Mahler’s 4
operatic reforms.35 5
The fact that Anna was still young when she met Mahler caused him a great 6
deal of problems, just as Alma was later to do, but it also gave him a chance to 7
act as her mentor and avuncular guide, a role that he likewise assumed with 8
Alma. Neither woman will have found this easy. On 10 December 1895, 9
shortly before the first orchestral rehearsal for the first performance of his 20
Second Symphony in Berlin three days later, Mahler wrote to Anna: 1
2
If I speak of the battles that lie ahead, I do so on the basis of my experience 3
of life, an experience that allows me to foresee many of the things of which 4
you yourself still have no inkling. Look, Anna, this must surely prove to you 5
that I am utterly serious about my love for you. – If I were younger and more 6
thoughtless, I’d regard the beautiful present as sufficient and not weigh down 7
my mind with anything else. – Only bear in mind that what we are wanting 8
to do together is no summer excursion or passing pleasure but a whole great 9
life which (especially from my own side) is bound up with sacred duties – the 30
obligations towards ourselves are so great and serious that even if there were 1
no other considerations, these alone would demand that we examine 2
ourselves in all seriousness. You must also consider my mission, which I am 3
bound to regard as sacred above all else! But more on this at another time, 4
this is something you first have to learn to understand.36 5
6
How must a twenty-three-year-old soprano have reacted to this tone of voice, 7
which is more appropriate to an itinerant preacher or a school inspector than 8
to an enamoured conductor? Could she really work out how serious he was in 9
speaking of ‘sacred duties’ and his ‘mission’? Mahler was to strike a similar 40
note in the letters he wrote to the young Alma shortly before and after they 41R
238 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 married. He was clearly unable to resist the temptation to adopt this tone, yet
2 his reason for doing so was not to bend a woman to his will by intimidating
3 her but simply because he was deadly serious. At least on an intuitive level,
4 Anna von Mildenburg seems to have understood exactly what Mahler thought
5 and what he wanted.
6 The fact that there were no more letters from Mahler to Anna von
7 Mildenburg is due, of course, to their close daily contact in Hamburg. Most of
8 the letters that passed between them date from the periods when Mahler was
9 away on tour or on holiday during the summer. Their affair had to be kept a
10 secret – whether or not they succeeded is another matter. Mahler’s two sisters,
1 who were by now living with him in Hamburg, were not allowed to find out
2 what was going on. Yet it seems certain that Justine had her suspicions,
3 although, if Mahler is to be believed, she felt a great deal of sympathy for the
4 singer, which must have made their contacts somewhat easier. But Mahler was
5 also keen to ensure that the liaison was kept from his colleagues at the theatre.
6 After all, he had a certain experience of untidy relationships of this kind, and it
7 would have embarrassed him if there had been any gossip on this point. There
8 is, however, no evidence of this. When Anna travelled to Berlin for the first
9 performance of the Second Symphony in the company of Mahler’s sisters, he
20 urged her not to betray them. He could meet her only at her own apartment,
1 where she lived alone, and whenever he sent her unsealed notes to her dressing
2 room, they were necessarily couched in a rather more formal language.
3 Unsurprisingly, the relationship between two such passionate people was
4 beset by scenes of great turbulence. Alma claims that it was these endless
5 scenes in Hamburg that finally turned Mahler against ‘M.’. She had allegedly
6 begun by tormenting him and then, when he had turned his back on her,
7 stopped at nothing to win him back. That Anna von Mildenburg was capable
8 of such scenes is certainly credible, the elemental force of one particular
9 incident seemingly utterly believable: when Mahler and Alma were already
30 married and staying on the Wörthersee, it is said that the soprano, who was
1 living nearby, often turned up at their rented accommodation with a large
2 mangy dog, a creature that Mahler the animal-lover could not abide. Once,
3 during a severe storm, she drew him out on to the terrace, while the pregnant
4 Alma remained indoors: ‘The great Wagnerian soprano let her hair fall about
5 her face and played Valkyrie and Ortrud in the same breath. She called to
6 me to come and when I made a sign of refusal she turned in scorn to Mahler:
7 “She’s a coward.” ’37 Mahler’s surviving letters to Anna von Mildenburg
8 contain little to support this accusation. Conversely, a letter that he wrote on
9 7 February 1896 within months of the start of their affair speaks of a deep-
40 seated crisis and profound sense of injury on his part – not until Mahler wrote
41R to Alma at the height of their crisis over Walter Gropius was he to pen an
equally wounded and impassioned letter. A few key sentences are worth 1
quoting: 2
3
Anna! What I’ve been through in these last few days – and what I shall go 4
through in the future – I simply can’t begin to say! Anna! I’ve never felt such 5
pure and sacred love for another human being – you don’t love me! My God! 6
I shall never get over this! . . . I must keep away from you – there’s nothing 7
more I can be to you! My very life is at stake! Believe me! Anna, if you’d asked 8
me to sacrifice my life to you – I could have done so. But – oh, God! – how 9
could you pretend to love me? How did you manage to do so? Have I 10
deserved this from you? Do you know what you’ve stolen from me in doing 1
so? I have lost my faith! May God help me – how can I go on living? – Didn’t 2
you see how deep and serious was my love for you? A love that I maintained 3
so pure and inviolate throughout the time when I did not yet know you! . . . 4
I am in a hell from which there is no release! . . . Anna, have no regard for me! 5
Be the person that you feel most comfortable as! – You can’t do anything for 6
me! Whatever you do, it is like a red-hot knife plunged into my heart! Oh, 7
God! Anna, my beloved! May God protect you! May God be with you! Forget 8
that I ever existed! Don’t write to me any more! Fare well! Fare well! My 9
darling!38 20
1
If we needed further proof of the importance and profound significance of this 2
passion for Mahler, it would be this letter, even if we have no idea what caused 3
him to be so distraught. In the event the breach between them was by no 4
means final. A short poem that Mahler wrote on 19 May indicates that all was 5
well again – as was later to be the case with Alma, Mahler often wrote poems 6
in moments of great agitation, not least whenever he was attempting to sort 7
out his own feelings and build bridges: 8
9
Ein Reuevoller liegt zu deinen Füssen; 30
das Wort, das seinem tollen Mund entsprang 1
in seines frohen Mutes Überdrang – 2
O, lass es nicht den armen Sünder büssen! 3
4
Mein Lieb, nicht wahr, du wirst verzeih’n?! 5
Das schnelle Wort, das dich gekränkt, vergessen? 6
Könnt’st du nur meine Reu’ und Scham ermessen, 7
Lieb, diesmal sagtest sicher du nicht: ‘Nein’! 8
9
Vom ‘Schelm von Bergen’ kennst du ja die Mär’!? 40
Die Königin verlor an ihn die Ehr’; – 41R
240 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 der König macht gleich eine Tugend aus der Not:

2 Schlug lieber schnell zum Ritter ihn – statt todt!39
3
4 [He lies, repentant, at your feet; the word that passed his foolish lips in happi-
5 ness’s unrestraint – oh, let the sinner not atone for it! My love, you’ll surely
6 find forgiveness and forget the rash offending word?! Could you but gauge my
7 self-reproach and shame, my love, you’d surely not say ‘No’! You know the story
8 of ‘the mountain rogue’!? To him the queen her honour lost; the king, however,
9 turned the ill to good by dubbing him a knight – and not by killing him!]
10
1 The love between Mahler and Anna von Mildenburg was at its most intense in
2 1896. He shared everything with her – thoughts on his works and their genesis,
3 and reflections on his subsequent career. No doubt he meant well, but he saw
4 no harm in pointing out the vast gulf that separated a singer from a composer:
5 ‘You yourself know what art means in our lives – but you know only how to
6 reproduce art! Just think what producing art must be like!’40 This was typical of
7 Mahler – he always had difficulty showing consideration for sensitive souls
8 around him. Essentially, he was right, but there was surely no need for him to
9 blurt out the truth so implacably and so imperiously. Even by the summer of
20 1896 it was already becoming clear that his days in Hamburg were numbered
1 and that things could not go on as they were between him and Pollini.
2 Although he said nothing to Anna about his concrete prospects, he had long
3 been thinking about Vienna and of the ‘god of the southern climes’, as he
4 would henceforth refer to his ultimate goal as an opera director and conductor.
5 When she auditioned as Kundry in Bayreuth in early December 1896, he was
6 with her in his thoughts. And even as late as 1897, the letters that he wrote to
7 her from Moscow, where he was conducting a Russian Music Society concert,
8 still reveal all the old warmth and affection.
9 It is unclear from the surviving sources what led to a cooling of these feel-
30 ings. Had the scenes between them really become intolerable, as Alma insinu-
1 ates? Had he suddenly noticed that Anna was not sufficiently attractive for his
2 demands, not sufficiently ‘feminine’? Was her exceptional height unsuited to a
3 man of his relatively short stature? Certainly, the woman whom he went on to
4 marry was the very opposite of Anna: Alma was of medium height, voluptuous
5 and markedly feminine, albeit not as passive and submissive as he felt that
6 Sieglinde should be. Above all, she was a dazzling beauty – in a letter to his
7 parents, Bruno Walter even described her as the most beautiful young woman
8 in turn-of-the-century Vienna, and Walter undoubtedly had a greater under-
9 standing of women than his great model. None of Alma’s comments on this
40 relationship deserves to be taken seriously, not least when she gives the distinct
41R impression that Mahler left Hamburg to escape from the soprano’s attentions.
There were undoubtedly other, more compelling reasons for his departure. 1
The first evidence that his relationship with the singer was under strain comes 2
in his letters of May 1897, by which date he had already taken up his new post 3
in Vienna. ‘Your question as to whether I intend to see you again is really 4
rather silly’41 – such a cold attempt to appease his love, who had remained 5
behind in Hamburg, must give the reader pause for thought. 6
There is little doubt that by May 1897 their love was no longer what it had 7
been, and the course that it was to take must already have been clear during the 8
final months of Mahler’s appointment in Hamburg. In his letters to the singer, 9
he offers her advice concerning her future career, even suggesting Vienna as a 10
possible showcase for her hochdramatisch gifts. But he also mentions other 1
opera houses, suggesting that while Anna von Mildenburg was understandably 2
waiting for the call to Europe’s leading operatic centre, Mahler, conversely, was 3
stalling, unable to bring himself to make Vienna seem a wholly unattractive 4
proposition. He clearly had mixed feelings on the matter. In terms of his own 5
emotional well-being, it would have been better if she did not join him in 6
Vienna, as he knew her temperament and the possessive nature of the demands 7
that she placed upon him – and he no longer loved her. But for the institution 8
that he was now running, the engagement of the most gifted dramatic soprano 9
of her day could only have been a good thing. Indeed, his plans to reform the 20
city’s operatic scene could only benefit from her involvement. The situation 1
became critical in the summer of 1897, when Pollini declared his willingness to 2
release her from her contract in Hamburg, leaving the Vienna Court Opera free 3
to engage her. At that date Mahler was not yet the new director, nor even the 4
acting director. Moreover, he was recovering from a severe attack of angina and 5
an operation to remove an abscess from his neck and had had to cancel his 6
planned appearances at the Court Opera. Instead, he had travelled with Justine 7
and Natalie to the Tyrol to recover, and it seems that only now did the news of 8
the Court Opera’s plans to engage the singer reach him. 9
Alarm bells ringing, Natalie wrote to Rosa Papier to report that the news 30
had been a bombshell and had left Mahler devastated, and yet it must be said 1
that if this was indeed the impression that he gave, he must have dissembled 2
as he knew very well what was being planned. The singer’s hold over Mahler 3
was boundless, Natalie went on, and there was nothing that he could do to 4
resist it. From the moment that she first set foot in Hamburg, the soprano had 5
tried repeatedly to ensnare Mahler, which was precisely why he had left the 6
company. But Natalie was seriously overstating her case, for the main reason 7
for Mahler’s departure was the tremendous opportunity to work in Vienna, 8
although it cannot be denied that the difficult situation with regard to Anna von 9
Mildenburg will have confirmed him in his desire to move. Natalie urged the 40
influential Rosa Papier to do everything in her power to prevent the soprano 41R
242 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 from moving to Vienna. Her letters are demonstrably dictated by jealousy – the
2 same jealousy which, coupled with her possessiveness and her unrequited love
3 for Mahler, finally precipitated the break between them. But the fact that they
4 were not simply the brain-spun creation of an overwrought mind is clear from
5 a letter that Mahler wrote to Rosa Papier at this same time, in which he
6 presciently noted that Natalie had undoubtedly gone too far. He had to admit,
7 he went on, that the Vienna Court Opera could not forgo the services of such
8 an outstanding singer merely because of the personal problems between them.
9 They should simply wait to see which way the wind was blowing. In any case,
10 Anna von Mildenburg’s contract was not due to take effect until the autumn of
1 1898 and so they still had a year in which to deal with any obstacles that might
2 lie in the way of their future collaboration, a statement that clearly demonstrates
3 that Mahler had until then wanted to prevent the singer’s engagement.42
4 Mahler must have written the decisive letter to his former lover in July 1897,
5 explaining what was to happen. If she had been in any doubt as to the nature
6 of Mahler’s true feelings for her, this letter will have opened her eyes, for its
7 logic is unconvincing. In Hamburg, Mahler had been the company’s principal
8 conductor and yet he had had an affair with the ensemble’s dramatic soprano,
9 an affair that they had evidently managed to keep a secret. If there had been
20 the occasional gossip, this had manifestly not disturbed him. Why should
1 things be different in Vienna? In his letter to the singer, he suggests with some-
2 what hollow pathos that if she were to accept the offer that she was about to
3 receive from Vienna, it was necessary for them
4
5 to restrict our personal dealings as far as possible in order to prevent life from
6 once again becoming a torment to us both. Even now the entire company is
7 alarmed by the various titbits of gossip that have been reaching Vienna from
8 Hamburg, and news of your engagement would have the effect of a bomb-
9 shell. If we were to give them the least cause to mistrust us and so on, my own
30 position would become impossible within a very short space of time and I
1 would have to set off on my travels again, just as I did in Hamburg. You too
2 would suffer as a result, assuming that your entire raison d’être were not like-
3 wise called into question. I ask you now, my dearest Anna: do you feel that
4 you have the strength to accept an engagement in Vienna with me and – at
5 least during the first year – to renounce all personal contacts and refuse all
6 favours on my part? I hope that you are convinced that this will be no less
7 difficult for me than it is for you, and that only the most bitter necessity
8 obliges me to ask this question of you. . . . I am almost inclined to think that
9 we shall be subjecting ourselves to an intolerable ordeal: and in the event of
40 your feeling the same, I would ask you simply to decline the offer and to
41R accept one from Berlin, which you will be receiving very soon.43
Mahler’s letter is extremely revealing, and if Anna von Mildenburg was as 1

clever as her former lover repeatedly claimed, then she must have realized by 2
now that it was all over between them. Mahler was not being honest with 3
himself in this letter. There is absolutely no evidence, for example, that ‘life was 4
a torment’ to them both in Hamburg or that they were the subject of wide- 5
spread gossip, while it is altogether unlikely that their affair was already the 6
talk of the town in Vienna. At the same time, Mahler’s claim that he would 7
have had to resign his position at the Court Opera if his liaison with the 8
soprano became known is wildly exaggerated. Both of them were unmarried 9
and both were adults, so their affair would not have mattered. Indeed, if a 10
prohibition on such affairs had been the general rule in the cultural capitals of 1
Europe, the arts would simply have ceased to function – after all, even the old 2
Kaiser had had an affair with the actress Katharina Schratt. And what was 3
Anna von Mildenburg to make of Mahler’s demand not to speak to him 4
privately for an entire year? Did he really think that this was a convincing 5
request? And why should the situation change after a year if they were then to 6
resume their affair? Gossip and the threat of dismissal would scarcely have 7
become less of a danger at the end of that time. No, the truth of the matter is 8
that Mahler did not have the courage to say what he was really thinking but 9
preferred to hide behind defensive, threadbare arguments. His letter, one has 20
to conclude, was simply mendacious. 1
We do not know how Anna von Mildenburg reacted to the letter and how 2
she dealt with the new situation. At all events, she did not take the veil but, if 3
the reports may be trusted, began an affair with one of Mahler’s friends in 4
Hamburg, Hermann Behn, while in Vienna she allegedly enjoyed a fling with 5
Siegfried Lipiner. We may assume that it was not easy for her to work in 6
Vienna with her former lover, who both as director of the Court Opera and as 7
a composer was given to increasingly bold experiments, but it says much for 8
her artistic integrity that she played an active role in the operatic reforms 9
undertaken by Mahler and Roller, triumphing as Isolde in their epoch-making 30
production of Tristan und Isolde and also setting new standards as Beethoven’s 1
Leonore, Mozart’s Donna Anna and Gluck’s Aulidian Iphigenia. According 2
to Alexander Witeschnik, she was ‘a tragedienne of regal stature with her 3
sorrowfully overcast, knowing Medusa’s head and an elemental, fate-laden 4
voice that resembled nothing so much as a force of nature, an illustrious artiste 5
who was in every sense larger than life, the very embodiment of the Wagnerian 6
music drama’.44 7
Mahler’s later letters to Anna von Mildenburg reveal their once grand 8
passion ending in sobriety and coolness. The following note was probably 9
written in 1902: ‘Without any sense of resentment and without wishing to 40
hurt you, I am returning your letter unopened. – Believe me when I say that 41R
244 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 only the instinct for self-preservation can persuade me to do so, and I hope
2 that in view of this you will get over the apparently wounding nature of such
3 a reply.’45 The last surviving note that passed between them strikes a tone of
4 mild resignation that reflects Mahler’s mood when he left Vienna for New
5 York. On 7 December 1907 he drafted his famous letter bidding farewell to
6 the members of the Court Opera. It must have occurred to him that there was
7 one member of the ensemble whom he could not address in this impersonal
8 way, and so he wrote separately to his former lover, a short note presumably
9 penned the same day:
10
1 My dear old friend! I have just written a letter bidding farewell to the
2 ‘honoured members’ of the company. It will be pinned up on the notice
3 board. But while I was writing it, it occurred to me that it does not include
4 you and that in my eyes you stand completely apart from the others. I had also
5 kept hoping to see you in person. But now you’re in Semmering (which is, of
6 course, more beautiful). And so I can only send you these few heartfelt words
7 by way of farewell (from the theatre – not from Vienna, where I shall still be
8 living) and clasp your hand in spirit. I shall always follow your career with all
9 my old devotion and interest, and I hope that less turbulent times will one
20 day bring us together again. At all events, you should know that even at a
1 distance I shall remain your friend, a friend on whom you can count. I’m
2 writing this amidst the most frightful upheaval. Fare well and keep going!
3 Your old friend, Gustav Mahler.46
4
5 Anna Bahr-Mildenburg’s reminiscences were published ten years after
6 Mahler’s death and, totally lacking in bitterness, are discreet to the point of
7 self-denial. Those of his letters that she reproduces there understandably omit
8 all mention of anything that would be unduly personal, but they none the
9 less allow the reader to tell how close was the bond between composer and
30 soprano. ‘A common desire is bound to emerge, an encounter on the most
1 basic spiritual level of a work must inevitably lead to a secret but altogether
2 profound understanding that is uniquely capable of answering the creative
3 artist’s wishes’ – with these words Anna von Mildenburg summed up three
4 years of intense passion and twelve of artistic collaboration: she, too, saw her
5 contribution as a ‘sacred mission’.47
6
7
A Time of New Departures
8
9 In reflecting on Mahler’s years in Hamburg, we have completely changed our
40 perspective and methodology, abandoning our former chronological narrative
41R and concentrating instead on a summary of the decisive changes of direction
in his life. To return to our earlier narrative technique would simply lead to 1
needless repetitions. What follows here is merely an attempt to provide a brief 2
résumé of the outward changes in what was clearly a decisive period in 3
Mahler’s life. 4
Throughout his years as principal conductor of the Hamburg Opera, Mahler 5
was tremendously busy, often to a point that seems altogether incredible. At no 6
other period in his working life did he conduct so many performances. Between 7
March 1891 and April 1897 he conducted a barely conceivable total of 8
715 performances. During the 1894/5 season, for example, he conducted 148 out 9
of a total of 360, in other words, more than a third of the annual total. It is unlikely 10
that a modern opera-house conductor would reach anywhere near this figure. In 1
2001/2, for instance, the general music director of the Bavarian State Opera 2
conducted forty-six opera performances (and four concerts), a third of the 3
number achieved by Mahler. (We shall say nothing of their respective fees.) The 4
practical implications of this were spelt out in a letter that Mahler wrote to Ödön 5
von Mihalovich in Budapest. His schedule between the middle and end of 6
January 1893 was as follows: 16 January – the local première of Mascagni’s 7
L’amico Fritz; 17 January – Wagner’s Siegfried; 18 January – L’amico Fritz; 8
20 January – Tristan und Isolde; 22 January – L’amico Fritz; 23 January – Fidelio; 9
24 January – Die Zauberflöte; 25 January – Lohengrin; 26 January – Tchaikovsky’s 20
Iolanta; 27 January – Die Walküre; 28 January – L’amico Fritz; 30 January – 1
Hermann Goetz’s Der Widerspenstigen Zähmung; and 31 January – L’amico 2
Fritz.48 It was no accident that, as we have noted, Mahler altered the way in which 3
he spent his summer vacations in order to be able to devote his time to composi- 4
tion. In Hamburg, he continued to lead an unsettled existence, a point that 5
emerges with some force from his constant changes of address: after initially 6
taking rooms at the Hotel Royal on the Hohe Bleichen, he moved to rented 7
accommodation in the Bundesstraße, then to the Fröbelstraße, the Parkallee and 8
finally to the Bismarckstraße in the Hoheluft quarter of the city, where he lived 9
with his two sisters and led a more or less settled existence. 30
Mahler’s circle of friends in Hamburg was limited and yet his exchanges 1
with them were intense – this, too, was a constant in his life. His closest 2
contacts, both socially and professionally, were with Josef Bohuslav Foerster 3
and also, of course, the young Bruno Walter, who arrived in the city in the 4
autumn of 1894 to work as chorus master and conductor and with whom 5
Mahler’s relationship was like that of a father and son. For a time he was also 6
close to Ferdinand Pfohl, although the two men were never close friends in the 7
way that he was with Foerster and Walter. And yet it is striking that Mahler 8
never used the familiar ‘du’ in his dealings with any of these men, this being a 9
privilege accorded to only a handful of Mahler’s older friends. With the excep- 40
tion of Anna von Mildenburg, he appears not to have sought any closer contact 41R
246 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 with anyone at the theatre – the sort of friendly dealings that he had with
2 Wilhelm Hesch in Prague gave way increasingly to a sense of distance, some-
3 thing that he felt was necessary in order to maintain his own authority and
4 avoid occluding the hierarchical relationship between the conductor and his
5 singers. He also cultivated a number of contacts with members of Hamburg
6 society. Among this group, pride of place goes to Hermann Behn, a patron of
7 the arts with a profound love of music. Almost the same age as Mahler, he had
8 studied law but because of his wealth never needed to practise his profession.
9 Instead, he studied music for the love of it, studies that also took him to
10 Anton Bruckner in Vienna and that enabled him to prepare a vocal score of
1 Mahler’s Second Symphony for piano duet. Together with the local busi-
2 nessman Wilhelm Berkhan, he helped to defray the expense of mounting the
3 first performance of the Second Symphony in Berlin in December 1895.
4 One of Behn’s friends who subsequently became friendly with Mahler was
5 Henriette Lazarus, a widow from Trieste, her salon on the Esplanade modelled
6 on those of Henriette Hertz and Rahel Varnhagen that had flourished in Berlin
7 in the heyday of German Romanticism. She was also an enthusiastic supporter
8 of Bülow. Probably the closest friend of Mahler’s sisters in Hamburg was Adele
9 Marcus, a young widow with a small daughter. Six years older than Mahler, she
20 had a room to let, and Mahler was one of the interested parties. Although he
1 did not in fact take the room, he became friendly with her, a friendship
2 cemented by their shared musical and literary interests. Rumours that they
3 were lovers have no foundation in fact. Justine later went on holiday to Italy
4 with Adele Marcus, while Mahler himself maintained a sporadic correspon-
5 dence with her after he had left for Vienna.
6 Mahler’s principal contacts outside Hamburg were initially those that he
7 maintained with Vienna – there can be no doubt that long before he moved to
8 Hamburg, he was already hoping that he would one day return to Vienna, even
9 if we have no written evidence to support this claim. Vienna was the city of his
30 dreams. The only surprise is that he achieved this goal as soon as he did. True,
1 his contacts were few in number, nor was he in touch with any of the leading
2 figures on the city’s musical scene for he had left Vienna in 1880 as an unknown
3 young musician. The only exceptions were Bruckner, whose Te Deum he
4 performed in Hamburg in late March 1893, as he proudly informed the
5 composer in a letter, and Brahms, whom he visited on several occasions in Bad
6 Ischl while he was staying on the nearby Attersee. He was invariably much
7 impressed by the surly and gruff old man, even though he must have known
8 that Brahms had no idea what to make of his music. But even if Brahms was not
9 an opera composer and had little to contribute to the debates about opera in
40 Vienna, it was none the less clear to Mahler that he had tremendous authority
41R and that he had scored a hit with him in December 1890, when he had
conducted Don Giovanni in Budapest. Brahms died on 3 April 1897, the day 1
before Mahler signed the preliminary contract for his Viennese engagement. 2
Far more remarkable than his dealings with these grand old men of the 3
Viennese musical establishment was Mahler’s relationship with Bayreuth and 4
Cosima Wagner, a relationship that proved so useful to Anna von Mildenburg, 5
though it could be argued that she would still have made her Bayreuth debut 6
without Mahler’s advocacy. Mahler had first attended the Bayreuth Festival in 7
1883, the year of Wagner’s death, returning in 1889, 1891, 1894 and 1896. 8
Cosima had first heard Mahler conducting one of her late husband’s works – 9
Tannhäuser – in Leipzig in November 1887, and from then on Bayreuth kept its 10
eye on a conductor who was clearly extremely gifted but who, as Felix Mottl 1
regretfully noted, was ‘unfortunately a Jew’. And yet even in Bayreuth such a 2
verdict can hardly have been completely annihilating. After all, it was enough 3
that Jewish musicians revealed their Wagnerian credentials for Bayreuth to 4
turn a blind eye to this failing. This was certainly the case with Carl Tausig 5
and Josef Rubinstein and above all with Hermann Levi, who conducted the 6
world première of Parsifal in 1882 and continued to be closely associated with 7
Bayreuth until the end of his career, for all that he remains a classic example of 8
the torments to which Jews were exposed in the Bayreuth of Wagner and his 9
second wife. One wonders whether Mahler ever thought that he, too, would one 20
day conduct in Bayreuth. Quite possibly he did, not least because Levi had 1
shown him that even a Jew could do so and because there is little doubt that he 2
was arguably the most fascinating Wagner conductor after Bülow. This certainly 3
explains his attempts to build up a positive relationship with Cosima Wagner, 4
although he also, of course, felt tremendous admiration for the composer’s 5
widow. 6
Mahler first came into close contact with her during the 1894 Festival. She 7
knew perfectly well how much Wagner he had conducted in Hamburg for she 8
took a strategic interest in such matters, not least because of the royalties. She had 9
also asked him to coach the young Hamburg tenor Willi Birrenkoven for the part 30
of Parsifal, a task that Mahler assumed with enthusiasm. His success, it may be 1
observed in passing, was also noted by Strauss, who was on the music staff at the 2
1894 Festival, conducting all five performances of Tannhäuser. Cosima thanked 3
Mahler by allowing him to visit Wahnfried between 28 July and 4 August and to 4
attend performances of Parsifal, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, which he watched 5
from the family box. (Parsifal was conducted by Levi, Lohengrin by Mottl.) 6
Mahler will no doubt have imagined standing on the podium in the ‘mystic abyss’, 7
as Wagner himself had described the Bayreuth pit, but in the event it was not 8
granted to him to do so. Writing to his sister Justine, who was currently staying at 9
the family’s summer refuge on the Attersee, he reported that he had been invited 40
to Wahnfried almost every day and that his meetings with Cosima had always 41R
248 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 been cordial. He returned to Bayreuth in 1896 (there was no Festival in 1895) and
2 attended performances of the Ring, five cycles of which were given under Richter,
3 Mottl and Siegfried Wagner, whom Cosima was hoping to channel into a career
4 in conducting. Strauss thought that Siegfried’s conducting bordered on the cata-
5 strophic, but Mahler, who attended the cycle conducted by ‘Fidi’, as Siegfried was
6 known within the family circle, adopted a much more diplomatic tone when he
7 wrote to Cosima in the October of that year. To anyone reading between the
8 lines it would be clear that he too was unhappy with Siegfried’s conducting, but
9 Cosima failed to spot the subtext and was delighted and grateful that a conductor
10 as experienced in conducting her late husband’s music dramas as Mahler had
1 found her son so impressive, albeit with room for improvement.49 At the same
2 time – as we have already noted – Mahler was able to raise the subject of Anna
3 von Mildenburg’s engagement as Kundry in 1897, although his commitments in
4 Vienna meant that he was unable to attend her Bayreuth debut.
5 Mahler had gained his post in Vienna not least as a result of the fact that
6 in Hamburg he had belatedly converted to Catholicism. In the years around
7 1900 Cosima Wagner’s position of power within the musical circles of her day
8 extended far beyond the confines of Bayreuth, and it is known that she tried to
9 prevent his appointment, even if we can only speculate on her reasons for
20 doing so. One such reason may have been her abiding anti-Semitism, but it is
1 more likely that she opposed his appointment because she wanted her
2 favourite, Felix Mottl, to have the job. Mottl, she believed, would have ensured
3 that Wagner’s works dominated the repertory in Vienna to the exclusion of all
4 else. Certainly there seems no reason to question the truth of a remark in a
5 later letter to one of her female friends: ‘I enjoy the best possible relations with
6 Mahler and I am very happy to know that he is in Vienna. In almost every
7 letter he assures me of his support for Bayreuth, something that he has often
8 proved.’50 Mahler had earlier demonstrated his support by conducting the
9 Viennese première of Siegfried Wagner’s Der Bärenhäuter in March 1899, by
30 far the greatest success that Siegfried was ever to enjoy as an opera composer.
1 Cosima again had cause to be grateful, but when a difference of opinion arose
2 between Mahler and Siegfried, who conducted the last performance in the
3 run, Cosima allowed all her old prejudices to boil to the surface in a typically
4 Wagnerian manner: ‘There was no dearth of semites either, and Mahler had in
5 fact lured Siegfried into a kind of trap.’51 In spite of this, dealings between
6 Cosima and Mahler remained cordial, even if Cosima’s side of the correspon-
7 dence was marked by the occasional insincerity. Not until 1906, when illness
8 obliged Cosima to withdraw from the running of the Bayreuth Festival, did
9 their correspondence cease.
40 As for his own compositions, Mahler continued to be dogged by ill fortune.
41R In Hamburg, his achievements as an opera conductor ensured that he was soon
hailed as one of the leading figures on the German musical scene. Sooner or 1
later, he was convinced, he would reach the very top of his career ladder. He was 2
the principal conductor of one of the largest German opera houses, a house 3
surpassed in importance only by Munich and Berlin. But as a composer he was 4
still awaiting his breakthrough. The revised version of his First Symphony was 5
not a success when it was performed in Hamburg on 27 September 1893 under 6
his own direction. Even Ferdinand Pfohl, who as a critic was well disposed to 7
him, regretted the absence of an overriding sense of structure. But the reactions 8
were even more dismissive when Mahler conducted the work in Weimar on 9
3 June 1894. Much the same occurred on 4 March 1895, when he conducted the 10
first three movements of his Second Symphony in Berlin within the context of 1
a concert with the Berlin Philharmonic that was otherwise conducted by 2
Strauss. Here, too, there was a failure on the part of audience and critics alike to 3
understand the work. Among the audience was the composer Wilhelm Kienzl, 4
who sat in one of the boxes alongside Strauss and Karl Muck and who recalled 5
Strauss turning to him enthusiastically at a harmonically bold passage in the 6
brass and saying: ‘ “Believe me, there are no limits to musical expression!” 7
At the same time Muck, on my right, twisted his face into an unmistakable 8
expression of horror, and the single word “Frightful!” escaped through his 9
clenched teeth.’52 20
But the first performance of the complete Second Symphony, also in Berlin, 1
on 13 December 1895 turned out to be a triumph. True, as we have noted, the 2
audience was largely made up of musicians, including their dependants and 3
students from the Conservatory, all of them drafted in to fill the hall when 4
advance ticket sales had proved particularly poor. But the performance marked 5
Mahler’s first real success as a composer. Even he himself was overwhelmed to 6
discover the effectiveness of the final movement, which he had not previously 7
heard in performance. Although the result was exactly what he had imagined, he 8
had never dared to believe that such an impact could be achieved. Even with his 9
advancing fame as a composer, Mahler continued to be beset by such vicissitudes, 30
and it was not until 12 September 1910, only a few months before his death, that 1
the first performance of his Eighth Symphony in Munich finally brought with it 2
the certainty that he and his music had found a place for themselves in the hearts 3
of many listeners. 4
It remains to mention a further decisive change that took place in Mahler’s 5
life at this time, which led to the tactical masterstroke that he and his friends 6
were able to undertake with an altogether unprecedented degree of virtuosity: 7
his move to Vienna as conductor and, later, as director of the Vienna Court 8
Opera. The event in question is closely bound up with that masterstroke in his 9
career while also reflecting more deep-seated problems that affected not only 40
Mahler’s life in particular but the age in general. Of the various pieces of 41R
250 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 evidence that survive from this period, the most revealing is the letter that
2 Mahler wrote to Ödön von Mihalovich in Budapest on 21 December 1896,
3 which makes it clear that even before he arrived in Vienna he was already plan-
4 ning an assault on the directorship in addition to coveting the post of the
5 Court Opera’s principal conductor:
6
7 This is to request you to do me a favour on which the whole pattern of my
8 future life depends. The matter of the Conductor or Director post in Vienna
9 is now acute. My name is among those receiving ‘serious consideration’.
10 Two circumstances are against me. First, I am told, is my ‘craziness’, which
1 my enemies drag up over and over again whenever they see a chance of
2 blocking my way. Second, the fact that I am Jewish by birth. As regards this
3 latter point, I should not fail to inform you (in case you are not already aware
4 of the fact) that I completed my conversion to the Catholic faith soon after
5 my departure from Pest.53
6
7 On the central point, Mahler was undoubtedly right: his Jewishness was a
8 serious, if not an insuperable, obstacle to his new appointment, Viennese anti-
9 Semitism then being at its most virulent. But on the second point Mahler was
20 lying, because at the time that he wrote this letter he had yet to convert to
1 Catholicism. Not until two months later was he to take this step, a step docu-
2 mented by an entry in the baptismal register of the parish of St Ansgar in
3 the Little St Michael’s Church in Hamburg: on 23 February 1897 the then
4 thirty-six-year-old Gustav Mahler from Kalischt in Bohemia was officially
5 baptized by the local curate, a Herr Swider. The godfather was Theodor
6 Meynberg. It is always embarrassing, not to say painful, to find a revered genius
7 perpetrating an act of dishonesty like the present lie, but we have to ask what
8 prompted Mahler to lie in the first place and whether we should not, rather, take
9 issue with the circumstances that led a man of his probity to obfuscate a not
30 unimportant step in his life. This raises the whole question of Mahler’s relations
1 with Judaism, a question that needs to be addressed before we can consider the
2 call from the ‘god of the southern climes’ to this prodigal son in Hamburg.
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
17 3
4
5
6
Jewishness and Identity 7
8
9
10
1
2
3
L ET ME BEGIN with a quotation: 4
5
All [i.e. all Jewish composers] have assimilated the style that exists all 6
around them, all have produced an oeuvre that is personal in style . . ., 7
and yet it cannot be said of any of them that they have changed the course of 8
history or made a creative contribution in terms of style or form. . . . This 9
transcendence of style, which is a transcendence of the second degree, 20
seems to be beyond the scope of Jewish composers, because the Jew cannot 1
break free from himself except in the abstract – and music is not an abstract. 2
His soul is pegged to his body, for otherwise he would no longer be a Jew. . . . 3
Mahler reveals himself in part through his recourse to popular melodies, 4
to birdsong, fanfares and orchestral cataclysms – ‘facts’! – and in part 5
through the breadth of his symphonic forms; and it is because he does not in 6
fact have a personal style but only a personal way of organizing a generally 7
impersonal melodic dialectic (which is a personal way of feeling) that he 8
reveals his personality through the breadth of his forms. In other words, he 9
has recourse to eloquence. . . . This music is not Jewish music, it is the music 30
of Mahler; but, using the language of us all, it signifies the modality of 1
being Jewish.1 2
3
Surprisingly enough, this quotation is not taken from a text that was written 4
during the Third Reich or penned by a proto-Nazi author but is the work of an 5
internationally renowned conductor, Ernest Ansermet, whose performances of 6
the French repertory were held in high regard. His book Les fondements de la 7
musique dans la conscience humaine was first published in 1961 (a German 8
translation followed in 1985), but his ideas on Jewish composers failed to excite 9
any attention in their own day because his substantial tome has always been 40
regarded as unreadable by musicians and was largely ignored by musicologists. 41R
252 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Ansermet’s curious comments need to be seen against the background of anti-

2 Semitic trends in French musical life, which in turn were bound up, in part,
3 with responses to Wagner’s art and ideas in the final third of the nineteenth
4 century, responses embodied in the work of that most influential composer and
5 teacher Vincent d’Indy.
6 We may begin by asking whether Mahler was ever exposed to anti-Semitic
7 resentment during his lifetime, and the answer is a resounding yes. The first
8 campaign against him dates from 1885, when he was still only twenty-five and
9 working as a conductor in Kassel. A newspaper article survives from this period,
10 inveighing against Mahler as a Jew whom the local mayor had entrusted with the
1 running of a major music festival at the expense of a German conductor above
2 him in the theatrical hierarchy:
3
4 In order that the whole world may see that in Kassel the Jew must play first
5 fiddle on such occasions according to national liberal legal action, Mahler, a Jew
6 who is currently assistant conductor at the Royal Court Theatre, has been
7 named principal conductor. . . . This satisfied the different racial types, the
8 Germans having all the work, while the Jew received all the credit. Oh, what fun
9 it was to help turn a dear old Jew into a genius by writing and talking him up.2
20
1 This situation never changed but culminated in Vienna, a city described with
2 some justification as a breeding ground for anti-Semitism in the German-
3 speaking world in the years around 1900. By the end of 1896 Mahler had
4 already begun to forge ties with Vienna and to prepare the ground for his
5 appointment to the long-coveted position of principal conductor and, shortly
6 afterwards, director of the Vienna Court Opera. By April 1897 the contract
7 had been signed, Mahler having been baptized into the Catholic Church only
8 two months earlier. But the days were long since over when conversion was
9 enough to make a Gentile out of a Jew, and the Viennese press left Mahler in
30 no doubt what he could expect from at least a section of its members.
1 On 14 April 1897, even before Mahler had conducted a note of music at the
2 Court Opera, the Reichspost had informed its readers that:
3
4 In our edition of 10 April we printed a note on the person of the newly
5 appointed Opera Conductor, Mahler. At the time we already had an inkling
6 of the origin of this celebrity and we therefore avoided publishing anything
7 other than the bare facts about this unadulterated – Jew. . . . We shall refrain
8 completely from any over-hasty judgement. The Jews’ press will see whether
9 the panegyrics with which they plaster their idol at present do not become
40 washed away by the rain of reality as soon as Herr Mahler starts spouting his
41R Yiddish interpretations [mauscheln] from the podium.3
JEWISHNESS AND IDENTITY 253
The writer uses the word mauscheln to describe Mahler’s platform manner, 1
an old and ominous term of abuse directed at the German spoken by Jews. 2
(Nowadays German linguisticians occasionally, if controversially, use the term 3
‘West Yiddish’ to distinguish this particular dialect from the true Yiddish dialect, 4
‘East Yiddish’.) The word mauscheln – the language of Moses, or Moshe – 5
was contentious even among Jews. In his famous German translation of the 6
Pentateuch, the first edition of which was printed in Hebrew characters, Moses 7
Mendelssohn sought to avoid all associations between mauscheln and a lack of 8
education and a ghetto mentality. By the middle of the nineteenth century the 9
great historian of Judaism, Heinrich Graetz, was already speaking of ‘hideous 10
mauscheln’ and ‘babbling gibberish’. It is no wonder, then, that anti-Semitically 1
inclined non-Jews cultivated this negative stereotype in literature, onstage and 2
in the form of caricatures and cartoons. From this point of view, mauscheln 3
remained the decisive feature, allowing observers to identify even those Jews 4
who had dispensed with the outward characteristics of Judaism in terms of their 5
hairstyle and clothing. If the Viennese journalist applied the word mauscheln 6
to Mahler’s conducting in 1897, he was adroitly using a linguistic metaphor to 7
imply the sort of physical characteristics that were traditionally ascribed to 8
Jews, namely, violent movements of the extremities, a distinctive use of body 9
language and swaying movements of the upper body – time and again writers 20
and cartoonists pointed out that on the podium Mahler’s movements were more 1
fidgety than those of other conductors of the age, conductors whose style was 2
much more understated. This point is brought out in a whole series of carica- 3
tures, although it is not always clear to what extent this emphasis is inspired by 4
anti-Semitism. But in many cases, a comparison with older caricatures that are 5
demonstrably part of the anti-Semitic tradition confirms beyond doubt that the 6
intention is indeed anti-Semitic. 7
Although anti-Semitic attacks on Mahler came from only a certain section 8
of the press, they remained a constant feature of his life from now on. 9
Throughout his ten years as director of the Vienna Court Opera, everything 30
that he did was more or less openly linked to the fact that he was Jewish. 1
Particular indignation was caused by his retouchings to the instrumentation 2
of the works that he conducted with the Vienna Philharmonic, notably the 3
symphonies of Beethoven. On 4 December 1898, for example, the Deutsche 4
Zeitung demanded that ‘If Herr Mahler really wants to make corrections let 5
him set about Mendelssohn or Rubinstein – that’s something of course the 6
Jews will never put up with – but let him just leave our Beethoven in peace.’4 7
Such sentiments look forward to the infamous Protest of Richard Wagner’s 8
Own City of Music in April 1933 after Thomas Mann had delivered his lecture 9
on the ‘Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner’ in the Great Hall of 40
Munich University and subsequently in other European cities. The musical 41R
254 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 scene in Munich was particularly short-sighted and reactionary at this time,

2 embodied, as it was, in the figures of Hans Knappertsbusch, Hans Pfitzner and,
3 unfortunately, Richard Strauss. The signatories refused to stand by and see
4 Mann criticize ‘German intellectual giants of enduring merit’, to quote their
5 inimitable phrase.5 In 1897 the contributor to the Deutsche Zeitung had
6 appealed to ‘our Beethoven’. In 1933 no less illiberal voices spoke of ‘our great
7 German musical genius’: others should evidently keep their distance, the
8 ‘others’ including not only Jews like Mahler but also men of letters like Mann
9 who, related by marriage to Jews, had been supportive of the Weimar Republic.
10 Anti-Semitic attacks on Mahler, whether overt or covert, were not limited
1 to his activities as a conductor who re-instrumented the music of other
2 composers, nor were they restricted to his work as the director of the Vienna
3 Court Opera, whenever he dismissed popular singers. Above all, they were
4 directed at his work as a composer. In general, the Viennese had not realized
5 that in signing up their new director, they had got a composer as part of the
6 bargain: by 1897, after all, Mahler was still largely unknown in this capacity.
7 But his increasing fame went hand in hand with mounting controversy, forcing
8 observers to confront the new situation. Nor were the anti-Semitic attacks on
9 his work as a composer confined to Vienna but were found wherever his music
20 was performed, especially when Mahler himself conducted, as he often did, so
1 convinced was he that only in this way could he adequately introduce listeners
2 to his unusual musical language.
3 In 1909 the respected critic and writer on music Rudolf Louis brought out a
4 book under the title Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (German Music of the
5 Present Day) that became an instant best-seller. The first book-length attempt
6 to discuss German music in the wake of Wagner’s death, it could not avoid
7 mentioning Mahler, who was by then at the height of his controversial fame
8 and who could rely on an army of supporters. Having assured his readers that
9 he regarded anti-Semitic sentiments as foolish and crude, Louis then lobbed
30 his grenade into the debate:
1
2 What I find so hideously repellent about Mahler’s music is its unequivocally
3 Jewish character. . . . If Mahler’s music were to speak Jewish, I might find it
4 completely unintelligible. But I find it abhorrent because it speaks with a
5 Jewish accent. In other words, it speaks musical German, but with the accent,
6 the intonation and, above all, with the gestures of the eastern, all too eastern
7 Jew. As a writer of symphonies, Mahler avails himself of the language of
8 Beethoven and Bruckner, Berlioz and Wagner, Schubert and Viennese folk
9 music – and one has to concede that he has acquired a tolerable grasp of the
40 grammar and style of these languages. But with every sentence that he speaks
41R he has the same effect on more sensitive listeners as the one that we would
feel if a comedian at the Budapest Orpheum [a cabaret in Vienna famous for 1

its performances in a mixture of Yiddish and Viennese] were to declaim a 2
poem by Schiller with no idea of how grotesque he appears in the mask of the 3
German poet. The same inner contradiction invests Mahler’s works with the 4
same sense of embarrassing inauthenticity. Without noticing it himself – for 5
I do not for a moment doubt in the subjective sincerity of Mahler’s music – 6
he plays a role that is, as it were, constitutionally impossible for him to carry 7
off in any credible way.6 8
9
This was more dangerous and more pernicious than the attacks in newspapers 10
notorious for their anti-Semitic opinions, for Louis was well respected in 1
middle-class circles in the German-speaking world. Not only did he write for 2
the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, but with Ludwig Thuille he had also 3
co-authored a standard work on harmony. He was certainly not known as an 4
anti-Semite but was a widely read author whose books were to be found in the 5
homes of all educated members of the middle class with an interest in music. 6
But, like other writers, he accuses Mahler of musical mauscheln, adopting a 7
line of argument all too familiar from the history of nineteenth-century anti- 8
Semitism, when the increasingly successful emancipation of the Jews – their 9
‘bourgeois amelioration’, to quote the title of a well-known book from the end 20
of the eighteenth century – was provoking more and more violent counter- 1
reactions. The enemies of emancipation felt threatened by the acculturation of 2
the German Jews and by their creative engagement with German culture. Such 3
enemies now paid close heed to the gestures and language of the German 4
Jews, and whenever they found examples of mauscheln, they were able to adopt 5
a triumphalist tone and insist that the Jew would always remain a foreign 6
element in the body politic. Much the same was true of Louis, who did not 7
accuse Mahler of writing Jewish music, as he could easily have done, but 8
complained, rather, that Mahler was trying to write German music, each note 9
of which smacked of an ineradicable Jewishness. The old reproach that the 30
Jews smelt differently – the ‘foetor judaicus’ was a commonplace among para- 1
noid anti-Semites – was now applied to music: however virtuosic and brilliant 2
the music of Jewish composers, it remained eclectic and mendacious as Jews 3
were constitutionally incapable of being creative, and the worst part about it – 4
or, rather, the best part about it, because it was this that made Jewish music so 5
instantly identifiable – was that it spoke with a Jewish accent and had the 6
speech patterns of the ‘eternal Jew’. This, at least, was the common perception 7
articulated by Louis and others. 8
These, then, were the principal charges that were laid at Mahler’s door 9
both during his lifetime and afterwards. The National Socialist press naturally 40
clung to these stereotypes, even before 1933. In January 1929, for example, a 41R
256 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 reviewer in the Völkischer Beobachter wrote of a Munich performance of the

2 Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen that the work revealed ‘the inner uncertainty
3 and deracination of the superficially civilized western Jew in all his tragedy’.
4 Mahler was
5
6 false and insidious. The only characteristic that emerges with any authenticity
7 is a hopeless melancholy, a denial of the world and a feeling of insecurity from
8 which he extricates himself artificially by means of narcotic stimulants only
9 to fall all the more deeply into a state of listlessness caused by his inferiority
10 complex. It is a hopeless case.7
1
2 That such prejudices were still rife even after 1945 is clear from the passage in
3 Ernest Ansermet’s study cited above, a passage written around 1960. Many
4 other examples of music reviews from the 1950s and 1960s – before the
5 ‘Mahler renaissance’ got under way – could also be quoted in this context. It is
6 depressing to discover the extent to which most of the critics of this period
7 were convinced that none of the isolated performances of the composer’s
8 works would ever lead to a proper revival. In 1952, for example, a critic from
9 Hanover thought nothing of lumping together Mahler and Heine by virtue of
20 their ‘association of naïveté and wit’, except that Mahler apparently had ‘none
1 of Heine’s western critical spirit’: ‘Mahler was a man of a more effeminate
2 eastern type, but in a mysterious way both had succumbed to the magic of the
3 German national character.’8 Elsewhere we are told that Mahler
4
5 lacked the uninhibitedness that helped Strauss, for example, to overcome
6 many an obstacle, and yet he must have realized that his talents were limited.
7 But he still set out with a superhuman will to transcend these limitations:
8 with blood transfusions from folksong and art music he sought to increase
9 his strength – and nothing is more disturbing than the profound resignation
30 that is all that is left for the exhausted man to feel. . . . Sublimity clashes with
1 the trivial, genuine emotion atrophies and becomes a studied construct, the
2 composer’s own ideas appear alongside others borrowed from elsewhere, and
3 the disproportion between the actual content and the outer façade is impos-
4 sible to overlook.9
5
6 These lines are not taken from the Völkischer Beobachter or Der Angriff but
7 from one of the most popular concert guides of the 1950s and 1960s, Rudolf
8 Bauer’s Das Konzert, which first appeared in 1955, joining the best-seller list
9 five years later when it was taken over by Germany’s largest book club. It hardly
40 needs to be said that the vast majority of the music critics and musicologists
41R of this period – assuming they had not spent the war years in exile – had
published assiduously during the Third Reich and now continued to write 1
in much the same spirit as before, even if they eliminated the worst excesses 2
of their National Socialist vocabulary. The anti-Semitic substance of critical 3
responses to Mahler remained unchallenged, even if the word ‘Jew’ was never 4
used, the Hanover critic’s reference to the composer’s ‘more effeminate eastern 5
type’ being the exception that confirms the rule. The authors of such remarks 6
could reckon on the fact that those of their readers who had read reviews and 7
concert guides under the Third Reich knew what was meant by terms such as 8
eclecticism and triviality, by the gap between intention and ability, by the 9
hankering after empty effects, by the imitation of all forms and styles and by 10
shallowness and saccharine sweetness. In Mahler’s case these voices fell 1
silent, at least in public, only when his international breakthrough had become 2
unstoppable. In Germany, of course, anti-Semitic discourse was officially 3
banned after 1945. But readers and listeners with sensitive hearing will have no 4
difficulty in confirming that a residue of this type of argumentation can still be 5
found today. 6
The time has come to address the question of the origins of these attitudes to 7
Jewish composers and to ask whether Mahler was the first to suffer from such 8
attacks. In fact their originator – the diabolus in musica, as it were – was none 9
other than Richard Wagner. Writings on his anti-Semitism now fill entire book- 20
cases. The correspondence cannot be regarded as closed. Far from it. As a 1
result, the following account must be limited to a mere pointer to the source of 2
all these attacks on Mahler and, by extension, on all other Jewish composers. 3
The source is an article, ‘Jews in Music’, that Wagner published in two instal- 4
ments in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in September 1850. The piece initially 5
appeared under the pseudonym of ‘K. Freigedank’ (‘Free Thought’) but was 6
reissued in booklet form in 1869, this time under Wagner’s own name and with 7
an introduction and a lengthy afterword.10 Previous commentators have tended 8
to claim that Wagner was the first writer to express his views on Jewish influ- 9
ence on music and that he did so at a time when the modern concept of racial 30
anti-Semitism did not yet exist – it is normally dated to the end of the 1870s, 1
when the phrase ‘anti-Semitism’ was used for the first time. But writers on 2
anti-Semitism have shown that even before this date there were already aggres- 3
sive attempts to resist Jewish emancipation, attempts that found expression 4
in a vast number of intemperate writings and pogrom-like measures in the 5
years between 1810 and 1850. The world of music was initially only tangen- 6
tially affected by these developments, although even before the appearance of 7
Wagner’s essay in 1850 there was already widespread resentment directed at 8
Jews as performing artists and also as composers, Mendelssohn being the most 9
prominent example. In Paris, too, there was already prejudice against Jewish 40
composers such as Halévy and Meyerbeer during the 1830s and 1840s. 41R
258 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 In short, Wagner was by no means the first in this field, not that this exon-
2 erates him, for he was the first to introduce any kind of system to the subject.
3 By 1869, moreover, he was famous throughout Europe and able to add the
4 weight of his name to the cause of anti-Semitism. This is not the place to trace
5 the course of Wagnerian polemics, but it is striking that he was to prove the
6 source of all the essential catchphrases that were to characterize anti-Semitic
7 pamphleteering and that his influence went far beyond Mahler. Citing
8 Mendelssohn and, above all, Meyerbeer, Wagner sought to show that Jewish
9 musicians produced a confused contrafactum of the different forms and styles
10 that had existed throughout history and that they attempted to make up for the
1 absence of any real feeling by means of an assemblage of superficial effects.
2 Jewish works of music were notable for a coldness and an indifference that
3 bordered on the trivial and the absurd, the period during which music was
4 dominated by Jews being characterized by its total lack of creativity. This
5 was especially clear in the case of Meyerbeer. Although Meyerbeer is not
6 mentioned by name in ‘Jews in Music’, contemporary readers would have had
7 no difficulty identifying the anonymous butt of Wagner’s barbs.
8 In his longer study, Opera and Drama, which he completed in January 1851,
9 Wagner named names, dismissing Meyerbeer’s music as a farrago of ‘effects
20 without causes’, a phrase that quickly did the rounds. The republication of ‘Jews
1 in Music’ in pamphlet form in 1869 revived the arguments and led to an embit-
2 tered debate on the subject. The liberal writer Gustav Freytag, whose novel Soll
3 und Haben features a number of shady Jewish characters, took issue with
4 Wagner and listed the qualities that Wagner imputes to Jewish composers,
5 finally asking his readers which composer best embodied these characteristics.
6 Surely, he concluded, it was Wagner himself. This republication caused such a
7 stir that from then on Wagner’s arguments could no longer be ignored, allowing
8 them to be reactivated by Mahler’s critics in the years around the turn of the
9 century. From here we can trace an unbroken line to the cultural politics of the
30 Third Reich, which found in the writings of Wagner and the Bayreuth circle a
1 welcome repository of clichés and catchphrases. Time and again anti-Semitic
2 journalists appealed explicitly to Wagner, almost always referring in the process
3 to his essay, ‘Jews in Music’. Many writers have wondered why Wagner exerted
4 such a powerful influence on contemporary Jews: Jewish musicians such as Carl
5 Tausig, Josef Rubinstein and Hermann Levi flocked to Wagner’s side, Jewish
6 audiences attended performances of his works (only a small minority protested
7 at his anti-Semitism), and not even Mahler could be swayed in his tremendous
8 enthusiasm for Wagner. Although he must have been aware of Wagner’s anti-
9 Semitism, there is no evidence that he ever sought to distance himself from it.
40 What was Mahler’s own attitude to his Jewish ancestry? It is a question that
41R cannot be avoided, no matter how difficult it may be to answer. Unlike Wagner,
Mahler left no writings expressing his views on this or any other subject. 1
Instead, we have to rely on his letters and on the reminiscences of his family 2
and friends. He was born into a Jewish family in the south-eastern corner of 3
Bohemia. In Iglau, the town to which the family moved soon after Mahler was 4
born, there was initially no Jewish community with any proper organization to 5
it, but when such an organization was finally established, it was Bernhard 6
Mahler who sat on its committee. Very little Yiddish was spoken in this region, 7
and so Mahler grew up speaking German. According to one of his earliest 8
memories, he was still a small child when he protested at the singing in the 9
local synagogue, suggesting that the family attended services there on a fairly 10
regular basis. But we may also be right in assuming that while he was a 1
student in Vienna, where he mixed with freethinkers and Nietzscheans such as 2
Siegfried Lipiner and with men like Engelbert Pernerstorfer and Victor Adler, 3
who went on to become prominent Socialists, he soon distanced himself from 4
the faith of his forefathers, a faith that is unlikely to have been orthodox in 5
character. Anti-Semitic attacks such as the one that he suffered in Kassel will 6
have made it clear to him at an early date that his Jewish faith was an obstacle 7
to his advancement – one thinks in this context of Heine’s description of 8
baptism as an ‘entry ticket’ to European civilization. By the winter of 1896/7, 9
by which date Mahler was principal conductor in Hamburg and hoping 20
to become conductor and director of the Vienna Court Opera, he still 1
seemed surprised when writing to his friend Friedrich Löhr: ‘The fact that 2
I am Jewish prevents my getting taken on in any Court theatre. – Neither 3
Vienna, nor Berlin, nor Dresden, nor Munich is open to me. The same wind is 4
now blowing everywhere.’11 Mahler’s use of the word ‘now’ indicates that he 5
had initially been unaware of this ‘obstacle’. His childhood and adolescence 6
will have been largely free from anti-Semitism. As we have already noted, it 7
was not until the 1880s that a new and less tolerant regime began. 8
Having gradually moved away from orthodox Judaism, Mahler decided to 9
convert to Christianity in 1897, in the middle of his negotiations with Vienna. 30
‘Mahler is a Jew, I’ll never get him through,’ the administrative director of the 1
Court Theatres, Eduard Wlassack, one of Mahler’s patrons, is said to have 2
exclaimed. But in a letter to Ödön von Mihalovich, Mahler himself reports a 3
remark by the principal comptroller Prince Liechtenstein to the effect that 4
‘things are not yet so bad in Austria that anti-Semitism can decide matters’.12 5
Yet the obstacle still had to be removed. That Mahler waited until he was 6
thirty-seven to remove it is an indication of the purely tactical nature of the 7
step, a point reinforced by a letter to his young disciple Bruno Walter, who had 8
asked him for his advice on the course that his life should take: ‘But above all, 9
you should convert and do your military service!’13 Writing only weeks after 40
his own conversion, Mahler was anxious that Walter should remove the two 41R
260 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 most serious obstacles on the road to a career as a conductor. Shortly after-

2 wards, he advised Walter to change his name and abandon the Jewish surname
3 Schlesinger in favour of the less stigmatizing Walter. That Mahler was not
4 entirely comfortable with his late conversion is clear from his repeated claim
5 that it had taken place earlier than was in fact the case. (We have already
6 quoted one particularly embarrassing example of this deceit.) Clearly he
7 preferred not to think that it was directly bound up with his Viennese appoint-
8 ment, although his anger may have been directed less at himself than at a
9 world which, pervaded by anti-Semitism, forced him to undertake such an act
10 of deception.
1 As for Mahler’s beliefs, we can say only that their character is difficult to
2 define, a point to which we shall return in the wider context of his general
3 philosophical outlook. Alma, who – to put it mildly – was herself not free
4 from anti-Semitic sentiment, later insisted that her husband’s conversion was
5 anything but opportunistic in character as he had always believed in Christ.
6 Indeed, she even uses the term ‘Christian Jew’, an expression commonly
7 applied to converts from Judaism whose Christianity was peculiarly fervent –
8 Mendelssohn was another such example. But Alma’s assessment appears to
9 have been dictated by special interest. Mahler’s private religion – if we may use
20 such an expression – was a highly individual mix of Goethean pantheism, a
1 belief in entelechy of a kind associated with both Goethe and Gustav Fechner,
2 namely, the notion of a creative destiny imposed on us by forces outside
3 ourselves, a religion of compassion in the spirit of Dostoevsky, a Nietzschean
4 independence and a profoundly felt natural religion. When Mahler used the
5 word ‘God’, he did not mean the Christian or the Jewish God but, as we shall
6 see in a later chapter, an amalgam of all this and much else besides.
7 There are plenty of examples of Jews such as the Marranos who were forcibly
8 converted but who retained their Jewish beliefs. But Mahler does not fall into
9 this category. Even as an adolescent he had clearly moved away from the faith
30 of his forefathers and, unlike Arnold Schoenberg in very different circum-
1 stances, he never returned to it. Mahler is sometimes cited as an example of the
2 problematical concept of ‘Jewish self-hatred’. In particular, writers have drawn
3 attention to a letter that he addressed to his wife from Lemberg, where he was
4 giving two concerts on 2 and 4 April 1903: ‘The most endearing part of it are
5 the Polish Jews that roam the streets here just like stray dogs in other places. –
6 It’s highly amusing to observe them! My God, are these supposed to be my kith
7 and kin?! In the face of such evidence, all theories of racial origin appear more
8 ludicrous than I can tell you!’14 Unsettling though such remarks may seem, we
9 must be wary of interpreting them as reliable evidence of the sort of Jewish self-
40 hatred that is discernible in the case of individuals such as Arthur Trebitsch and
41R Otto Weininger. Mahler was clearly prejudiced against Eastern European Jews,
but such prejudices were common and, indeed, normal among assimilated 1
Western European Jews at this period. Very similar psychological mechanisms 2
were later described by Jakob Wassermann, a non-convert who published an 3
impressive set of memoirs under the title Mein Weg als Deutscher und Jude (an 4
English translation appeared in 1933 as My Life as German and Jew). 5
There is no doubt that Mahler viewed his Jewish birth as a burden, and 6
however much he may have protested at racial theories in his letter to his wife, 7
he was no less able to escape from such ideas than any of his contemporaries. 8
In a letter that he wrote in 1906 to the young Jewish conductor Oskar Fried, he 9
spoke out quite openly on the subject: ‘And don’t forget that we can do nothing 10
about our being Jewish, our chief mistake. We must merely try to moderate a 1
little those superficial aspects of our nature which really do disturb, and to give 2
way as little as possible on important matters.’15 On another occasion he told 3
Alfred Roller that he regarded his Jewish ancestry as a spur or incentive: ‘If a 4
person comes into the world with an arm that is too short, his other arm must 5
learn to achieve even more and perhaps do things that two healthy arms could 6
never have accomplished.’16 7
On the one hand, therefore, we find Mahler regarding his Jewish ancestry 8
as a tormenting burden and sharing the prejudices of assimilated Western 9
European Jews against those of their Eastern European counterparts who in the 20
wake of Russian pogroms at the end of the nineteenth century fled to the West 1
in increasing numbers. These refugees formed ‘hordes of ambitious, trouser- 2
selling youths from the inexhaustible Polish cradle’, persuading the German 3
nationalist historian Heinrich von Treitschke to coin the fatal phrase ‘The Jews 4
are our misfortune’ in 1879. It was a phrase that the Nazi newspaper Der Stürmer 5
was later to reprint on its title page every day. On the other hand, there is no 6
evidence that – to use Anna Freud’s expression – Mahler ‘identified with the 7
aggressor’ in a way that is typical of Jewish self-hatred. Few men knew Mahler 8
better than the artist and set designer Alfred Roller, who worked with him on his 9
epoch-making productions at the Vienna Court Opera and who convincingly 30
summed up the problem in the words: ‘Mahler never hid his Jewish ancestry. But 1
it gave him no pleasure.’ Roller also reports the following remark: ‘People should 2
listen to my works and allow those works to affect them, either accepting them 3
or rejecting them. But they should leave at home their positive or negative pre- 4
judices against the work of the Jew. I demand this as my right.’17 As we have seen, 5
Mahler was denied this right. Even the anti-Semitic Alma admitted that he never 6
denied his Jewish origins but tended, rather, to stress them, a point confirmed by 7
Alphons Diepenbrock, one of Mahler’s Dutch friends. But we need to remember 8
that not to deny one’s Jewish birth is one thing, whereas it is a completely 9
different matter to see oneself as a Jew. Whenever Mahler felt rejected either 40
as a human being or as a musician, he believed that it was as a Jew that he was 41R
262 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 being spurned. To that extent he undoubtedly regarded himself as a victim of

2 the anti-Semitism of the age, even when that anti-Semitism may not have been
3 present. There is also evidence, as previously noted, that he hated obvious
4 displays of Jewishness, including Jewish jokes, no matter whether they were told
5 by anti-Semites or Jews. He loved his wife’s long flowing hair and when she
6 pinned it up, he protested at her ‘current Jewish look’.18
7 It is simply not possible to provide a definitive answer to the question of
8 Mahler’s relationship to Judaism and his own Jewish origins – no one who has
9 taken any interest in what has been called the ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’ will
10 be surprised at this inability to solve a problem that founders even on the
1 definition of a Jew. The Halacha definition that is also applied in Israel, albeit
2 controversially, argues that a Jew is someone with Jewish parents (in the case
3 of a mixed marriage, the mother’s Jewishness is paramount) or a convert to the
4 religious precepts of Judaism. Set against this is the secular definition whereby
5 those people are Jews who identify with the Jewish nation and its destiny. As we
6 know, these differing definitions have led to test cases in Israel, and although
7 judgements have been handed down from the highest secular and rabbinical
8 courts in the land, the arguments have yet to be resolved. The Halacha also
9 insists that baptized Jews remain Jews, being guilty only of infringing religious
20 law. According to Halacha law, Mahler too must be regarded as a Jew. The
1 problem with this definition emerges when we turn to the German-language
2 Jüdisches Lexikon that was published in the 1920s: the author of the entry under
3 ‘Baptized Jews’ can hardly contain his disgust at such people and even appends
4 a list of baptized Jews intended to discourage others by naming and shaming
5 their predecessors.
6 At the same time, however, the volume is evidently pleased to include an
7 entry on Mahler in which the composer’s baptism is mentioned, just as it is in
8 the Mahler article in the Encyclopedia Judaica. (Conversely, the 1990 edition of
9 the Brockhaus-Enzyklopädie makes no mention of Mahler’s Jewish ancestry or
30 of his baptism.) Once Mahler had abandoned his Jewish co-religionists, we
1 can hardly regard him as a Jew any longer, at least to the extent that we are
2 unwilling to follow Halacha law. In adopting this view of him we may be
3 further encouraged by the fact that once he had outgrown his childhood he no
4 longer observed any Jewish rituals. On the other hand, it is impossible to
5 ignore Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous definition of the Jew as someone who is
6 regarded as such: in this sense, Mahler remained a Jew throughout his life.
7 Perhaps we may combine both definitions and argue that a Jew is someone
8 who regards himself as such and who identifies with Judaism or who is
9 regarded by others as a Jew until such time as he himself comes to see himself
40 as a Jew. (Here one thinks of the many Germans who said that it required
41R Hitler to make them conscious of the fact that they were Jews.) This was
certainly the line adopted by the a-religious, non-convert Sigmund Freud, 1

when he explained in an interview in 1926: ‘My language is German. My 2
culture, my attainments, are German. I considered myself German intellectu- 3
ally, until I noticed the growth of anti-Semitic prejudice in Germany and 4
German Austria. Since that time, I prefer to call myself a Jew.’19 5
A person who in this or a similar situation refuses to identify with Judaism, 6
as Mahler refused to do, can hardly be described as a Jew. Here the individual’s 7
own definition of himself should be given greater weight than other people’s 8
definition of him. It is unsurprising that the undifferentiated use of the term 9
‘Jew’, especially when it is well-meaning, invariably leads to complications. Be 10
that as it may, the various threads that bind a person to his Jewish ancestry 1
need to be disentangled and examined one by one. Mahler did not regard 2
himself as a Jew even though he was neither able nor willing to deny that he 3
was born into a Jewish family. He felt remote from all aspects of Judaism, 4
be they ritual, dress, hair or beard, and on occasion even spoke dismissively 5
about them. Linguistically, too, he showed no trace of Western European 6
Yiddish in the way he spoke. Towards the end of his life, an orchestral 7
musician in New York addressed him as a German, prompting him to insist, 8
rather, that he was from Bohemia. His famous remark that he was homeless 9
three times over – as a Bohemian among Austrians, as an Austrian among 20
Germans and as a Jew in the whole of the world, implying that he was 1
forever an unwelcome intruder – is attested only by Alma and, like everything 2
found only in her memoirs, it needs to be treated with caution. It may be 3
the most famous sentence associated with Mahler, but doubts concerning 4
its formulation are none the less in order.20 But even if we take it literally, 5
the phrase still does not allow us to conclude that Mahler defined himself 6
as a Jew. 7
Alfred Roller believed that Mahler’s attitude to Judaism was best character- 8
ized by the term ‘compassion’. It was no doubt this compassion that prevented 9
him from distancing himself more emphatically from his Jewish ancestry and 30
from denying those origins altogether. At a time when a belief in race was still 1
very deeply rooted, he was already prepared to cast doubt on racial theory. We 2
shall perhaps come a little closer to this extraordinarily complex problem if we 3
use the term that Arthur Schnitzler devised for his own attitude to Judaism: 4
‘Gefühlsgemeinschaft’, an ‘emotional community’ or commonality of feeling. 5
Schnitzler was anything but a devout Jew but was a fully integrated agnostic 6
whose command of the German language was second to none. In spite of this 7
he did not abandon his Jewish religious community, even though he felt no 8
real bond with it. Rather he felt close to other members of this community, 9
which in his eyes replaced the increasingly obsolete concept of race. Freud said 40
much the same: 41R
264 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 I can say that I am as remote from the Jewish religion as from all others; that
2 is to say, they are highly significant to me as a subject of scientific interest;
3 emotionally I am not involved in them. On the other hand, I have always had
4 a strong feeling of solidarity with my people and have also fostered it in my
5 children. We have all remained in the Jewish confession.21
6
7 One senses something very similar in the case of Mahler, even if only in a
8 much weaker form. It is an attitude documented by more than just his conver-
9 sion. We may sum up the situation by suggesting that Mahler did not feel
10 himself to be a Jew even if he sensed that there were links with his family’s past.
1 He hated negative Jewish qualities, at least as he understood them. He also
2 hated anti-Semitism. If his conversion to Catholicism left him feeling uncom-
3 fortable, it was not because he had had to deny any articles of faith but because
4 it had been a tactical manoeuvre. It will have been the admonishment of his
5 superego, together with his compassion for those of his comrades who shared
6 the same fate, that prevented him from distancing himself even more from his
7 Jewish origins than he might perhaps have felt inclined to do. If we had to limit
8 ourselves to a single definition, it might be that Mahler was not a Jew, but nor
9 was he a Gentile. He came from a family that was still Jewish and that still
20 played a part in the life of the local Jewish community but which in all likeli-
1 hood could hardly be regarded as orthodox. His family had taken its first
2 tentative steps on the road to assimilation, although a glance at Schnitzler’s
3 family shows just how much they still had to achieve in this regard. Mahler
4 continued this journey with his typically intemperate determination and
5 perseverance. In breaking free from the straitened circumstances of his family,
6 which had taken generations to enter the ranks of the petty bourgeoisie, and in
7 working his way up to one of the highest cultural positions in western Europe
8 within a matter of barely twenty years, he left far behind him most of his fore-
9 fathers’ links with his Jewish faith. Nor should we forget that among his young
30 friends both Lipiner and Löhr were baptized, as was his later brother-in-law,
1 Arnold Rosé. But Mahler never forget where he came from. Nor did he seek to
2 deny it. If his background became a burden to him, it was because the society
3 in which he lived was impregnated with anti-Semitism to a degree altogether
4 unknown to earlier generations.
5 We now have to ask whether Mahler wrote Jewish music. The question has
6 to be put even if it has repeatedly been posed by anti-Semites. But it has also
7 been asked by Mahler’s supporters, even during his own lifetime. And it
8 continues to be discussed to this day – much the same is true of Schoenberg,
9 whose music was examined from this standpoint by the American musicolo-
40 gist Alexander L. Ringer in his 1990 book Arnold Schoenberg: The Composer as
41R Jew. It will come as no surprise to discover that here, too, simple answers are
ruled out, because any possible response is bound up with the answer to the 1
question of what Jewish music is. There are two major encyclopaedias in 2
the world that are dedicated to music, the English-language New Grove and 3
the German Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart. The latter has recently 4
been completely revised, and the volume containing the article on ‘Jewish 5
Music’ was published in 1996. The same difficulties arise over the definition of 6
Jewish music as those that we encountered when discussing the Jewish iden- 7
tity. Indeed, it would be surprising if it were otherwise. The development of 8
music is closely associated, of course, with the vicissitudinous fate of the 9
Jews as a nation and as a religious community. During the diaspora local tradi- 10
tions played a considerable role, greater or lesser deviations from the liturgy 1
depending on the extent to which the genres in question were already remote 2
from the liturgy, having developed independently according to the Sephardi 3
and Ashkenazi traditions. For a long time writers clung to the definition 4
proposed by the musicologist Curt Sachs at the First International Congress on 5
Jewish Music that took place in Paris in 1957: ‘Jewish music is that music 6
which is made by Jews, for Jews, as Jews.’ This definition at least had the merit 7
of memorability and is still occasionally found today. It is, as it were, the 8
Halacha definition of Jewish music, the narrowness of which was quickly 9
noted. A ‘secular’ rider was soon added, according to which all music with 20
which Jews can identify should also be described as Jewish, although this 1
inevitably raises the question of the role that Jews adopt when identifying with 2
a particular type of music: religious Jews, cultural Jews or purely as music 3
lovers. Take the example of Hermann Levi, the son of a rabbi from Gießen, 4
who refused to convert to Christianity but conducted the first performances of 5
Parsifal at the 1882 Bayreuth Festival, devoting himself with an abandonment 6
bordering on self-sacrifice to music that could hardly be described as ‘Jewish’. 7
In his 1992 book Jewish Musical Traditions, Amnon Shiloah emphasized the 8
importance of intrinsic musical, geographical and historical aspects in any defi- 9
nition of Jewish music. Above all, however, he felt that the cultural context was 30
important and rightly drew attention to the fact that performance practice is often 1
decisive in defining the function of a particular Jewish musical identity. The 2
author of the article on Jewish music in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart 3
takes this definition as his starting point when arguing that Jewish music is music 4
that combines formal, stylistic and semantic features of Jewish behaviour and 5
culture. The whole of the substantial article adopts this same approach, tracing 6
in minute detail the long history of the Jewish musical tradition. The entry 7
ends with an account of the great cantors of the nineteenth century, including 8
Salomon Sulzer in Vienna and Lazarus Lewandowski in Berlin. In the twentieth 9
century, the writer draws attention to the importance of the national school of 40
Jewish music in Russia between 1900 and 1930, a tradition that began life in 41R
266 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 St Petersburg. Other twentieth-century composers who are mentioned here

2 include Arnold Schoenberg, at least to the extent that he took an interest in Jewish
3 themes, Leonard Bernstein and Dmitri Shostakovich, who, although not a Jew,
4 used musical motifs from the Jewish tradition in works such as his Thirteenth
5 Symphony and his song cycle From Jewish Folk Poetry. Other composers listed
6 here are Ernest Bloch and Josef Tal, both of whom settled in Israel. But where are
7 Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and Mahler? They are not mentioned here, and rightly
8 so, because, unless we are to take Wagner’s anti-Semitic arguments seriously,
9 none of them can be said to demonstrate any formal, stylistic or semantic signs of
10 Jewish culture and Jewish behaviour.
1 At this point we could sit back and regard the argument as settled, were it not
2 for the fact that Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and Mahler – one lifelong Jew and two
3 converts to Christianity, to stick to our existing terminology – are listed in all
4 Jewish encyclopaedias as Jewish composers. Are these, then, examples of Jewish
5 composers who wrote non-Jewish music? This is certainly the point of view
6 adopted by the Jewish encyclopaedias in question and presumably also by non-
7 Jewish encyclopaedias, even when they do not explicitly refer to Mahler’s
8 Jewishness. But the situation is not as simple as this, especially when we recall
9 how even unbiased lovers of Mahler’s music repeatedly claim that it sounds
20 Jewish to them. Here we can at least appeal to Adorno, whose Mahler study of
1 1960 remains unsurpassed and who examined the Jewish element in Mahler’s
2 music, albeit only in passing: ‘Possibly synagogal or secular Jewish melodies are
3 rare; a passage in the Scherzo of the Fourth Symphony might most readily point
4 in that direction.’22 But the passage cited by Adorno is difficult to interpret in this
5 way. Conversely, there are one or two other passages in which the listener may
6 be able to sense the plaintive, jubilant tone of the clarinet as found in Eastern
7 European klezmer music, but these passages are nowhere near enough to allow
8 us to describe the whole of Mahler’s output as ‘Jewish’. He himself stressed on
9 more than one occasion that as a small child in Iglau, on the border between
30 Bohemia and Moravia, he listened with intense fascination to the local brass
1 bands, running behind them and losing his way back home. He also listened to
2 itinerant dance bands. These small groups of musicians also included Jewish
3 players, of course, but the Hamburg musicologist Vladimir Karbusicky, himself
4 a native of Bohemia, examined the musical impressions of Mahler’s youth in a
5 study that he published in 1978. While he was able to draw detailed attention to
6 the influence of Bohemian and Moravian folk music, he has nothing to say on
7 the subject of Jewish music.23 Even if Jewish musicians were present in Iglau and
8 its environs, they did not always play purely Jewish dance tunes and Jewish folk
9 music but an indeterminable mixture of styles.
40 Mahler himself repeatedly emphasized the importance of the folk music
41R from his region for his own early musical education. It was a point that he
made at some length in an interview that he gave to a New York newspaper 1

towards the end of his life.24 But he insisted that what mattered was the way in 2
which the material was reworked, not its origins. In the rare instances where 3
Mahler alludes to this music or integrates it into his works, it is impossible to 4
describe it as unequivocally Jewish, for it stems from the linguistic and cultural 5
mix of Bohemian, Moravian, German and Jewish elements that was typical of 6
the region where he grew up. Attempts by later writers to dissect these influ- 7
ences along coldly clinical lines are doomed to fail, and in the light of all that 8
we know about Mahler’s relations to Judaism, there can be no justification 9
whatsoever for the claim that he consciously used and even parodied a partic- 10
ular Jewish musical element. It is unlikely that he would have quoted such 1
material in an attempt either to assert his own identity as a Jew or, conversely, 2
to imply a dismissive and malicious subtext. Rather, it is one of those many 3
elements that Mahler amalgamated into his music, drawing no distinction 4
between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms but concerned only with its status within 5
the symphonic context as a whole. To quote Adorno’s inimitable description: 6
7
The unrisen lower is stirred as yeast into high music. The rude vigour and 8
immediacy of a musical entity that can neither be replaced nor forgotten: the 9
power of naming is often better protected in kitsch and vulgar music than in 20
a high music that even before the age of radical construction had sacrificed 1
all that to the principle of stylization. This power is mobilized by Mahler. Free 2
as only one can be who has not himself been entirely swallowed by culture, 3
in his musical vagrancy he picks up the broken glass by the roadside and 4
holds it up to the sun so that all the colors are refracted. . . . In the debased 5
and vilified materials of music he scratches for illicit joys.25 6
7
To avoid all misunderstandings, I must stress that it is not my intention to 8
remove every last trace of Jewishness from Mahler’s music. Gershom Scholem 9
was quite right to be exercised by the fact that well-meaning German writers 30
of the post-war era have often shown a peculiar reluctance to use the word 1
‘Jew’ to describe Jews who do not necessarily insist on their Jewishness: ‘After 2
they were murdered as Jews, they are now glorified as Germans in a kind of 3
posthumous triumph. To stress their Jewishness would be a concession to anti- 4
Semitic theories. What a perversion!’ In the same context, Scholem famously 5
questions the ‘myth of German-Jewish discourse’, a form of discourse that he 6
was able to regard only as the Jews’ despairing cry echoing in the void: 7
8
True, the total devotion to the German nation of so many people who 9
describe themselves in their – numerous – autobiographies as being ‘of 40
Jewish extraction’ because they otherwise had nothing in common with the 41R
268 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Jewish tradition, still less with the Jewish people, is one of the most moving
2 and unsettling aspects of this process of alienation. The list of Jews who have
3 been lost to the Germans is infinitely long, a catalogue of great and often
4 astonishing gifts and achievements offered up to the Germans. . . . These
5 people made a choice, and it is not our intention to contest the Germans’
6 right to them. And yet it often leaves us feeling uncomfortable, for we sense
7 the internal divisions in such lives. Even when they are conscious of being
8 estranged from all that is ‘Jewish’, many of them reveal a quality that is felt by
9 Jews and Germans alike – but not by the individuals concerned! – to be their
10 Jewish substance. This is certainly true of such leading figures as Karl Marx
1 and Ferdinand Lassalle and, closer to our own day, Karl Kraus, Gustav
2 Mahler and Georg Simmel.26
3
4 At least to the extent that writers took heed of it at all, Scholem’s radical refusal
5 to pay lip service to the cosy debates about the ‘German-Jewish symbiosis’
6 brought a breath of fresh air to the difficult discussion over the relations
7 between Germans and Jews, and yet there were times when Scholem tended to
8 adopt an unduly Manichaean approach to the subject. Mahler, after all, is out
9 of place in this list of names, each of which is sui generis: Kraus converted to
20 Catholicism, only to abandon his newfound faith, while in the case of Simmel,
1 it was the sociologist’s father who had already converted to Christianity. As for
2 Mahler, he did not ‘offer himself up’ to the Germans but refused to describe
3 himself as a German. Nor did he distance himself from all things Jewish in the
4 way that Kraus and Simmel did. We have already tried to approach this
5 problem by suggesting that Mahler was not a Jew, but nor was he a Gentile. By
6 not embracing the Germans and Austrians wholeheartedly, Mahler was spared
7 the disappointment of rejection in its strictest form, but at the same time he
8 exposed himself to a feeling of homelessness. He inhabited a world poised
9 between past and future, a ‘man of the air’, to use a Jewish expression of the
30 period: the roots that he put down were aerial roots. His manic restlessness, his
1 sense of always being driven, his inability to relax, which made his wife ill, his
2 tendency to bite his fingernails and even the nervous tic that made him stamp
3 his foot and twitch his leg uncontrollably – in part, these are undoubtedly all
4 examples of learned behaviour picked up while he was a child in a large family
5 beset by health problems, but they may also be attributable to his sense of
6 insecurity and to a feeling that he had no home to which he could return.
7 This is ultimately the only way to explain the letter that Mahler wrote to
8 Bruno Walter in the summer of 1908 and that describes the events of the
9 previous year, when his daughter Maria had died and his own heart disease
40 was diagnosed. Here was a man at the height of his fame as a composer, a man
41R who had already been acclaimed in New York as a world-famous conductor, a
man who still had a wife and daughter – his marital crisis lay two years in the 1
future – and who could feel proud of his own achievements as a composer, for 2
he knew exactly who he was and what his music meant to him and others. And 3
yet he was able to say of himself that he had suddenly lost all sense of clarity 4
and reassurance and was standing ‘vis-à-vis de rien’ – he was facing the void.27 5
It remains to attempt at least a partial answer to the question how we might 6
evaluate the Jewish element in Mahler’s music if the criteria proposed by 7
narrower definitions of the term are not applicable here. To answer this ques- 8
tion we do not need to sink to the level of the unfazable anti-Semites. A glance 9
at the debate that has taken place about Mahler during the last one hundred 10
years allows us to distinguish three different groups. First, there are the anti- 1
Semites who, as we have seen, insist that Mahler was Jewish. Then there is the 2
Mahler faction that refuses absolutely to regard him as a Jewish composer. 3
(Unsurprisingly, this group contains numerous assimilated Jews.) And finally 4
there is the much smaller group that has attempted to think more seriously 5
about the Jewish element in Mahler’s music and to reclaim him for a new and 6
more self-confident Jewishness. As early as the 1920s there was a debate in the 7
columns of the journal Der Jude that involved writers of the standing of Arno 8
Nadel, Paul Nettl, Heinrich Berl and Max Brod. Whereas Nadel argued for 9
assimilation and claimed that Mahler wrote German music just as Meyerbeer 20
wrote French music, Berl insisted that Mahler wrote Jewish music and, 1
adopting a Zionist standpoint, demanded that all Jewish composers, including 2
Schoenberg, should be mindful of their Jewish and Middle Eastern roots. He 3
even went on to write a book on the subject, giving it the same title as Wagner’s 4
Das Judentum in der Musik.28 For his own part, Max Brod voiced views that 5
were only slightly less radical when he tried to bring Mahler and Judaism back 6
into alignment. As late as 1961 he was still hailing Mahler as an example of a 7
German-Jewish symbiosis – Scholem would have been delighted at this – but 8
at the same time he insisted that with his predilection for marches Mahler had 9
drawn his inspiration ‘from the wellspring of Eastern European Jewish Hasidic 30
folk music’. To assert that Mahler’s music is characterized by march rhythms is, 1
however, a bold claim to make. In attempting to explain away the fact that 2
Mahler himself never referred to such traditions, Brod fell back on the simple 3
expedient of declaring that these Jewish elements were all ‘unconscious’.29 4
Even if Brod’s attempt to demonstrate this point must ultimately be regarded 5
as a failure, there remains much that is still worth considering. We have seen 6
that the charge levelled by the anti-Semites that Mahler’s music is trivial, 7
eclectic, banal and derivative stems from Wagner’s essay, but this in itself does 8
not mean that it can be dismissed out of hand, for it has been raised even by 9
critics who cannot be accused of anti-Semitism. And Mahler himself, after all, 40
pre-empted all such reproaches by striking a note of irony. In 1896, while he was 41R
270 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 working on his Third Symphony, he wrote to Bruno Walter, ‘Everyone knows

2 by now that some triviality or other always has to occur in my work. But this
3 time it goes beyond all bounds.’30 Contemporaries noted from an early date
4 that Mahler’s symphonies contained elements that are not to be found in the
5 works of his revered Brahms, for example, and even those of his champions
6 who were receptive to his ideas had to struggle to make sense of this. When
7 Mahler uses a posthorn or writes performance markings such as ‘In a folk tone’,
8 ‘Like the sound of distant bells’ and ‘Like the call of a bird’, or when he writes
9 for offstage orchestras, then even the most cloth-eared listeners must realize
10 that he is striving to achieve effects different from those found in Brahms’s
1 Fourth Symphony or Bruckner’s Eighth. For sceptical spirits, it was all too
2 tempting to dismiss such elements as derivative and as substitutes for a lack of
3 creativity. And this is certainly what happened, generally with an anti-Semitic
4 intent.
5 Let us, however, also look at the way in which two adepts of the more recent
6 period deal with this problem, neither of whom can be accused of anti-Semitism.
7 Adorno refused to see any connection between Mahler’s ‘crudities’ and his Jewish
8 ancestry. Rather, he regarded both Mahler and his own teacher, Alban Berg, as
9 advocates of the downtrodden masses, a point that emerges with peculiar force
20 not just from his wonderful phrase about ‘broken glass’ but also from his earlier
1 reference to the ‘lower music’ irrupting ‘Jacobinically’ into the ‘higher’. Much later
2 he addresses the Jewish question, but here he becomes oddly vague, insisting in
3 the case of the Jewish element that
4
5 One can no more put one’s finger on this element than in any other work
6 of art: it shrinks from identification yet to the whole remains indispensable.
7 The attempt to deny it in order to reclaim Mahler for a conception of German
8 music infected by National Socialism is as aberrant as his appropriation
9 as a Jewish nationalist composer. . . . What is Jewish in Mahler does not
30 participate directly in the folk element, but speaks through all its mediations
1 as an intellectual voice, something non-sensuous yet perceptible in the
2 totality.31
3
4 The reader would like Adorno to say more on this point, but he leaves us in
5 the lurch and after alluding briefly and unsatisfactorily to ‘the shrill, sometimes
6 nasal, gesticulating aspect’ of Mahler’s late style, with its tendency to ‘talk at cross
7 purposes’ – the anti-Semitic clichés are certainly a problem here – he turns
8 abruptly and apparently with some embarrassment to another topic, leaving
9 readers feeling that they are taking part in a conversation in which an unguarded
40 remark has suddenly opened up a gaping abyss, which the speaker, after a brief
41R moment of horror, then covers up by turning to far more innocuous matters.
Writing in the wake of Adorno, the German musicologist Hans Heinrich 1

Eggebrecht has coined the phrase ‘vocabular music’ in an attempt to explain 2
Mahler’s ability to create a highly individual personal style out of ‘high’ and 3
‘low’ elements borrowed and picked up elsewhere. Time and again, eavesdrop- 4
pers will hear concert-goers complaining that Mahler’s music is ‘second-hand’. 5
And yet these same concert-goers insist that a single note of this music is 6
enough to identify its composer. Second-hand and yet individual – even the 7
most innocent listeners can grasp this apparent contradiction, leading them to 8
seek to dismiss the problem in terms that are occasionally, but not always, anti- 9
Semitic in character. Eggebrecht argues that Mahler used musical vocabularies 10
from the tradition of both high art and popular culture, even famously 1
drawing on the sounds of nature such as birdsong and cowbells, because he 2
wanted to portray the world in its totality, depicting it in music that comes very 3
close to language, hence the use of the term ‘vocabularies’. Such music eschews 4
the attempt to eradicate anything that might reveal the origins of individual 5
elements – according to Mahler, in an interview that he gave in New York 6
during the final years of his life, his own achievement as a composer was like 7
that of a jeweller making an unpolished diamond sparkle. In Eggebrecht’s view, 8
this compositional method has something to do with the Jewish element in 9
Mahler’s music, and he draws a parallel between, on the one hand, the freedom 20
of an approach that refuses to genuflect before the flotsam and jetsam of 1
cultural possessions, still less to turn away from them in disgust, and, on 2
the other, the homelessness of Mahler’s Jewishness. In turn this existential rest- 3
lessness is associated in Eggebrecht’s view with the striking prevalence of 4
marching, striding rhythms in Mahler’s music.32 5
Whereas Adorno prefers a physiognomic argument (his monograph, after 6
all, is subtitled ‘A Musical Physiognomy’), Eggebrecht draws on comparisons 7
of a linguistic nature. But both studies are conducted on the highest and most 8
unambiguous level, and both ultimately suggest the impossibility of getting 9
any closer to the Jewish element in Mahler’s music in any rationally tangible 30
way, whereas the attempt to monopolize Mahler for Zionist ends was always 1
bound to fail. Within the context of any discussion about modernity and post- 2
modernity it is perfectly possible to regard Mahler’s ‘polymaterial’ procedure 3
as a collage technique and as an example of plurality without trespassing on 4
the quagmire of ‘Jewishness in Music’. Perhaps the normally self-assured 5
Adorno was right to express himself with unusual reticence when he wrote 6
that the Jewish element ‘shrinks from identification yet to the whole remains 7
indispensable’. 8
Picking up Adorno’s image, we might further analyse the light that falls 9
through the broken glass of Mahler’s relations to Judaism and break it down 40
into other colours, and yet there still remains a residue that cannot be broken 41R
272 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 down any further. Every writer who has examined the question of Mahler’s
2 relations with Judaism must at some point confront a testimony known to a
3 broader readership since the mid-1980s or so, when a fuller – if by no means
4 complete – version of Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s reminiscences was first made
5 available. An entry for 1901 reads:
6
7 Mahler recalled a strange dream that he had had as a child – he must have
8 been about eight at the time. It came to such vivid life before his mind’s eye
9 that he remained under its impression for a very long time and even today is
10 unable to forget it. He told me: ‘My mother, my brother Ernst and I were
1 standing one evening at the window of our sitting room when my mother
2 exclaimed: “God, what’s happening!” The sky was filled with yellow mist; the
3 stars were moving, following each other or devouring one another as if the
4 world were ending. Suddenly I am outside in the marketplace. The fiery mists
5 pursue me and when I look round, I can see in them an immense figure rising
6 up, that of the Wandering Jew. His cloak, distended by the wind, towers over
7 his shoulders like a vast hump; he is resting his right hand on a long staff
8 surmounted by a gold cross. I find myself fleeing before him in frantic fear,
9 but with a few steps he catches up with me and tries to force his staff on me
20 (a symbol, as it were, of his eternally restless wanderings): at that point I wake
1 up screaming with the most terrible fear.33
2
3 Re-imagined some thirty-five years after he had first dreamt it – assuming
4 that Mahler dreamt it at all in this form – this dream suggests that Ahasuerus
5 was a recurrent topos for him. But it would be wrong to reduce this topos to
6 the problems suffered by assimilated Jews in Central Europe in the years
7 around 1900. After all, Ahasuerus had in the course of the nineteenth century
8 become a literary figure extending far beyond the immediate Jewish context,
9 and not every restless composer, as Mahler undoubtedly was, could describe
30 himself as an Ahasuerus of the musical world. True, his Ninth Symphony
1 certainly does not end on a quietistic note, and the sketches for the Tenth
2 Symphony clearly reveal the signs of Mahler’s deep-seated crisis. But nothing
3 suggests that the events surrounding the death of his daughter and the diag-
4 nosis of his heart disease in 1907 or Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius in the
5 summer of 1910, which left him shaken to the very depths of his being and led
6 to his consultation with Sigmund Freud (and which affair, be it added, Alma
7 continued with Gropius without Mahler’s knowledge), can in any way be
8 attributed to a tendency in the final years of his life to regard his Jewish origins
9 as profoundly problematic. Mahler’s character remains ineluctably marked
40 by the infinitely complex life of an Austrian composer of Bohemian ancestry
41R who spoke German and who numbered Jews among his forebears, and to the
extent that the character and form of expression adopted by the artistic 1
subject are indivisible, these attributes also characterized his work. All 2
attempts to go beyond this observation and to seek concrete examples of 3
Jewishness in his music must ultimately end in the mists and vapours of 4
Mahler’s childhood dream. 5
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41R
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7 The Third Symphony
8
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4 MAHLERIANS have always had difficulty with the
5
6
E VEN COMMITTED
Third Symphony, the opening movement of which seems immoderately
distended – the slowest performance on record takes no fewer than thirty-seven
7 minutes, more than the length of an entire symphony by Beethoven. And then
8 there is the final movement, an affirmative-sounding Adagio lasting some
9 twenty-five minutes, pursuing its leisurely course with its seemingly unshake-
20 able belief in truth, beauty and goodness. Between these two extremes are four
1 movements that could hardly be more heterogeneous. There are writers on
2 Mahler who, for all their sympathetic response to the piece, regard it as a failure,
3 arguing that elements that should have been welded together fall apart and that
4 disparate ideas have been paratactically juxtaposed, to say nothing of the work’s
5 egregious gigantism. Others take a different view of the matter. Adorno, for
6 example, conceded that objective difficulties might be suggested by the fact that
7 the work is relatively rarely performed – certainly it receives fewer perform-
8 ances than the other three so-called ‘Wunderhorn’ symphonies – but he went
9 on to attribute this circumstance to the fact that in the opening movement in
30 particular Mahler ventured into territory that he was never again to explore:
1 from this point of view, the Fourth Symphony undoubtedly gives the impres-
2 sion of a kind of neoclassical restraint after the excesses of the Third, which
3 Mahler worked on in the main during his summer vacations in 1895 and 1896.
4 The young Bruno Walter was present in Steinbach on the Attersee when Mahler
5 played through the work on the piano during the summer of 1896 and was
6 almost literally stunned by the power and novelty of the musical language
7 within the work’s symphonic world.1 Walter uses the term ‘primal sound’, while
8 Adorno describes its proportions as ‘primeval’.
9 It is this work, above all, that commentators continue to associate with
40 Mahler’s idea of constructing an entire world, an ambition that undoubtedly
41R culminates in the Third. It is worth quoting this famous sentence in context, a
THE THIRD SYMPHONY 275
sentence that we must be grateful to Natalie Bauer-Lechner for noting down 1

when she visited Mahler in Steinbach in the summer of 1895 and he told her 2
‘jokingly’ that he hoped he would finally ‘earn applause and money’ with a 3
work that was ‘pure humour and merriment, a great laugh at the whole world!’ 4
By the following day, however, he had become more serious and took back 5
what he had said about the work’s success, ‘for people won’t understand or 6
appreciate its cheerfulness; it soars above that world of struggle and sorrow in 7
the First and Second, and could have been produced only as a result of these’. 8
And then comes the famous passage, this time with the important sentence in 9
context: 10
1
My calling it a symphony is really inaccurate, for it doesn’t keep to the tradi- 2
tional form in any way. But, to me ‘symphony’ means constructing a world 3
with all the technical means at one’s disposal. The eternally new and changing 4
content determines its own form. In this sense, I must forever learn anew how 5
to forge new means of expression for myself – however completely I may have 6
mastered technical problems, as I think I may now claim to have done.2 7
8
Mahler’s first two symphonies had been concerned with what we might call 9
‘a hero’s life’, albeit not in the sense intended by Strauss in his symphonic poem 20
of the same name, but here he aims for something even higher, because an 1
‘Eroica’ of the kind that he had achieved in his Second Symphony could not be 2
surpassed by the same means and with the same musical language. He now set 3
his sights much higher, even if they were aimed in a different direction, for 4
what he now wanted to depict in his music was nothing less than the different 5
stages in the development of animate nature. This quickly found expression in 6
a conception that circulated among the composer’s friends and supporters in a 7
number of variants, all of them listing the titles of the individual movements. 8
Significantly, Mahler then withdrew these movement headings and left no 9
definitive version of them, even the most straightforward interpretation of 30
which would require a discussion unto itself. Let us consider one of the later 1
versions that comes from a letter that Mahler wrote to Max Marschalk in 2
August 1896: 3
4
A Summer’s Midday Dream 5
Part One 6
Introduction: Pan awakens. 7
I. Summer marches in (Bacchic procession). 8
Part Two 9
II. What the flowers in the meadow tell me. 40
III. What the animals in the forest tell me. 41R
276 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 IV. What man tells me.

2 V. What the angels tell me.
3 VI. What love tells me.3
4
5 What we have here is clearly the ascent of all organic life to the very highest level,
6 which is called not God but love, giving a cosmological dimension to the whole
7 idea of constructing a world out of musical sounds. The roman numerals corre-
8 spond to the symphony’s individual movements. Mahler originally planned to
9 add a seventh movement, ‘Heavenly Life’, but he then decided to reserve this for
10 the finale of his Fourth Symphony. While working on the Third during the
1 summer of 1896 he wrote to his lover Anna von Mildenburg: ‘But just try to
2 imagine such a major work, literally reflecting the whole world – one is oneself
3 only, as it were, an instrument played by the whole universe.’4 It is no accident
4 that it is the Third Symphony above all that writers have used to illustrate their
5 thesis that Mahler’s symphonies can be compared to the great novels of the
6 nineteenth century, as Adorno demonstrated with remarkable clarity, for the
7 movement headings do indeed create the impression of chapter headings from a
8 vast novel, even if that novel has no hero of the kind that may be imputed to the
9 First and Second Symphonies.5 The result is a poem about the whole world, a
20 ‘Commedia superhumana’, to paraphrase the title that Mahler once gave to the
1 last two movements of his First Symphony. His symphonies can certainly be
2 viewed as symphonic siblings to the great realistic novels of the nineteenth
3 century: the musical equivalents of a Balzac, Tolstoi, Keller or Dickens although
4 closer to Mahler’s heart, of course, were Cervantes, Sterne, Jean Paul and
5 Dostoevsky, novelists who combined realism with fantasy and humour.
6 Particularly striking is Mahler’s fondness for loquacious explanations of
7 his Third Symphony, even if those explanations were not intended for wider
8 consumption. No less striking is his comparison of himself to Zeus wrestling with
9 Cronus or with Jacob wrestling with God (or, more accurately, the angel) or even
30 with Christ on the Mount of Olives drinking to its bitter dregs the cup of cosmic
1 suffering. Never again was Mahler to become involved in such rhetorical turmoil
2 over a work. His explanations are full of contradictions, the subtle shades of
3 meaning in the titles and their relative positions being far more random than one
4 would imagine. Everything points to a feeling of uncertainty as to the meaning of
5 a work which, lasting around one hundred minutes, overshadows everything that
6 had gone before it. More than ever, Mahler evidently felt that the ‘creator spiritus’
7 was an unsettling, violent force that seized hold of the acolyte and left him deeply
8 shaken, more a tsar than a father figure, to hark back to Adam Mickiewicz’s
9 expression. ‘At such moments I am no longer my own master, but nor do I belong
40 to you,’ Mahler tried to reassure Anna von Mildenburg, explaining how he felt
41R and why he needed a great deal of understanding from the people who loved
him.6 He granted Natalie Bauer-Lechner an even deeper insight into the workings 1
of his heart, and since coquetry and self-regard were completely foreign to his 2
nature, we may regard his remarks as utterly serious: 3
4
It’s frightening the way this movement seems to grow of its own accord more 5
than anything else that I have done. The Second seems to me like a child in 6
comparison. It is in every sense larger than life, and everything human 7
shrinks into a pygmy world beside it. Real horror seizes me when I see where 8
it is leading, the path the music must follow, and that it fell upon me to be the 9
bearer of this gigantic work.7 10
1
It is above all the opening movement that makes the work as a whole seem 2
so daring. That Mahler wrote it last of all seemed to him necessary, for other- 3
wise he would not have had the courage to compose it. Before writing it, he had 4
thought of giving it the heading ‘Summer marches in’, but by the time he had 5
completed it, such innocuous jocularity no longer seemed appropriate, and it 6
was now the idea of the great god Pan that he came to prefer: ‘Pan awakens’ he 7
wrote at the head of the introduction. But even the image of a procession led by 8
Bacchus or Dionysus no longer seemed suitable. In July 1896 he even thought 9
of calling the work as a whole ‘Pan: Symphonic Poems’.8 The tenor of the 20
piece is certainly one of terror-stricken panic, recalling Arnold Böcklin’s Pan 1
Frightens a Shepherd, a canvas that Mahler could well have known. The painting 2
captures the heavy, brooding atmosphere of a hot summer’s day, the sort of 3
atmosphere that prompts Pan to inspire fear and terror in men and beasts, while 4
shaking with laughter at his exploits. But Mahler said that the opening move- 5
ment could also have been headed ‘What the rocky mountains tell me’, for life 6
struggles to break free from immovable, inanimate matter, rising, growing and 7
acquiring increasingly disparate forms until in the fifth movement it reaches the 8
angels, who to words taken from one of the Wunderhorn poems sing their 9
sweet-toned song. Finally, infinite love pours forth in the concluding Adagio. 30
The Third and Ninth Symphonies both end, unconventionally, with an Adagio. 1
Mahler himself claimed that he did not know the reason for this until he real- 2
ized that only an Adagio could introduce the note of calm and immutability 3
that he needed here. 4
The contrast between the first and second movements is even greater in the 5
case of the Third Symphony than it was in the Second. How, after all, could a 6
movement lasting a mere nine minutes assert itself in the face of one lasting 7
more than thirty? The second movement is dancelike and retrospective in tone, 8
making it difficult to justify the title ‘What the flowers in the meadow tell me’. The 9
overriding feeling is of a graceful exercise in style, a certain Biedermeier elegance 40
that is already neo-Biedermeier and, as such, comparable to the neo-Rococo tone 41R
278 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 of the poems of Otto Julius Bierbaum, which Mahler did not, however, like. The
2 middle section almost literally shimmers, suggesting the wind blowing over the
3 grass. The third movement is headed ‘What the animals in the forest tell me’,
4 although it was originally to be called ‘What the cuckoo tells me’, recalling the
5 Wunderhorn song ‘Ablösung’. Here the animals of the forest complain that a
6 cuckoo that has been entertaining them has fallen to its death. They hope that it
7 will be replaced by a nightingale. Mahler uses the song to propel the movement
8 forward, its quaintly droll character representing a clear continuation of the ‘Fish
9 Sermon’ in the Second Symphony. The posthorn episode that is central to this
10 movement presumably has a literary basis to it, having been inspired by Nikolaus
1 Lenau’s poem ‘The Postilion’ (‘Lieblich war die Maiennacht, Silberwölkchen
2 flogen’), which tells of a postilion who stops at a graveyard in order to play the
3 favourite song of a friend and colleague who is buried there. Ernst Decsey reports
4 that he had written a review of the Third Symphony in which he mentions that
5 while listening to the work, he had been reminded of Lenau’s poem, whereupon
6 Mahler had invited him to visit him and told him that he was right.9 What Decsey
7 could not have known is that in his fair copy of the full score Mahler had written
8 ‘The Postilion’ over the posthorn’s first entry.
9 The last three movements are in stark contrast to the first three – Mahler
20 would not have been entirely wrong to see the break between the two parts
1 after the third movement, rather than after the first. He realized that there
2 was no ‘normal’ connection between the individual movements in the sense
3 demanded by the symphonic tradition. In conversation with Natalie Bauer-
4 Lechner, he admitted that he had originally intended such a connection, but in
5 the end each movement had emerged as a self-contained and independent
6 entity, something he was not disposed to regard as a failing.10 None the less,
7 the fourth, fifth and sixth movements form a more cohesive whole than the
8 first three and create what Mathias Hansen has termed a ‘large-scale move-
9 ment’, a point underscored by the fact that at the end of the fourth and fifth
30 movements Mahler has added a note to the effect that there should be no break
1 between the movements.
2 The fourth movement is a setting of the poem ‘O Mensch! Gib acht!’ from
3 Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra, sung here by a contralto soloist. The fact that
4 Strauss’s tone poem of the same name was first performed in the same year, 1896,
5 as that in which Mahler completed work on his Third Symphony reflects the
6 tremendous impact of Nietzsche’s writings on freethinkers of this period, a group
7 to which Strauss, throughout his entire life a free spirit and an agnostic, belongs
8 more obviously than Mahler, who spent his life searching for God.11 We have
9 already seen that Mahler was bound to be drawn into Nietzsche’s sway during his
40 years of study in Vienna – no one who was friendly with Siegfried Lipiner could
41R escape from that influence, and all who in the years around 1880 were young,
progressive and anti-bourgeois were bound to become followers of Nietzsche. 1

When judged by contemporary standards, Mahler’s own enthusiasm for the 2
philosopher is remarkably limited. According to Bruno Walter, Nietzsche’s 3
impact on Mahler was great but by no means lasting.12 Also sprach Zarathustra 4
impressed him with its linguistic brilliance, whereas its ideas tended, rather, to 5
repel him. Above all, we need to remember that as a fanatical Wagnerian, Mahler 6
could never follow Nietzsche down the road to apostasy and was indeed sharply 7
critical of the philosopher for turning his back on Wagner. At the time that he was 8
working on his Third Symphony, Mahler’s enthusiasm for Nietzsche’s skills as a 9
writer were still so great that he was able to set one of his poems as its fourth 10
movement. But within five years his attitude had changed considerably, and it 1
annoyed him intensely when Alma suddenly revealed her half-digested thoughts 2
on Nietzsche, whose ‘utterly false and brazenly arrogant theories of masculine 3
supremacy’ he dismissed in a particularly venomous outburst even before they 4
were married.13 During the early days of their love he even demanded that Alma 5
should burn an edition of Nietzsche’s writings, a demand that she steadfastly and 6
understandably refused to respect. Within a matter of only a few years, however, 7
his attitude had become more tempered and he was again willing to concede that 8
Nietzsche’s language had a musical element to it, especially in Also sprach 9
Zarathustra. He even acknowledged the philosopher’s gifts as a composer.14 20
With its meditative character and its gently swaying carpet of sound, the fourth 1
movement of the Third Symphony is permeated by the musical qualities of this 2
intensely poetical language. The calming voice of the contralto soloist rises up 3
from this carpet of sound and intones the words ‘O Mensch!’ (O man!) – if only 4
all singers and conductors were to obey the performance marking here, ‘With a 5
mysterious expression – remaining quiet’. When at the end of the contralto’s first 6
verse the violins launch into a broad unison hymn which, as later writers have 7
pointed out, is suspiciously similar to Sebastián de Iradier’s immortal La paloma, 8
the charge of triviality is not easy to refute. Mahler may have known this piece, 9
although it seems unlikely that he consciously intended to quote it. In any case the 30
rhythm of the original has been changed and the ending is different. But Mahler 1
predicted this reproach too, and it did not trouble him. Banality could not be 2
ignored by anyone wanting to construct a whole new world. High and low, 3
sublime and trivial all find their place in Mahler’s universe and are not excluded 4
by any a priori decisions. This, too, was all part of the piece’s polyphony. The 5
concept of ‘taste’ and the lack of it was not in Mahler’s vocabulary. 6
There is no finer illustration of Adorno’s wonderful phrase – ‘The unrisen 7
lower is stirred as yeast into high music’15 – than the Iradian raptness of this 8
unison passage for the violins or the posthorn solo in which Mahler captures 9
the artlessness and superficially banal rubato of a postilion who, with no artistic 40
training, plays all the more fervently in consequence. The soloist is instructed 41R
280 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 to play this passage ‘Freely, like the melody of a posthorn’. A precursor of the
2 cornet, the posthorn is a difficult instrument to master – the philharmonic
3 perfection that one finds today has something inappropriately sleek about it. In
4 a letter he wrote to Bruno Walter in July 1896, Mahler parodied his critics:
5
6 I am afraid the whole thing is again sicklied o’er with the notorious spirit of
7 my humour, ‘and there is frequent opportunity of pursuing my inclination to
8 make a furious din’. Sometimes, too, the musicians play ‘without taking
9 the slightest account of one another, and here my savage and brutal nature
10 reveals itself most starkly’. Everyone knows by now that some triviality always
1 has to occur in my work. But this time it goes beyond all bounds. ‘At times
2 one cannot help believing one is in a low tavern or a stable.’16
3
4 The supposed naïveté of the fifth movement, with its sound of morning bells
5 contrasting with the night-time sentiments of its Nietzschean predecessor, must
6 be accepted as such by the listener, otherwise it risks recalling Nazarene art. The
7 ‘Beggars’ Song of the Poor Children’ from Des Knaben Wunderhorn is sung by
8 a female choir accompanied by bells and by boys’ voices doubling the bells
9 and intoning the words ‘Bimm Bamm’ that Mahler added to the Wunderhorn
20 poem. This, too, can work only if we are willing to forget its symphonic cyni-
1 cism for four whole minutes. Mahler knew very well that this movement could
2 not last a moment longer, otherwise he would have been accused of monu-
3 mental kitsch, and yet his playful use of naïveté is inextricably linked to a subtle
4 dramaturgical intent.
5 The final movement again offers Mahler’s critics ample opportunity to take
6 issue with his symphonic style, while its interpreters, too, are left feeling
7 distinctly uncomfortable. Is the movement a monument to failure on the
8 highest level? Or is it a record of arbitrariness and chance? Does it seem mech-
9 anistically grafted on to the rest of the work, which requires a positive climax
30 here, inasmuch as it is all-embracing love that speaks? The link between the
1 first and last movements that Mahler himself mentioned – the only one that he
2 emphasized – is one between dull, petrified, inarticulate nature in the opening
3 movement and the supreme articulation of the last, but it is not immediately
4 apparent. After all, the unruly and eccentric colossus of the opening move-
5 ment is difficult to reconcile with the sleekness and harmoniousness of the
6 final one. No more is there a connection between the terrifyingly comic figure
7 of the great god Pan and the marmoreal statue of the Greek Apollo that seems
8 to stare at us here with hollow eye sockets. Were it not for the hierarchical
9 structure built into the work, the listener might well take away the impression
40 that it is not until thirteen years later, in the final Adagio of the Ninth
41R Symphony, that we find the real answer to the question raised by the opening
movement of the Third. Much about this last-named work remains a puzzle, 1
and Mahlerians will find it hard to set aside their sense of uncertainty. And yet 2
they may ultimately derive some consolation from Mathias Hansen’s judge- 3
ment of Solomon: ‘This problem child runs the greatest risk of failing, and yet 4
it also elicits the greatest attention and the most loving understanding.’17 5
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41R
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7 The God of the Southern Climes:
8
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Vienna
10 (1897–1901)
1
2
3
4 The Cabal
5
‘Meanwhile I am telling the town a story of how to become president’ –
6
Ferdinand throws down this challenge to his father in Schiller’s Cabal and
7
Love. Our own challenge is to provide a dispassionate account of Mahler’s rise
8
to the position of opera director. It is worth examining the background to this
9
episode in some detail as his rise to the head of what was then the most famous
20
opera house in the world was a tactical masterstroke and a product of the
1
workings of the most sophisticated cabal on the European arts scene at the end
2
of the nineteenth century, the once nervous provincial conductor proving
3
himself an undisputed master in this field.
4
Of course, he also had at his disposal a number of loyal and committed
5
supporters headed by Natalie Bauer-Lechner, who was his closest confidante
6
after his sister. She did much to promote Mahler’s Vienna appointment, not
7
least because she was able to reactivate her earlier contacts with Rosa Papier, an
8
ex-singer who still had the best possible connections with the Vienna Court
9
Opera, where she had enjoyed considerable personal success between 1881 and
30
1891 as the house’s principal mezzo-soprano. Papier additionally had the ear
1
and possibly also the heart of Privy Councillor Eduard Wlassack and, finally,
2
she had taught Anna von Mildenburg. One of the increasing numbers of
3
members of the middle class who rose to these elevated ranks in the country’s
4
administration, Wlassack was the administrative head of the offices overseeing
5
all the court theatres in Vienna, a position he held from 1881 to 1893 and again
6
from 1895 to 1903, with the result that he knew what went on in the theatre in
7
a way that neither the intendant himself nor any other administrator could
8
claim to do. The fact that Mahler had Rosa Papier on his side and, through
9
her, Eduard Wlassack, was to prove his trump card, effectively assuring his
40
position.
41R
THE GOD OF THE SOUTHERN CLIMES: VIENNA 283
The head of all the court theatres at the decisive stage in the negotiations and, 1
as such, Wlassack’s superior, was Baron Josef von Bezecny, not to be confused with 2
the Ferenc von Beniczky who had been responsible for Mahler’s appointment in 3
Budapest and who also helped Mahler in his present situation. Bezecny, whose 4
name Mahler misspelled variously as Bezeczny, Besecny and even Besetzny – 5
the latter possibly a pun on the verb besetzen, meaning ‘to appoint’ – had been 6
Imperial and Royal Privy Councillor and section chief since 1885 and remained so 7
until the start of 1898, long enough to take the decisive steps on Mahler’s behalf. 8
He was succeeded by Baron August Plappart von Leenheer, whose bureaucratic 9
approach to his work was far less to Mahler’s liking. Fortunately, the general 10
administrator’s superior, Prince Rudolf von und zu Liechtenstein, remained as 1
well disposed to Mahler as Wlassack and Bezecny. He belonged to the family of 2
Austrian aristocrats which, following the end of the monarchy, created the present- 3
day state of Liechtenstein out of its estates in Vaduz. From 1896 to 1908 he was the 4
chief comptroller to the emperor, entitling him to be addressed as ‘Your Highness’. 5
Still new to his job, he remained very much in the background, leaving his deputy, 6
Prince Alfred Montenuovo, to take the decisions. Montenuovo, too, was well 7
disposed to Mahler, withdrawing his support only towards the end of the Mahler 8
era. When Liechtenstein died in 1908, Montenuovo became his successor. Among 9
Mahler’s closest associates at the court opera, two were particularly loyal, although 20
neither was involved in Mahler’s appointment: the company’s artistic secretary 1
Hubert Wondra, who, as living proof of Viennese nepotism, was a nephew of the 2
director Wilhelm Jahn, and Mahler’s own private secretary, Alois Przistaupinsky, 3
whose name Mahler regularly shortened to ‘Bschiss’, an abbreviation both 4
phonetically correct and affectionately meant. 5
In addition to these supporters at the heart of power, Mahler had other 6
champions who were keen to see their old friend and acquaintance at the 7
head of the Vienna Court Opera. Among them was Siegfried Lipiner, who, for 8
all his low-profile involvement, was an intellectual éminence grise in the city. 9
The composer Karl Goldmark had been a leading light in Vienna’s musical 30
life since the success of his opera Die Königin von Saba in 1875. He, too, had 1
followed Mahler’s career with a friendly eye and as a native Hungarian had 2
taken a particularly close interest in his activities in Budapest, as he later did 3
in Hamburg. The fact that Mahler signed his preliminary contract in Vienna 4
on 4 April 1897, the day after Brahms’s death, undoubtedly had a symbolic 5
significance. Brahms had been ill for some time and had clearly not played an 6
active role in Mahler’s appointment in Vienna, and yet everyone in the city 7
knew that ever since he had heard Mahler conduct Don Giovanni in Budapest, 8
the revered composer had spoken of him in only the most generous terms, so 9
that he must be regarded as at least a posthumous influence on Mahler’s 40
appointment. Among journalists, help was forthcoming from Ludwig Karpath, 41R
284 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 whom Mahler had met in Budapest and who had begun his career as a singer,
2 in which capacity he had got to know Rosa Papier. But Karpath had then aban-
3 doned singing for journalism and had recently started to write for the Neues
4 Wiener Tagblatt. His memoirs, Begegnung mit dem Genius, are an important
5 source for our knowledge of the cabal surrounding Mahler’s appointment
6 as they contain a number of letters that are not to be found elsewhere. But
7 Karpath’s extreme vanity and his later falling-out with Mahler make him a
8 not entirely reliable, if none the less important, contemporary witness.
9 Finally, we need to mention three of Mahler’s friends from Budapest: Ödön
10 von Mihalovich, Albert Apponyi and Ferenc von Beniczky, all of whom had
1 remained convinced of Mahler’s genius in spite of his inglorious departure
2 from Budapest. They all used their contacts with Vienna – and they were all
3 actively encouraged by Mahler to do so – in order to ensure that he achieved
4 his goal. The evidence for the cabal is plentiful, allowing us to trace its course
5 on an almost day-to-day basis, but, however fascinating the subject, we shall
6 have to make do with merely a summary.
7 By the middle of 1896 at the latest, it is clear from Mahler’s comments that he
8 no longer felt happy in Hamburg. The initial impression is that he felt worn
9 down by the treadmill of the theatre and could imagine bidding farewell to the
20 opera by taking charge of a concert orchestra. In a letter to one of his friends in
1 Budapest we even find him mentioning the idea of returning to Hungary, but
2 this would have meant a return to the Royal Hungarian Opera. It is doubtful
3 whether Mahler took this Hungarian option seriously, but it seems as if he was
4 not over-fastidious on this point as long as he could get away from Hamburg.
5 An offer from Budapest would at least have had tactical advantages. He had
6 been in Hamburg for five years, longer than in any other theatre, and had
7 exhausted the field of opportunities. By now he could work with the director,
8 Bernhard Pollini, only by gritting his teeth and suppressing all negative feelings.
9 His love for Anna von Mildenburg was also fading, and he additionally felt a
30 sense of nostalgia, not for Iglau, which following his parents’ death was now
1 consigned to a phase in his past, but for Vienna, where he had spent the form-
2 ative years of his life and where some of his oldest friends still lived. Above all,
3 the Vienna Court Opera was the leading opera company in the world, and, if he
4 was to pursue a career in opera, it was here that he would find the most brilliant
5 position, a munificent salary and the finest singers and opera orchestra of the
6 age. The brilliance of the position mattered less to him than the remuneration,
7 which would help to alleviate his worries about providing for his brothers and
8 sisters. Most important of all was the excellence of the performers. He knew
9 that because of his various links with the city Vienna was the only place where
40 he had a realistic chance of gaining such a position – neither Berlin nor Munich
41R nor Paris nor New York offered such an opportunity, and even in London his
connections were too tenuous to provide any hope of an appointment. In short, 1

his Viennese ambitions were not entirely utopian. 2
Mahler’s most candid insights into his emotional life at this time were 3
vouchsafed in a letter to Friedrich Löhr, and there seems no reason to doubt in 4
his sincerity when we find him writing to his friend, probably in the autumn 5
of 1896: 6
7
I am knocking about the world quite a lot now. I assure you it is a fight, a real 8
one, in which one does not notice one is bleeding from a thousand wounds. 9
In the lull one suddenly feels something moist, and only then realizes that 10
one is bleeding. I find my ‘successes’ especially painful, for one is misunder- 1
stood before one has got out what one has to say. – I feel so homesick! Oh for 2
a quiet corner at home! When shall I have earned that? I fear – only over 3
yonder where all of us and all things shall be gathered together.1 4
5
Perhaps we should not take entirely seriously Mahler’s claim to hanker after ‘a 6
quiet corner at home’: such a desire to renounce the world would later become 7
more pronounced, but in 1896 it was just a passing phase. He was still too 8
motivated by burning ambition, still too convinced of all that he could achieve 9
in the very highest position, for him to have been entirely serious. And if his 20
homesickness was undoubtedly genuine, the ‘quiet corner at home’ was mani- 1
festly the director’s office at the Vienna Court Opera. That the process had 2
already been set in train by the autumn of 1896 is clear from a letter that 3
Lipiner wrote on 21 November to the General Management of the Court 4
Theatres – in other words, to Josef von Bezecny. Now preserved in the Vienna 5
Municipal Archives, it relates to a meeting that had taken place between the 6
two men, presumably a few days earlier, and is an attempt to counter rumours 7
about Mahler’s ‘temperament’ that were circulating in the city, rumours that 8
threatened to make him seem unsuited to so diplomatically fraught a position. 9
Mahler, Lipiner conceded, could sometimes be ‘difficult’, but it was always in 30
pursuit of the highest goals. He could also demonstrate ‘an often unbelievable 1
patience’.2 2
Exactly four weeks later Mahler appealed directly to Bezecny. It is not 3
entirely clear how we should interpret Mahler’s remark that he had repeatedly 4
been well received by his correspondent, as this implies a number of previous 5
meetings about which we know nothing. But perhaps the two men had met 6
while Mahler was working in Budapest. Alternatively, Mahler’s brief visit to 7
Vienna in June 1896 may have provided an opportunity for such an encounter. 8
Whatever the answer, the two men evidently knew and respected each other. 9
Above all, Bezecny respected Mahler. ‘I hear from various sources’, wrote 40
Mahler, ‘that the matter of the post of Conductor at the Vienna Court Opera 41R
286 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 will become urgent in the very near future.’ There follow the usual remarks
2 balancing modesty against self-esteem. But it is above all the end of the letter
3 that speaks volumes for Mahler’s subtle pride, for here he underlines the fact
4 that if necessary he can extricate himself from his Hamburg contract at very
5 short notice – he was to do so precisely three weeks later, by which date he was
6 already confident of victory. At the same time he makes it clear that Bezecny
7 should act quickly in order not to miss this unique, historic opportunity to
8 appoint him: ‘By a later date I may not be as free to take any decisions.’3 This
9 was a fraudulent claim. After all, Mahler had nothing in prospect apart from
10 Vienna, but the threat was clearly effective, at least in the longer term. We
1 shall shortly see why, in his letter to Bezecny, Mahler refers not to the post of
2 director but to that of conductor. In order to ensure that his bridges were well
3 and truly burnt, Mahler now adopted the high-risk strategy of exacerbating his
4 simmering conflict with Pollini in Hamburg by openly declaring war on the
5 company’s senior stage manager, Franz Bittong, who years earlier had written
6 a parody of Die Meistersinger that was intended as a satirical response to the
7 reissue of Wagner’s anti-Semitic essay, ‘Jews in Music’.4
8 On the same day, 21 December, Mahler activated his links with Budapest,
9 writing to Ödön von Mihalovich and indicating beyond doubt that his ambi-
20 tions extended beyond the post of conductor to that of director. On the
1 surface, his letter was concerned with Wilhelm Jahn, who had been director of
2 the Court Opera since 1881 and one of its two principal conductors. The other
3 was Hans Richter, whom we have already encountered on several occasions
4 and who was also responsible for the Philharmonic concerts, leaving him less
5 time for the opera. Jahn’s regime in Vienna was not only the longest in the
6 company’s history, it was also extremely successful. He specialized in the
7 Italian and French repertory (Massenet in particular was in his debt), while
8 Richter took charge of the German repertory, including the works of Wagner,
9 whose mature music dramas had been triumphantly staged in Vienna not least
30 thanks to Richter. Richter, after all, had conducted the inaugural Ring in
1 Bayreuth and thus acquired an aura of authority as a Wagnerian.
2 But it was now clear that Jahn’s period in office was drawing to an end. He
3 was old, ailing and tired, sixteen years of artistic and administrative responsi-
4 bilities having taken their toll. It was no secret, therefore, that the general
5 administrator’s office needed to act. During the days and weeks leading up to
6 Mahler’s appointment, Jahn also had to contend with an eye operation – his
7 eyesight had been failing for some time, with the result that not only had
8 newer works to be played to him but he generally conducted from memory. It
9 was no doubt this that persuaded Bezecny to dispense with Jahn’s services:
40 sixteen years was enough. In fact, Jahn saw this development as an attempt to
41R lighten his burden both as a conductor and as the director of the Vienna Court
Opera. Clearly he had no intention of willingly giving up his two posts. True, 1
he asked to resign in January 1897, but this was merely a tactical ploy. When 2
Bezecny declined to accept his resignation, Jahn saw this as a vote of confi- 3
dence. The prospective new conductor would help to lighten his burden of 4
responsibility, something that was now desperately needed. Liechtenstein saw 5
this as his chance to get rid of Jahn. But Bezecny was afraid of a scandal and 6
wanted to avoid a confrontation, with the result that for the present he left Jahn 7
in his post. (Coincidentally, this period also witnessed the end of another era, 8
that of Max Burckhard, who had been running the Burgtheater since 1890 and 9
who was a great admirer of the young Alma Schindler.) It was clear, however, 10
to all concerned that the Vienna Court Opera was threatening to sink into 1
tired routine and that however glorious its past may have been under Jahn, its 2
future lay elsewhere. To that extent it seems apparent that if Mahler’s name was 3
considered, it was not only as conductor but also as director. No one seems to 4
have thought of Richter, whose talents were evidently felt to be too one-sidedly 5
Wagnerian and too limited to the concert hall. At fifty-three, moreover, he was 6
considered old and too closely associated with Bayreuth to be able to do justice 7
to the catholic operatic tastes of the Viennese. 8
The letter that Mahler wrote to Ödön von Mihalovich on 21 December 9
1896 – the same day as his letter to Bezecny – would seem to support the 20
suggestion that the post of conductor was only intended as an interim step for 1
both Mahler himself and for the Viennese court: ‘This is to request you to do 2
me a favour on which the whole pattern of my future life depends. In Vienna 3
the matter of the conductor or, rather, of the director is now acute. My name is 4
among those receiving “serious consideration”.’ In other words, Mahler knew 5
very well that the post of conductor was merely an interim step on the way to 6
the directorship, something that he must have discussed with Bezecny or 7
Wlassack or both. And yet even the term ‘interim step’ is not entirely correct, 8
for Mahler remained the house’s principal conductor even after he had become 9
deputy director and then director: the post of director was therefore one that 30
he held in addition to that of conductor. In his letter Mahler clear-sightedly 1
points out that there were two factors that might still prove to be obstacles on 2
the road to the director’s office: his reputation as a difficult and even ‘insane’ 3
person and his Jewish faith.5 (We have already discussed his deception in 4
claiming that he had converted to Christianity soon after leaving Budapest, 5
whereas the actual date was five years later, February 1897.) If Lipiner assured 6
Bezecny that Mahler could be ‘difficult’, but only in the service of his art, then 7
it was presumably on Mahler’s own instructions that he insisted on this point. 8
Mahler also asked Mihalovich to call on the good services of Count Apponyi, 9
while a second letter to Mihalovich, written the very next day, asks him to 40
contact not only his former superior in Budapest, Ferenc von Beniczky, but 41R
288 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 also Counts Kinsky and Wilczek. ‘Please, my dear friend, leave no stone
2 unturned in this matter; only one more powerful thrust is needed in this affair
3 to see me emerge victorious.’6 Also of interest in this context is a letter that
4 Mahler wrote to Mihalovich in the middle of January 1897, once again
5 expressing his fears that his Jewish religion might yet thwart his designs on
6 Vienna.7 Above all, however, a powerful rival had suddenly appeared on the
7 horizon in the person of Felix Mottl, leading Mahler to realize that he had been
8 over-confident of victory.
9 Mottl was four years older than Mahler. He was born in Austria, closer to
10 Vienna than Mahler, and had worked at the Vienna Court Opera as a répéti-
1 teur, a distinction not shared by Mahler. He had conducted in Bayreuth at
2 every festival since 1886, representing the younger generation of conductors
3 there. He had been court Kapellmeister in Karlsruhe since 1881 and, since
4 1893, the company’s music director, revealing an unusual degree of loyalty
5 to the house. He was a committed Wagnerian, but was also responsive to the
6 music of other composers, notably Berlioz – he was the first conductor to
7 mount a complete performance of the French composer’s monumental two-
8 part Les Troyens. And Mottl had another advantage over Mahler: he was not
9 Jewish. He also had two eminent champions who weighed far more in the
20 scales of public opinion than all of Mahler’s foot soldiers. The first was Prince
1 Metternich, the well-known scion of an illustrious Viennese family, while the
2 other was Cosima Wagner, no less, who, in spite of her admiration for Mahler’s
3 work as a Wagner conductor who had earned Bayreuth’s gratitude by coaching
4 Anna von Mildenburg and Willi Birrenkoven, inevitably harboured serious
5 doubts about the eligibility of a Jew. She placed the greatest hopes in Mottl,
6 who, she believed, would guarantee that her late husband’s works would find
7 their fitting place in the Viennese repertory. No doubt she already knew that
8 Mahler would perform at least as much Wagner as Mottl would have done,
9 so that this consideration no doubt weighed less than Mahler’s Jewish back-
30 ground. Cosima clearly used her connections with Vienna to champion Mottl’s
1 cause in the city, while also taking advantage of her respected position in the
2 world of music and beyond as Wagner’s widow and as the director of the only
3 festival devoted to his unique genius. Whether she also used this position not
4 just to support Mottl but also to belittle Mahler, we simply do not know.
5 As for Mahler’s Jewish faith, we have already noted the evasive action that he
6 took at the very last moment. Liechtenstein’s comment that anti-Semitism was
7 not the decisive factor in Austria gave him justifiable grounds for optimism. It
8 was certainly a remarkable statement in a city which in the years around 1900
9 is generally believed to have been permeated with anti-Semitism. But Mahler’s
40 appointment proves that Liechtenstein was right. It is also worth recalling that
41R the Kaiser had repeatedly refused to confirm Karl Lueger as the city’s mayor
largely because of the latter’s blatant anti-Semitism. The synchronicity is 1

striking: Mahler, a baptized Jew, signed his Viennese contract on 15 April 1897, 2
and on the very next day the Kaiser confirmed Lueger in his post as mayor after 3
he had already been elected to the post on no fewer than five occasions. The 4
anti-Semitism that Mahler did indeed encounter is another matter or, rather, 5
another side of the selfsame coin. 6
Mahler’s appeals to his contacts in Budapest were not in vain, and in the 7
course of January 1897 three letters fetched up on Bezecny’s desk, Mihalovich, 8
Apponyi and Beniczky all advocating Mahler’s appointment with often iden- 9
tical phrases and emphasis, suggesting a concerted campaign. It is unclear 10
what weight these letters carried, although they will not have been dismissed 1
out of hand for all three writers could attest to Mahler’s achievements as the 2
director of a by no means insignificant opera company. By the beginning of 3
February 1897 Mahler seems almost to have given up hope that his cabal 4
would succeed, for a letter to Rosa Papier implies his belief that Mottl was 5
marginally ahead in the race to the Vienna Court Opera. This will have 6
rankled with Mahler, who needed assurance, not least because he had recently 7
taken the risky step of resigning his post in Hamburg. In spite of this, his letters 8
from this period reveal no signs of panic. Conversely, a premature rumour that 9
Bezecny was about to step down left him profoundly agitated, prompting him 20
to ask Rosa Papier to enquire of Eduard Wlassack how he should best proceed. 1
In turn, dear old Karl Goldmark was asked to speak to Bezecny, although 2
Karpath reports that Goldmark in fact did nothing. These events all took place 3
in January 1897. By the end of February Mahler had converted to Christianity 4
in Hamburg. And much of March was given over to an unusually lengthy 5
concert tour, the first that Mahler had undertaken on such a scale. He travelled 6
to Moscow, where he arrived on 12 March and three days later conducted 7
works by Beethoven and Wagner. He then travelled to Munich via Berlin and 8
conducted a concert of works by Wagner, Beethoven and Berlioz (two move- 9
ments of the Symphonie fantastique!) with the Kaim Orchestra, the forerunner 30
of the Munich Philharmonic. By 26 March he was in Vienna, where he spent 1
little more than a day, but he will undoubtedly have used this time to continue 2
his negotiations with Bezecny. 3
It is conceivable that a previously unpublished letter from Eduard Hanslick 4
helped to seal the deal. Unfortunately, it is unclear to whom the letter was 5
written, but since it has survived in the files of the general administrator’s 6
office, it seems likely that it was addressed to Bezecny. Alongside his idol 7
Brahms, who died only a few days later, Hanslick was the most influential 8
figure on Vienna’s musical stage. He occupied a chair in aesthetics and the 9
history of music at the University of Vienna and was also the city’s leading 40
music critic, contributing reviews to the Neue Freie Presse. Depending on one’s 41R
290 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 point of view, he was famous or notorious as the head of the anti-Wagner

2 faction, a point that also emerges from the present letter, dated 27 March 1897:
3
4 Your Excellency,
5 . . . This is no private matter but one that concerns all opera lovers. I have
6 just heard that Jahn’s dismissal has been agreed – this is no great misfortune.
7 The only two applicants worth considering are said to be MOTTL and
8 MAHLER. But misfortune could be in store if – in my own humble opinion –
9 Mottl were to become director. We know from his work in Karlsruhe that he
10 loves and performs only Wagner, together with the whole of Wagner’s evil
1 imitators of German and French extraction. The fact that he also employs his
2 wife8 in leading roles and dignifies her with a standing that she does not
3 deserve leads one to fear the worst. Conversely, it may be assumed on the
4 strength of his achievements in Prague and Hamburg that Mahler will
5 breathe new life into our opera without violating its classical traditions.
6 Forgive me, Your Excellency, if on this occasion I ignore my own precept of
7 never voting without first being asked to do so, but I wanted to get this off my
8 chest. I can also assure you that I am speaking on behalf of the finest and
9 most serious music lovers and connoisseurs. I am Your Excellency’s most
20 devoted servant, Dr Eduard Hanslick.9
1
2 We may assume that the die was cast during these final days of March 1897,
3 because within days of his appearance in Budapest to conduct the second
4 movement of his Third Symphony, Mahler was back in Vienna, where it was
5 agreed that the details of his contract as Kapellmeister would be finalized on
6 3 April. Mahler seemed to be within reach of his goal, only for another anxious
7 wait to wear down his already jangled nerves: he had misremembered the time
8 of his meeting with the general administrator and arrived only after the latter
9 had already left his office. Not until the next day did he finally sign the following
30 document: ‘I confirm that I am willing to accept an engagement as Conductor
1 at the Vienna Court Opera Theatre for one year from 1 June at an annual salary
2 of 5,000 (five thousand) florins, and that this declaration holds good until 15
3 April this year. Vienna, 4 April 1897.’10 In short, this was a preliminary agree-
4 ment or a declaration of intent, but for Mahler, at least, it was clear that this
5 represented his breakthrough, which was confirmed on 15 April, when he
6 signed his definitive contract, apparently deferring until 1 May the date on
7 which he officially took up his new appointment.
8 By 8 April the Wiener Abendpost had already announced the name of the
9 new Kapellmeister, an announcement followed up the next day by the Neue
40 Freie Presse, the city’s most important newspaper, which afforded proof of its
41R reliability by renaming the conductor Heinrich Mahler and presciently asking
what position he would hold in a house that already numbered Jahn, Richter, 1
Johann Nepomuk Fuchs and Joseph (‘Pepi’) Hellmesberger among its roster of 2
conductors. That same day, 9 April, Mahler also wrote to Eduard Wlassack, a 3
letter that leaves us in no doubt that after the war of nerves and the success of 4
his cabal, Mahler had no interest in adopting a triumphalist tone but was 5
looking forward to the future with characteristic enthusiasm: 6
7
It is now all-important for me to introduce myself artistically in Vienna as 8
advantageously as possible; and to that end the period of Richter’s absence 9
seems to me the most propitious. I think the best would be a Wagner opera 10
and Fidelio, which would represent both the main directions and should 1
satisfy both the Wagnerians and the classicists. [It is no wonder that Mahler 2
wanted to leap into the breach currently vacated by Richter, as these areas of 3
the repertory were the very ones with which the latter was most closely asso- 4
ciated.] The main thing after that would be to sketch out a plan of campaign 5
for the next season and to prepare new productions and new works in such a 6
manner that, with careful planning and full use of personnel and time, one 7
new production and one new work could both be brought out together. This 8
way we should already be able to make a start on widening this wretchedly 9
restricted repertoire in the course of the coming season. And I know from 20
experience that the public is very easy to win over as soon as it senses things 1
are looking up.11 2
3
This was entirely typical of Mahler. He did not take a moment to allow his 4
jangled nerves time to recover from the fray but lost no time in wrestling with 5
the new problems that lay in his path: his battle cry was ‘Attack!’, an approach 6
that had ensured success even in the face of Vienna’s anti-Semitism, Bayreuth’s 7
opposition and powerful rivals. Of one thing he must have been certain: if he 8
was unable to realize his plans to raise the local operatic industry to a new and 9
artistically responsible level, then he would not be able to do so anywhere else 30
in the world. And even if his later years in Vienna were overshadowed by the 1
usual pattern of resigned acquiescence, it remains a fact that between 1903 and 2
1906 he and Alfred Roller were able to achieve almost everything that they set 3
out to achieve, turning inside out the way in which opera was presented both 4
here and elsewhere. 5
6
7
The Court Opera
8
The Vienna Opera can look back on a long and glorious, if occasionally vicis- 9
situdinous, history. It is easy to say that Mahler took over the leading operatic 40
institution in the world – whatever Vienna’s opera lovers may claim, it no 41R
292 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 longer enjoys this distinction – but there is no doubt that it deserved that
2 accolade when he left it ten years later. Soon after the new medium of opera
3 was invented in the early seventeenth century, the Emperor Ferdinand II did
4 all in his power to ensure that operas, intermedi, sacrae rappresentazioni and
5 whatever else these works may have been called were staged on special occa-
6 sions, generally during the carnival season but also to celebrate birthdays and
7 weddings. Among his successors, Leopold I continued this tradition, giving
8 the first performance of Antonio Cesti’s Il pomo d’oro in 1668, for example.
9 But the audiences at these performances included only members of the court,
10 together with diplomats and illustrious visitors. Opera abandoned the world
1 of the court only when the Kärntnerthor-Theater was built in 1709 on the site
2 of what is now the Hotel Sacher, directly behind today’s State Opera on the
3 Ringstraße. Court opera was performed in the Hoftheater am Michaelerplatz,
4 a former ballroom refurbished as a theatre by Francesco Galli-Bibiena between
5 1698 and 1700 and used until 1744, when it was converted back into ball-
6 rooms. Gluck’s first opera for Vienna, Semiramide riconosciuta (1748), was
7 staged in the renovated Burgtheater, which remained in use until 1888,
8 initially for operas, later predominantly for spoken drama. (The modern
9 Burgtheater on the Ringstraße opened in the same year, 1888.) It was the
20 Emperor Joseph II who rid the Burgtheater of Italian singers and replaced
1 them with German plays and singspiels, while operas were staged at the
2 Kärntnerthor-Theater, a division that survives to this day. Only when the
3 actors were not performing was the Burgtheater available for operas. Mozart,
4 for example, repeatedly – and, for the most part, successfully – attempted to
5 have his operas performed here. Only Die Zauberflöte was staged at the
6 Theater auf der Wieden, an opera with German words having no chance of
7 being mounted at the Burgtheater.
8 The years between Mozart’s death in 1791 and the July Revolution of 1830
9 were not the most golden in the history of Viennese opera. Apart from Fidelio at
30 the Theater an der Wien, there were no new works worth mentioning. The
1 Viennese theatre was dominated by Italian opera buffa. German singspiels
2 by Süßmayr, Winter and Schenk gained an audience for themselves at the
3 Imperial and Royal Court Opera Theatre at the Kärntnerthor, as it was called,
4 followed, of course, by Rossini and the Italian bel canto operas of Bellini and
5 Donizetti. Various impresarios, generally of Italian extraction, leased the house
6 from the court and ran stagione seasons along more or less successful lines. But
7 it was not until 1854 that the house acquired a certain degree of continuity when
8 Karl Eckert became principal conductor and, in 1857, director, thereby estab-
9 lishing a local tradition whereby the principal conductor was also the general
40 music director and general administrator all rolled into one. It was a tradition
41R upheld by Wilhelm Jahn and Mahler and, later, by Felix von Weingartner, Franz
Schalk and Richard Strauss. As his name implies, Eckert was not Italian and so 1
he hit on an idea that would probably never have occurred to his Italian prede- 2
cessors and introduced the latest German operas to the house in the form of 3
Lohengrin (1858) and Tannhäuser (1859). 4
Thus began the Vienna Opera’s great Wagner tradition, a tradition that 5
remained unimpaired by the fact that Wagner’s own experiences in the city 6
bordered on the traumatic. In the event, Eckert remained in the post for only 7
three years and was followed by another Italian impresario, Matteo Salvi, who 8
ran the company from 1861 to 1867, an interregnum not least because this 9
was the decade when the magnificent new opera house was built on the 10
Ringstraße, just across the road from the Kärntnerthor-Theater. Destroyed in 1
the Second World War and rebuilt in 1955 in the form that is familiar today, 2
the Imperial and Royal Court Opera Theatre in the New House opened on 3
25 May 1869 with a production of Don Giovanni under its new general admin- 4
istrator, Franz von Dingelstedt, a playwright by profession. He was followed by 5
another conductor, Johann Herbeck, who was famous above all for his Wagner 6
performances, although he was also a successful stage director, even if that 7
post did not as yet exist as such. Herbeck was replaced in 1875 by Franz 8
Jauner, a managing director with no experience of conducting and an example 9
of the type of director familiar to Mahler from his dealings with Neumann, 20
Staegemann and Pollini. Jauner immediately chalked up a success with Bizet’s 1
Carmen, which had opened to mixed reviews in Paris only a few months 2
earlier. And he was also successful with Verdi, who conducted his Requiem 3
and several performances of Aida at the Court Opera, ensuring that from now 4
on the Italian composer was held in equally high esteem as Wagner among 5
Vienna’s opera enthusiasts. Only a few months later Wagner himself appeared 6
in the city to conduct a benefit performance of Lohengrin, but although the 7
performance was a success, Wagner never set foot in the city again. Hans 8
Richter joined the company at more or less the same time as Jauner, his close 9
association with Wagner implying the Master’s imprimatur and guaranteeing 30
idiomatic performances of his works. 1
Wilhelm Jahn was forty-five when he took up his appointment on 1 January 2
1881. He had been born in Moravia in 1835 and was therefore from a region not 3
far from Mahler’s own birthplace. His superior – and Bezecny’s predecessor – 4
was Baron Leopold von Hofmann. The years under Jauner and Jahn were a 5
golden age for the Vienna Opera, a point that needs to be borne in mind when 6
we assess Mahler’s decade at the helm, a ten-year incumbency that came not at 7
the end of a long period of dreary desolation and artistic insolvency but, rather, 8
after a time of considerable success, even if some of the performances towards 9
the end of this era fell short of the highest standards. And yet, even when 40
we take this background into account, there is no denying the brilliance and 41R
294 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 positively heroic rethinking of operatic life in Vienna, a rethinking that was

2 to affect the whole world of twentieth-century opera. The situation was helped
3 by the fact that Jahn and Richter worked well together, the former occupying
4 the twin posts of director and principal conductor, while the latter was effec-
5 tively the deputy principal conductor. Interpretatively, however, they both
6 pursued very different careers, Jahn having a soft spot for the French and Italian
7 repertory, while Richter was firmly established as a Wagnerian. Jahn was fond
8 of Gounod, Bizet and Massenet as well as Verdi, and it is to his credit that he
9 introduced Massenet’s Manon to Viennese audiences, scoring a tremendous
10 triumph in the process and following this up with the world première of
1 Werther in 1892. Jahn can also lay claim to the honour of ennobling Strauß’s Die
2 Fledermaus by staging it at the Court Opera in 1894.
3 Any assessment of the revolutionary nature of Mahler’s directorship also
4 needs to bear in mind that Jahn and Richter represented the older type of
5 German conductor: both were tall, powerfully built men with blond hair and
6 luxurious beards – anti-Semites would have described them as ‘Aryan’. Richter
7 in particular bore a striking resemblance to the city’s mayor, Karl Lueger. In
8 complete contrast was Mahler, small, thin, ‘nervous’, ‘fidgety’ and with a shock
9 of black hair. As such, he was the very embodiment of the stereotypical Jew –
20 a ‘brimstone-back and blistered dwarf ’, to quote Wagner’s description of his
1 Nibelung Alberich. For such a man to have seized control of the Vienna Opera
2 was hard to accept by all those whose thinking was coloured by German,
3 national and anti-Jewish, if not anti-Semitic, ideas. Two conductors could
4 not shoulder the burden of so large a house, and so Jahn and Richter were
5 assisted by three others, although none was particularly significant. Until 1884,
6 Wilhelm Gericke was responsible for the German repertory, a pallid figure
7 unable to inspire either the orchestra or the singers. Equally insignificant were
8 Johann Nepomuk Fuchs and Joseph (‘Pepi’) Hellmesberger, the latter the son
9 of a much more famous father: Joseph Hellmesberger Senior was the leader of
30 the Court Opera orchestra, the founder of a famous string quartet and director
1 of the Vienna Conservatory. Hellmesberger Junior’s easy-going manner had
2 ensured that he was popular with the players, but otherwise he was held in low
3 esteem and was notoriously work-shy. Known above all as a wag, he succeeded
4 Mahler as the conductor of the Philharmonic concerts in 1901, an appoint-
5 ment that reflects badly on the orchestra’s powers of judgement at this time,
6 even if it says much for their love of a quiet life.
7 The great strength of the Jahn era was its singers, for it was they who were
8 uppermost in the minds of contemporaries keen to hail the Vienna Court
9 Opera as the finest opera company in the world. Some of the great Wagnerian
40 singers of the Jauner era were still performing when Jahn took over in 1881,
41R including Amalie Materna, who had sung Brünnhilde in the inaugural
Bayreuth Ring in 1876; the heldentenor Hermann Winkelmann; the bass Emil 1
Scaria, who sang Gurnemanz in the world première of Parsifal in 1882 and 2
whose repertory included all of Wagner’s bass and bass-baritone roles; and the 3
bel canto baritone Theodor Reichmann, a singer known for his nobility of 4
voice, even if his acting was less distinguished. In short, Jahn took over a 5
remarkable ensemble that he continued to develop, especially in the direction 6
of French and Italian opera. Josef Ritter from Salzburg was an acclaimed Don 7
Giovanni who could also sing Wagner’s Alberich. And Jahn addditionally had 8
on his roster two singers ideally suited to Massenet and other composers 9
working in the same stylistic tradition: the soprano Marie Renard from Graz 10
(her real name was Pöltzl) and the Belgian tenor Ernest von Dyck, a round- 1
faced, somewhat portly former journalist, whose sense of style and mellifluous 2
tone made him an ideal exponent of the French repertory. His Des Grieux in 3
Manon was highly regarded by Massenet. He was also the first Werther. We 4
shall not be doing Mahler an injustice by claiming that his understanding of 5
vocal artistry was by no means the same as Jahn’s. Like Wagner, he rated 6
dramatic expression more highly and regarded vocal refinement and beautiful 7
singing in the bel canto tradition as altogether secondary in importance. 8
On 16 May 1897 the morning edition of the Breslauer Zeitung published a 9
‘Letter from Vienna’ written by one of the paper’s regular correspondents in 20
the Austro-Hungarian capital. Its author was the twenty-three-year-old Karl 1
Kraus, one of the most talented young journalists in a country with a long 2
tradition of such writing, the only difference being that Kraus was arguably 3
even more acerbic than his colleagues. In his article he offers an overview of 4
recent developments on Vienna’s cultural scene, with particular emphasis on 5
the Court Opera: 6
7
A new conductor has entered the Opera House recently with the panache of 8
a Siegfried, and you can see in his eyes that he will soon have done with the 9
bad old ways. Herr Mahler has conducted his first Lohengrin with a success 30
which was unanimously acknowledged by the whole press. There is a rumour 1
that he is soon to be made Director. Then, presumably, the repertoire of our 2
Court Opera will no longer consist entirely of Cavalleria rusticana; native 3
Austrian composers will no longer have their manuscripts returned to them 4
unread (they will be returned read); and singers of merit will no longer be 5
shown the door without reason. The new conductor is said to have given such 6
effective proof of his energy that intrigues are afoot against him already. 7
Mahler wrestling with insubordinate theatrical monsters [. . .].12 8
9
Two years later Kraus was to found his own newspaper, Die Fackel, and to 40
become the leading satirist in the German-speaking world. That he returned 41R
296 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 to the subject of Mahler on many subsequent occasions is remarkable, given

2 his almost complete lack of interest in music, the only exception being his
3 fondness for French operettas. Written only days after Mahler’s Court Opera
4 debut, his present notice reveals a number of things. First, Mahler’s future
5 promotion to the post of director was an open secret – Kraus had no inside
6 contacts at the Court Opera or with the general administrator’s office but was
7 merely repeating what was already common knowledge in the city. Second, the
8 new conductor was exercising Viennese minds in a way normally reserved for
9 the appointment of a new prime minister. (This, at least, is a tradition that
10 Vienna has upheld to the present day.) Third, there were expectations that the
1 repertory would change. (If Kraus specifically mentions Cavalleria rusticana,
2 it is because its composer, Pietro Mascagni, had recently been acclaimed in
3 Vienna when he had conducted performances of his runaway success, leading
4 to a parody of the piece that was performed under the title Krawalleria rusti-
5 cana, the German word Krawall meaning ‘riot’ or ‘brawl’.) And, fourth, Mahler
6 was already the object of powerful intrigue.
7 All four points were true. In the case of the last of them, we have already
8 quoted the anti-Semitic piece that appeared in the Reichspost even before Mahler
9 had conducted a note in the house: the Jewish press, it insisted, should take care
20 that its panegyrics were not undermined once Herr Mahler had ‘started his
1 Jew-boy antics on the podium’. Nor was the Reichspost the only paper in Vienna
2 to promote more or less anti-Semitic views. Throughout his life Mahler was
3 careful not to engage openly with the anti-Semitism that was directed at him
4 personally, still less to comment on the anti-Semitism that was almost universal
5 at this time, but it is clear from a number of private remarks that he knew very
6 well what was at stake here. Shortly after he had signed his preliminary contract,
7 rumours again began to circulate about Bezecny’s dismissal. On this occasion,
8 they were not entirely groundless, because Bezecny did indeed lose his job in
9 February 1898. On hearing of these rumours, Mahler was thrown into a state of
30 extreme anxiety, prompting him to write to one of his journalistic allies in
1 Vienna, Ludwig Karpath, and to ask whether the anti-Semitic newspapers would
2 exploit the situation by claiming that Mahler’s appointment had cost Bezecny his
3 job. This was then followed by other rumours to the effect that a second
4 conductor would be appointed alongside or even above Mahler. In short, he had
5 every reason to be nervous. His preliminary contract was confirmed on 15 April,
6 when he was still in Hamburg. A week later he conducted his final performance
7 at the Hamburg Stadttheater. The evening began with Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’
8 Symphony, followed by Fidelio, presumably with Anna von Mildenburg in the
9 title role. The occasion was a triumph for Mahler. The stage groaned beneath
40 the weight of all the flowers that he received, and the Hamburg correspondent of
41R the Neue Freie Presse counted sixty curtain calls for the conductor – if true, it was
a huge number. Mahler then travelled straight to Vienna, where he took rooms 1
at the Hotel Bristol, while Justine remained behind in Hamburg to take care of 2
the removal, which, as always, was relatively straightforward. Before the new 3
season opened, brother and sister had found an apartment at 3 Bartensteingasse, 4
a street running parallel to the Ringstraße and closer to the new Burgtheater 5
than to the opera house, but still within reasonable distance. 6
7
8
The New Opera Director
9
Kraus was right when he observed that Mahler had taken up his new post with 10
all the panache of a Siegfried. Once again – and, as it turned out, for the last 1
time, for the situation in New York was to prove very different – he revealed 2
all his old élan on assuming his new position, except that on this occasion he 3
was resolved not to abandon the struggle as quickly as he had done in the past. 4
And this time his resolve held firm. Indeed, it is significant that his appoint- 5
ments had been for progressively longer periods: in Bad Hall he had remained 6
for only three months; in Laibach for seven; in Olmütz for a recidivist stint of 7
only two months; in Kassel and Leipzig for two years each; in Budapest for two 8
and a half years; in Hamburg for six years; and in Vienna for ten and a half 9
years. One has the impression that on this occasion he drew on all his 20
remaining reserves, both physical and mental, even if it meant driving to its 1
limits a body which, lacking in strength, made up for that deficiency by sheer 2
tenacity. Scarcely had he made his debut when he succumbed to a serious 3
throat illness – presumably one of the attacks of purulent tonsillitis that were 4
to plague him from now on – and was obliged to cancel all his remaining 5
engagements during the last four weeks of the season, not resuming his duties 6
until the beginning of August. In the light of all that we know about the history 7
of Mahler’s illnesses, this may be viewed from today’s perspective as the 8
writing on the wall. As we have seen from his letter to Wlassack, Mahler 9
wanted to make his Viennese debut with a Wagner opera or Fidelio. At the end 30
of April 1897 he met Jahn to discuss the matter, although Jahn seems not to 1
have suspected that he was in the presence of his successor as the company’s 2
new director. Jahn generously offered him Don Giovanni – or Don Juan, to give 3
it its German title – but, as he told Karpath, Mahler was unhappy with this 4
choice, no doubt because he was fully aware of the horrendous difficulties of 5
this work for singers, orchestral musicians and conductor, but he did not dare 6
to decline the offer. But when Jahn decided to offer him Lohengrin instead, 7
Mahler was overjoyed, knowing that he would create a far greater impression 8
with it. Lengthy rehearsals were out of the question for a repertory piece of this 9
nature, and it was only on the day of the performance, 11 May, that the new 40
conductor was presented to the orchestra by Jahn – according to Karpath, no 41R
298 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 one in the entire theatre knew that this was the future director, but this seems
2 unlikely, given the fact that rumours of Mahler’s appointment were already
3 circulating in the city. On this occasion Mahler at least had a chance to play
4 through the prelude to Act One.
5 The evening’s performance proved a triumphant success and he received a
6 warm welcome, albeit on the part of the audience rather than the performers,
7 whose initial response was one of uncertainty and reserve. But the reserve
8 of the players, some of whom, of course, were petty-bourgeois anti-Semites
9 hostile to the house’s first Jewish conductor, grew less with each passing act,
10 a development that can have had nothing to do with the conductor’s concilia-
1 tory and winning personality but must have been based on his musical
2 authority, which was in turn underpinned by his undoubted competence. Even
3 the opening prelude was greeted by cheering, which increased as the evening
4 progressed. Following the performance, an enthusiastic crowd gathered at the
5 stage door, and the next day’s reviews were correspondingly euphoric, at least
6 if we exclude the anti-Semitic newspapers, whose critics refused to be talked
7 round. Mahler was particularly pleased that it was above all young people and
8 students at the Conservatory who waited for him and cheered him after the
9 performance. As a young man, he had often suffered unspeakably when his
20 ideas of what the music should sound like were inadequately realized. For the
1 first time in his life he had now heard an outstanding orchestra and excellent
2 singers coming close to that ideal, an ideal that he had carried in his head from
3 Bad Hall to Hamburg and that had now become a reality.
4 In her memoirs, Natalie Bauer-Lechner reproduces a touching letter from
5 an unnamed musician – presumably a member of the Court Opera orchestra –
6 who wrote that not since Wagner’s own performance of the work in 1876
7 had Lohengrin sounded as it did on this occasion: after Wagner and Bülow,
8 Mahler was the greatest conductor he had known. Of course, Mahler had
9 already had a chance to conduct an outstanding orchestra, but only in the
30 concert hall, when he had, for example, rehearsed the second movement of
1 his Third Symphony for Nikisch with the Berlin Philharmonic the previous
2 November, but he had never had charge of such a body of players in the
3 orchestra pit of an opera house. Whether or not the Vienna Court Opera was
4 then the best opera company in the world is open to dispute, although there
5 is much to be said in support of this claim, but what is beyond doubt is that
6 the Court Opera orchestra was the finest opera orchestra in the world, a posi-
7 tion that it retains even at a time when the house’s standards in general have
8 fallen. Mahler was swept along by the players’ willingness to learn and by their
9 ability to realize the conductor’s intentions, whether or not they found the
40 conductor himself sympathetic. After this inaugural Lohengrin, Mahler told
41R Natalie that:
I got further with them in one rehearsal than after years with all the others. 1
It’s true that the acoustics of the Vienna Opera idealize the tone in a quite 2
unbelievable way, whereas elsewhere bad acoustics make it coarser and more 3
material. But the chief credit must go to Austrian musicianship: to the verve, 4
the warmth and the great natural gifts that each player brings to his work.13 5
6
Mahler set about his new task with great enthusiasm, but it is remarkable 7
that he initially made no attempt to revolutionize the stage, a development that 8
had to wait until the beginning of 1903, when he staged Tristan und Isolde 9
with Alfred Roller. Even so, we may be certain that he could already envisage 10
a new way of presenting opera. After all, he had spent the last seventeen years 1
working his way up from a tiny theatre producing operettas in the summer 2
months to the Vienna Court Opera, allowing him to identify every last weak- 3
ness of the current operatic scene, but he also knew that these weaknesses 4
could not be overcome overnight. Happily, the orchestra was the least of his 5
worries as it responded promptly to his new ideas. The singers, conversely, 6
were more of a problem, not because they were bad – far from it – but because 7
some were already too old to satisfy Mahler’s demands, while others were 8
unwilling or unable to accept a new performance style. In Hamburg, Anna 9
von Mildenburg had shown him what an outstandingly talented singer could 20
achieve – vocally, musically and dramatically – under his direction. He was 1
determined to adopt a similar approach in Vienna, even if he needed to take 2
his time. And yet there can be no doubt that he was resolved from the outset 3
to bring about a new performance style onstage. That he tackled the problem 4
in a level-headed way is an indication of his well-developed tactical intelli- 5
gence. His most testing challenge was a complete reappraisal of production 6
values. Viennese audiences were used to the fact that Jahn himself acted as 7
stage director for important performances, ensuring that the singers were 8
arranged in the most favourable positions amidst the most lavish scenery. 9
Sometimes their positions may even have been meaningful and their move- 30
ments credible. Until now, no one had demanded more of them. It had been 1
sufficient for them to sing beautifully and for the orchestra to play as splen- 2
didly as they could. If Mahler had approached this problem with his usual 3
dynamism, he would have encountered resistance on the part of the company 4
and also on that of the audience. It says much for his great diplomatic astute- 5
ness that he waited almost six years before letting the cat out of the bag, an 6
astuteness that is often overlooked. He also had to wait, of course, for a 7
colleague like Alfred Roller to appear on the scene. 8
Mahler’s contract as conductor was initially for one year, starting on 1 May 9
1897. Between then and his official debut on the 11th he had time to travel to 40
Venice to see La Bohème – not Puccini’s version, but the one by Leoncavallo, 41R
300 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 which at this period was still preferred to Puccini’s, not least on account of the
2 lasting success of Pagliacci. As chance would have it, however, Puccini’s version
3 was also being performed in another opera house in Venice – the decision by
4 two Italian composers to set the same subject had caused considerable prob-
5 lems. Jahn had already reached an agreement with Leoncavallo to perform his
6 version in Vienna, but when Mahler returned to the city, he told anyone willing
7 to listen that Puccini’s setting was infinitely preferable, a verdict confirmed by
8 the history of opera, for all that history occasionally errs. After Lohengrin,
9 Mahler went on to conduct Der fliegende Holländer and Die Zauberflöte. In the
10 case of the latter, he was able to enlist the orchestra’s sympathies by sending half
1 of its members home or to the pub when he discovered to his dismay at the
2 orchestral rehearsal that Mozart’s singspiel was being performed with a huge
3 Wagnerian orchestra. In his view this contradicted the whole spirit of the work.
4 The first new opera that Mahler added to the repertory was Smetana’s
5 Dalibor, which he conducted on 4 October 1897, in the process winning
6 the public approval of the doyen of Vienna’s music critics, Eduard Hanslick,
7 whose behind-the-scenes advocacy of Mahler’s appointment we have already
8 mentioned. Hanslick was now seventy-two and, as such, the grand old man of
9 Vienna’s critics, but he was still tirelessly active. Readers familiar with him only
20 as a critic of Wagner do not know him at all, for even today there is much that
1 can still be learnt from his reviews, even from those critical of Wagner. He was
2 also one of the wittiest and most pertinent critics of the second half of the
3 nineteenth century. He concluded his review of Dalibor as follows:
4
5 But it is the director, Herr Mahler, who has earned our special gratitude by
6 performing Dalibor. He shares with Wilhelm Jahn the valuable ability to direct
7 his attention not just to the score but also to the stage picture, in every case
8 contributing sensitively to the work’s dramatic and musical impact. Mahler
9 has rehearsed Dalibor with keen understanding and meticulous care. No one
30 familiar with the work will have failed to notice the way in which he brings out
1 every subtlety of the score, while maintaining the harmonious unity of the
2 whole and now and then enhancing its effectiveness by means of a modest cut
3 or interpolation. Young, experienced and ambitious, he is, we hope, the man
4 to breathe new life into our opera, which has recently grown weary and sleepy.
5 The production of Smetana’s Dalibor was without doubt a debt of honour that
6 Austria’s leading opera house needed to pay, both Hamburg and Munich long
7 since having beaten us to the post. It will not be the last debt of honour that
8 we shall have to thank Herr Mahler for paying off.14
9
40 This was Vienna’s way of giving Mahler his letters patent. And even if Hanslick
41R was later to be left utterly baffled by his first encounter with Mahler’s own
music, there is little doubt that he would have greeted Mahler’s operatic 1
reforms of the years after 1903 as enthusiastically as he greeted Dalibor, for it 2
is clear that on the strength of his vast experience as a critic he sensed the new 3
conductor’s ability to revolutionize the stage. 4
In the middle of June 1897, four months before Dalibor opened, Mahler 5
suffered from a sore throat. It was a bad omen. An abscess had to be removed, 6
possibly from his tonsils, resulting in the first of many subsequent bouts of 7
high fever and forcing Mahler to take to his bed for a few days, after which he 8
joined Justine, Emma and Natalie in Kitzbühel, now that Steinbach on the 9
Attersee was no longer a viable alternative. But Kitzbühel was suddenly struck 10
by an outbreak of scarlet fever, and Mahler, anxious about the risk of infection, 1
insisted that he and his party should leave, no doubt a wise decision in the light 2
of his weakened condition. From Kitzbühel they travelled to Steinach on the 3
Brenner and from there to Gries, Ridmanntal near Sterzing and finally Vahrn, 4
also in South Tyrol, where they spent the rest of Mahler’s sick leave. In the 5
course of a brief excursion to the Pustertal they also visited Toblach, where 6
Mahler was later to spend his final summer vacations in Europe. 7
In mid-July Mahler was obliged to interrupt his vacation in order to accept 8
his appointment as the Vienna Opera’s deputy director. By the end of July he 9
was back in harness, his health restored. At that period the new season began 20
in early August, which in view of Vienna’s traditionally dusty summer heat 1
can hardly have been an attractive proposition, but at this date this was of 2
little concern to Mahler. In the course of the 1897–8 season he conducted 3
107 performances, not quite as many as he had done at the height of his stint 4
of forced labour in Hamburg, but still a huge burden of responsibility when 5
compared to the demands placed on today’s conductors. At Liechtenstein’s 6
insistence, the outstanding business with Jahn was resolved when the latter 7
was given a medal and urged to hand in his notice. Unlikely though it seems, 8
Jahn is said to have been surprised by this turn of events, but he did as he was 9
told, and on 8 October 1897 Mahler was appointed the house’s artistic director 30
with effect from 15 October. Never before had he signed such an advantageous 1
contract, and nor would he do so again. As a civil-service appointment, it was 2
for life and carried an annual salary of 12,000 florins, more than twice what he 3
had received as the house’s principal conductor. There was also a guaranteed 4
pension of 3,000 florins, which he would receive no matter when he left the 5
post. (Only a few years earlier, the Austro-Hungarian florin had been replaced 6
by the crown, one florin being the equivalent of two crowns, but the florin was 7
still retained for most calculations.) The pension was small in relation to 8
Mahler’s salary, but it was raised several times in the course of his appoint- 9
ment, so that by the time he left the company at the end of 1907 it was worth 40
7,000 florins. When taken with his sizeable income from America, it was 41R
302 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 enough to keep him relatively affluent until the end of his life, a state of affairs
2 from which his wife and daughter were later to profit. As always, comparisons
3 with present-day prices are difficult to draw, all attempts at conversion
4 foundering on the differing purchasing power of the respective currencies.
5 Land prices and rents, for example, were considerably lower than today,
6 whereas clothing was markedly more expensive. It is no more than a vague
7 indication, therefore, to suggest that one crown was the equivalent of four
8 euros, giving an annual salary of between 90,000 and 100,000 euros. Nor
9 should we forget that the completely absurd fees commanded by leading
10 conductors today, some of whom receive ten times this amount, were not paid
1 in Mahler’s day. For a court official, and especially for a musician, this was a
2 handsome sum, above all when we recall that, leaving aside the manner in
3 which they acquired their wealth, the only people who could really be
4 described as rich at this time were landowners, property owners and the
5 owners of large industrial concerns.
6 The hero of Carl Sternheim’s play Die Hose, Theobald Maske, tells his wife in a
7 similar situation: ‘I can now take responsibility for having a child with you.’ Mahler
8 could have said the same. For the first time in his life, his family could feel finan-
9 cially secure and he could think of starting a family of his own – at thirty-seven
20 he was no longer young and by contemporary standards was already too old to
1 marry and have children. But even this prospect was not yet in sight. He was still
2 living with his two sisters in the Bartensteingasse. Emma did not move out until
3 the summer of 1898, when she married the cellist Eduard Rosé. Meanwhile, his
4 favourite sister Justine was seeing Eduard’s brother, Arnold, the leader of the Rosé
5 Quartet, even if Mahler seems for a long time to have been oblivious to this fact.
6 Once Mahler had realized that he was unable to block Anna von Mildenburg’s
7 Vienna appointment any longer, he had his hands full trying to channel what in
8 Hamburg had been a passionate affair into the calmer waters of collegial coopera-
9 tion. There is no evidence of any other erotic entanglements on his part until
30 Selma Kurz joined the Vienna State Opera in the late summer of 1899. He was in
1 any case fully occupied conducting the aforementioned 107 performances during
2 his first season and, more generally, performing the duties of the house’s artistic
3 director.
4 In reforming Vienna’s opera industry, Mahler operated along rigorously
5 consistent lines, while adopting a diplomatic approach on all the decisive points.
6 Wherever he saw a real chance of success, he could be altogether uncompro-
7 mising. But one has the impression that he reserved this attitude for minor skir-
8 mishes, while proving astonishingly flexible on more important matters. It may
9 appear inconsequential, for example, whether or not latecomers were admitted
40 during the performance. Today’s standard reminder in programme booklets to
41R the effect that ‘Latecomers cannot be admitted until a suitable break in the
performance’ was a revolutionary innovation in Mahler’s day. (The fact that 1

complaisant ushers and pushy spectators continue to flout this rule is another 2
matter.) Mahler introduced it initially for works that he himself deemed sacro- 3
sanct, namely, Wagner’s music dramas, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and Beethoven’s 4
Fidelio, and it is unclear whether it was then extended to the other works in the 5
repertory. When Mahler told Wlassack what he was planning, the latter is said 6
to have been appalled: ‘That’s not acceptable in Vienna.’ But it was accepted, 7
albeit with much head-shaking by many of the regulars. Even the emperor was 8
apprised of the matter when an archduke objected to the withdrawal of his right 9
to enter his box whenever he wanted. The emperor, too, responded by shaking 10
his head: ‘My God, the theatre is ultimately there for our own amusement, I don’t 1
understand this strictness, but the director’s orders have to be obeyed.’ As long 2
as Liechtenstein was there to protect Mahler’s back, then the latter could be reas- 3
sured, knowing, as he did, that the emperor reacted angrily when members of 4
his court tried to meddle in the running of the theatre and other institutions. It 5
is reported that at one performance unrest broke out in the stalls when an usher 6
admitted a latecomer. Mahler took note of the employee in question and after- 7
wards read him the Riot Act. He dealt equally rigorously with the abuses of the 8
claque, the group of professional clappers paid by individual singers to lead the 9
applause for them. Mahler demanded that all his singers should sign a written 20
undertaking not to maintain such groups of mercenary supporters. Although he 1
apparently failed to eradicate the problem completely, the importance of the 2
claque was nevertheless much diminished. 3
And there was another, far more important problem that Mahler tackled 4
with no less rigour by restoring the cuts that were traditionally made in longer 5
operas, especially Wagner’s. We have already had occasion to mention Mahler’s 6
ruthlessness in cutting the whole of the fifth act of Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots for 7
reasons that remain unclear. But he was ruthless only in the case of operas that 8
he considered second-rate, as he unfortunately did with Meyerbeer’s master- 9
piece. With Wagner’s works, conversely, he adopted a different approach – one 30
that, judged from today’s perspective, is entirely understandable. The only cut in 1
Wagner’s works that continues to be sanctioned today is the famous one in the 2
Love Duet in Act Two of Tristan und Isolde. All of his other works are now 3
performed complete. But readers familiar with the historic recordings that were 4
made at the Metropolitan Opera, for example, in the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s and in 5
some cases even later will know that these performances involved massive cuts, 6
resulting in drastically shorter performance timings, while also taking pressure 7
off the singers. Such cuts were commonplace at the end of the nineteenth 8
century. No one took exception to the fact that in every theatre apart from 9
Bayreuth, David’s account of the art of the Mastersingers was cut in Act One of 40
Die Meistersinger, as was the scene between Sachs and Walther in Act Three; 41R
304 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 or that Wotan’s great monologue in Act Two of Die Walküre was reduced to a
2 handful of phrases, that half of the scene between Wotan and Fricka was cut;
3 and that in Götterdämmerung the scenes involving the Norns, Alberich and
4 Waltraute were all removed in their entirety, resulting in the loss of some
5 forty-five minutes of music.
6 Mahler refused to accept this – he respected Wagner’s works too much to
7 agree to such desecration, and so he insisted on performing them either uncut
8 or virtually uncut, a point we now take for granted. He began with the Ring,
9 which he gradually restored, performing it complete for the first time in
10 Vienna in September 1898 in a new production on which he almost certainly
1 worked very closely with the house’s resident stage director, August Stoll. This
2 was not yet the stage revolution that he was to undertake with Alfred Roller,
3 and it is a matter for immense regret that what he achieved with Tristan und
4 Isolde could not be extended to the Ring. His conducting of the cycle was
5 almost universally acclaimed, but it will not have been clear to all his audience
6 that he also directed the production as the name of the stage director was never
7 included in programme booklets and playbills at this period. Mahler’s success
8 is all the more remarkable in that he was inevitably compared with Hans
9 Richter, who had, as it were, been anointed by the Master himself and was
20 regarded as Wagner’s plenipotentiary on earth. At the same time, Mahler’s
1 interpretation must have struck even sympathetic Wagnerians as unusual. The
2 review by the critic of the Wiener Allgemeine Zeitung, Gustav Schönaich,
3 certainly gives pause for thought. Schönaich had heard Wagner himself
4 conduct and had attended the inaugural Ring in Bayreuth but was relatively
5 open-minded and certainly not disposed to prejudge the new conductor. His
6 comments help to make clear what it was about Mahler’s conducting that
7 Wagnerians found so disconcerting:
8
9 It is not a preference for slow or fast tempi, but rather his predilection for the
30 effect of excessively dramatic contrasts which on occasion makes Mahler drag
1 or hurry the tempo unduly. He often succeeds to a surprising degree in
2 bringing out these contrasts – rarely, however, without in some way damaging
3 the effect on the listener of what comes before and after. Allied to this is his
4 close attention to detail and tendency to invest certain hidden features of the
5 score with a significance that is perhaps not wholly their due. Not all themes
6 are equally congenial to him. . . . The general trend of Mahler’s tempi is
7 certainly in the direction of hurry rather than slowness. . . . Though often
8 splendid, spirited and well thought out, Mahler’s conducting at times lacks the
9 beautiful balance, and continuity of argument, and the majestic calm which is
40 the strength of Richter’s approach.15
41R
Such an apparently impartial description deserves to be taken seriously. These 1

are characteristics of Mahler at midpoint in his career, characteristics that time 2
and again emerge from reviews of his conducting. The tendency to opt for 3
extremes of tempo and to seek to capture and hold the listener’s interest at the 4
expense of balance and calm was a feature reminiscent of Kapellmeister 5
Kreisler rather than more stolid practitioners of the art – and it is only natural 6
that the essential characteristics of a conductor find expression in the way in 7
which he conducts. Many of these qualities sound familiar. When we turn our 8
attention to the great Wagner conductors of recent decades, it could be argued 9
that the spirit of Hans Richter lived on in Hans Knappertsbusch, that of 10
Mahler in Georg Solti or Leonard Bernstein – but this has nothing to do with 1
their Jewishness or otherwise. 2
In order to perform Wagner’s works uncut, outstanding singers are needed – 3
this was as true in Mahler’s day as it is now. The standard-bearers of the Jahn 4
era were old and tired: Amalie Materna and Theodor Reichmann were no 5
longer available or rapidly approaching retirement, and Emil Scaria was dead. 6
Ernest van Dyck and Marie Renard, who had championed the French and 7
Italian repertory under Jahn, were not to Mahler’s liking: Van Dyck was fat and 8
ungainly, and Renard relied on her pretty face and bell-like voice. Both were far 9
removed from the spirit of the Wagnerian music drama in which the singing 20
actor had an important part to play and which Mahler regarded as the model 1
for all the works in the repertory. Intellectually, too, they were too limited to be 2
capable of rethinking their approach to their profession. One by one, they left, 3
as also did the American mezzo and, later, soprano Edyth Walker, who had 4
arrived in Vienna two years before Mahler, proving indispensable as Fidès 5
in Meyerbeer’s Le Prophète and as Azucena in Verdi’s Il trovatore. Singers like 6
Van Dyck, Renard and Walker also had the disadvantage of performing a reper- 7
tory that was of no real interest to Mahler. True, he conducted an unbelievably 8
wide range of works during his early years in Vienna, but in his heart he 9
hankered after the great dramatic operas of the past: Gluck, Mozart, Beethoven, 30
Wagner and a handful of newer pieces. Of less interest to him were Rossini, 1
Donizetti, Verdi, Meyerbeer, Gounod and Massenet. That he was guilty of seri- 2
ously underrating some of these composers is, of course, another matter. As a 3
result of this focus of interest, one of his principal tasks at the start of his 4
appointment was to engage new singers. 5
The monumental figure of Anna von Mildenburg could be said to provide 6
the yardstick by which Mahler’s picture of the ideal singing actor could be 7
measured. She set new standards not only as Brünnhilde, Isolde and Kundry 8
but also as Ortrud, Donna Anna and Beethoven’s Leonore. All other singers 9
were inevitably judged by these standards, even if, as Mahler knew, they were 40
unrealistically high. By the time that he left the company in 1907, Mildenburg’s 41R
306 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 career was in decline, and although it is not true, as some writers have claimed,
2 that she retired from the stage in 1909 (she appeared as Strauss’s Klytämnestra
3 as late as 1927), she pursued a freelance career once she had left the Vienna
4 Court Opera. The daughter of an innkeeper from Weimar, Marie Gutheil-
5 Schoder was intended to be Marie Renard’s replacement, but she quickly
6 outgrew her revered predecessor. Her voice was by no means as beguilingly
7 beautiful as Renard’s, so she initially encountered resistance on the part of
8 Vienna’s canary-fancying audiences, but she could lay claim to tremendous
9 musicality, which Mahler particularly valued, and she eventually developed
10 into an outstanding singing actress, taking her cue – by her own admission –
1 from the leading actress of her age, Eleonora Duse. In particular, her Carmen
2 succeeded in avoiding the old clichés of a hip-swinging, fiery-eyed beauty and
3 created in its place a modern, fractured, nervous character. She moved to
4 Vienna in 1900 and even sang Strauss’s Elektra, while also championing the
5 most modern composers, including Arnold Schoenberg.
6 In Mahler’s eyes, Winkelmann’s successor was the Danish tenor Erik Schmedes,
7 who had been discovered by Pollini, arriving in Vienna from Dresden in 1898 and
8 capturing the hearts of local audiences as the young Siegfried. He remained a
9 member of the Vienna ensemble until he retired from the stage in 1924. Unlike
20 Anna von Mildenburg, he lacked the ability to explore the depths of Wagner’s
1 tragic figures, but he could impress his audiences with his genuine humanity. With
2 his sunny, cheerful disposition, this great bear of a man exerted an appeal that is
3 best understood by readers familiar with Alma Mahler’s early diaries. She flirted
4 with him extensively, and after one performance of Siegfried noted that she would
5 have been capable of anything if only he had been there and that he had made the
6 blood run to her head.16 What more can one say? It was no doubt this elemental
7 impact that Mahler valued in the singer. Vocally, he will not have been satisfied
8 with him, for Schmedes’s surviving recordings reveal a powerful and even beau-
9 tiful voice lacking the technical foundations necessary to achieve the sort of
30 ‘German bel canto’ that Wagner wanted in his singers. Above all, his breathing
1 technique was questionable.
2 A relative latecomer to Mahler’s Vienna ensemble was the baritone Friedrich
3 Weidemann, a native of Holstein, who joined the company in 1903, quickly
4 becoming its leading Wagner baritone in roles such as Sachs and Wotan.
5 Almost all of Mahler’s singers left gramophone recordings, allowing us to
6 recreate a composite picture of what they sounded like, and in Weidemann’s
7 case, too, it has to be said that his vocal technique lagged behind the sheer
8 beauty of his voice and the inspiration of his expression. Mahler valued him
9 particularly on account of his expressive singing, otherwise he would not have
40 invited him to give the first performance of his Kindertotenlieder in 1905. As for
41R bass singers, Vienna had not had an outstanding bass since Scaria’s death in
1886, but in 1902 Mahler was lucky to be able to sign up Richard Mayr, the son 1
of a Salzburg innkeeper. As everyone with an interest in the history of opera 2
knows, Mayr was the leading interpreter of the role of Baron Ochs in Strauss’s 3
Der Rosenkavalier. Although he did not create the role in Dresden, he sang it at 4
the first performance in Vienna in 1911, leaving his mark on the role and 5
remaining its finest exponent even today, a position underscored not only by a 6
gramophone recording but also by the many well-known photographs 7
of him in the part. It is easy to forget that Mayr was not only a buffo bass. 8
Immediately before joining the Vienna ensemble, he sang Hagen in Bayreuth 9
and was later an ideal Marke and Gurnemanz. Mahler’s old friend Wilhelm 10
Hesch had come to Vienna shortly before he did, but health problems quickly 1
led to the loss of his special qualities as a buffo bass. 2
Leo Slezak was a locksmith from Moravia who arrived in Vienna in 1901 3
and became the most radiant young heldentenor of his age. Here, too, a 4
remarkable number of excellent recordings have survived and show how good 5
he was. In this case, moreover, we shall have to acknowledge his outstanding 6
technique and the brilliant top notes that allowed him to sing roles such as 7
Arnold in Rossini’s Guillaume Tell, Meyerbeer’s tenor roles and, later, Verdi’s 8
Otello, as well as Lohengrin and Walther von Stolzing. With Schmedes in the 9
heavier heldentenor roles and Slezak singing the lighter ones, Mahler had two 20
performers who were the envy of practically every other opera house, the only 1
possible exception being the Met in turn-of-the-century New York, where 2
Jacques Urlus and Heinrich Knote were both appearing. In his hugely enter- 3
taining memoirs, Slezak wrote a touching tribute to his director in Vienna, 4
highlighting his respect and unconditional willingness to do as he was told, 5
even though it cannot always have been easy for the strict taskmaster and the 6
practical joker to work together. No list of the singers who stood by Mahler 7
through thick and thin would be complete without at least a brief mention of 8
the baritone Leopold Demuth, famous in his day not only in Rossini’s bel 9
canto baritone roles but also as Wagner’s Flying Dutchman; the jugendlich- 30
dramatisch soprano Berta Foerster-Lauterer whom we have already met as the 1
wife of one of Mahler’s friends in Hamburg; the buffo tenor Hans Breuer, who 2
was also an outstanding Mime; the character tenor Georg Maikl; and three 3
sopranos, Bertha Kiurina, Lucie Weidt and Gertrude Förstel. 4
Not every singer could work with Mahler. Those who wanted only an easy 5
life, happy to stick to the beaten path of well-tried routine and unwilling to be 6
taken out of their comfort zone, were finished as far as Mahler was concerned, 7
and for such singers he could really make life difficult: popular singers were 8
dismissed, their dismissals turned against him by his enemies and used to hold 9
him up to public ridicule in the form of cartoons and caricatures: ‘Director 40
Mahler driving away our favourites’ was the caption to one such caricature. 41R
308 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Sometimes the anti-Semitic camarilla also seized on these facts to whip up

2 resentment of the hated Jew at the head of the Vienna Court Opera. But there
3 is no doubt that Mahler could not have carried out his reforms and achieved
4 such impressive results if he had not had the support of a band of sworn allies
5 drawn from the ranks of the company’s leading singers, all of whom were
6 prepared to submit to his dictatorial will and to place their own talents in
7 the service of the cause that he represented. In her reminiscences, Marie
8 Gutheil-Schoder recalled that:
9
10 His great intelligence and philosophical approach to life and its manifesta-
1 tions left no room for the trivia of everyday existence. In his sympathies and
2 antipathies he sometimes vacillated, it is true, but there was usually a reason
3 why his feelings shifted. If he was disappointed in someone on whom he had
4 lavished a great deal of time and attention, he would drop that person, just as
5 he resented wasting his time and energy on inactivity. His irony was cutting
6 and he was fond of venting it on those whom he found conceited, and he
7 could be very angry if someone lacked the requisite seriousness during a
8 performance! . . . But to all who brought trust and loving understanding to
9 Mahler’s unique character and who responded to his genius and artistry with
20 devotion and warmth, he opened up his heart, they gained the inestimable
1 gift of his sympathy and interest and were even allowed the occasional
2 glimpse into the very depths of his mind, depths that he anxiously hid from
3 the world. He brought implacable rigour to the work that was essential to his
4 creative urge. How often he would explain at the end of the first night of a
5 new production: ‘Well, I wish I could start the rehearsals all over again!’ How
6 serious he was in saying this is clear from the fact that in all the works he
7 conducted and rehearsed new details would come to light in each and every
8 performance, and musical climaxes were brought out which, unrehearsed,
9 were the spontaneous expression of his powerful suggestive power, giving the
30 performance the appearance of having been completely rethought.17
1
2
Selma Kurz
3
4 One of the singers who was a member of Mahler’s Vienna ensemble has been
5 deliberately ignored until now: Selma Kurz. But she can be ignored no longer,
6 for she was without doubt the central love of Mahler’s life between Anna von
7 Mildenburg and Alma Schindler. It was a passion which, however brief, was
8 none the less both violent and intense. For a long time the nature of their rela-
9 tionship was unclear, but the letters that Mahler wrote to the soprano and that
40 were published in 1983 in the volume of reminiscences edited by the singer’s
41R daughter, Dési Halban, leave us in no doubt that the two of them had an affair.
Selma Kurz was born in Biala in Galicia in 1874. Like Mahler, she was Jewish 1
and grew up in straitened circumstances. Her father was almost blind and 2
earned a pittance repairing umbrellas. The cantor of the local synagogue 3
needed soprano voices, male or female, and discovered the sixteen-year-old 4
Selma Kurz, who was then sent to Vienna to study with Johannes Ress, having 5
obtained financial support from one of the Esterházy princes. It has been 6
claimed that she made her stage debut in Hamburg in 1895, in which case she 7
would have met Mahler on this occasion. But although she signed a contract 8
with Pollini, the appearance never took place, and it was not until 1899 that 9
Kurz and Mahler met in Vienna. Her first engagement was in fact in Frankfurt 10
in 1896, where, still only twenty-two, she sang roles such as Wagner’s Elisabeth 1
and Bizet’s Carmen. Three years later she moved to Vienna. She auditioned for 2
Mahler in the spring of 1898 as she no longer felt comfortable in Frankfurt, 3
where she was being ogled by the local intendant. Mahler was enthusiastic 4
about her singing and agreed to engage her on condition that she could 5
extricate herself from her Frankfurt contract. 6
Selma Kurz made her dazzlingly successful Viennese debut as Mignon in 7
early September 1899. Other major roles followed, initially in the jugendlich- 8
dramatisch repertory, but later, and increasingly, in coloratura roles, after her 9
phenomenal coloratura technique, including a flawless trill, was discovered 20
more or less by chance. Her long trill quickly became her hallmark and can be 1
heard on her many fine recordings, all of which attest to her uniqueness in this 2
respect in the history of recorded sound. As with so many other high voices, 3
anyone listening to these recordings today might wish for a little more emotion 4
and expression, but this was the style at that time, a style common to all the 5
virtuoso soprano roles in the French and Italian repertory. Inasmuch as 6
Mahler was aware of certain weaknesses in this area, he was grateful for the 7
fact that a singer of Selma Kurz’s vocal stature almost literally fell into his lap. 8
His earliest notes and letters to her already reveal a particular affection. ‘My 9
dear little Kurz’ is not the sort of salutation that he normally used for female 30
singers. In the wake of his difficulties in dealing with the problem of Anna von 1
Mildenburg, he had assured Rosa Papier and presumably himself as well that 2
he would keep his distance from all the female members of his company, but 3
in the case of Selma Kurz he quickly forgot his good intentions – what must 4
Anna von Mildenburg have thought when she heard the rumours? After all, he 5
had claimed that he would be driven from office if he continued his affair with 6
her in Vienna. 7
Relations between Mahler and Selma Kurz became closer while they were 8
rehearsing for the fifth Philharmonic concert in January 1900. Five of his own 9
songs – two of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen and three Wunderhorn 40
settings – were sandwiched between works by Schumann and Berlioz. The 41R
310 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 local newspapers had already insinuated that Mademoiselle Kurz was Mahler’s
2 favourite singer, but even the elderly Eduard Hanslick was forced to concede
3 that she had performed Mahler’s ‘extremely difficult’ songs very well. Rumours
4 were already rife even before the affair actually warranted such gossip.
5 Anonymous letters circulated, even within the company, and since Mahler was
6 never very circumspect in this regard, his more than artistic enthusiasm for
7 the young soprano did not remain a secret for long. Events evidently took a
8 decisive turn in Venice between 10 and 15 April 1900. Mahler left for Italy on
9 7 April, travelling via the Wörthersee and Abbazia in the company of Justine
10 and Natalie. Purely by chance – or otherwise – Selma Kurz, too, happened to
1 be in the city with an older female friend who acted as her chaperone, to use
2 the somewhat malicious term of the time. Prior to the trip, Mahler had used
3 the formal pronoun ‘Sie’ in his correspondence with the singer, but the very
4 first note that he wrote on his return finds him adopting the intimate ‘Du’: ‘My
5 darling! I need to know how you are, whether the carriage was reserved, what
6 your journey was like, how you slept and how you are. – I am still wearing
7 everyone out and am most anxious to see you! Shall I see you for a moment
8 this evening? Many heartfelt greetings – your G.’18
9 The weeks that followed were extremely difficult for Kurz. Now twenty-five,
20 she was, sexually speaking, almost certainly completely inexperienced but, as
1 the director of the Vienna Court Opera repeatedly assured her, she had a great
2 future ahead of her. She had been importuned by a director in the past, but
3 now the situation was very different. Mahler was a different kind of person
4 from Emil Claar in Frankfurt. Her elder by fifteen years, Mahler was a fascin-
5 ating figure and his Jewishness was not a problem. But the fact that he was
6 the director of the Vienna Court Opera weighed heavily on her mind. It is
7 more than likely that in his impetuousness Mahler spoke of marriage, and yet
8 this would have meant her giving up her career. We know from his relations
9 with Anna von Mildenburg that Mahler thought no differently from most
30 other men in his position. Whereas it may be possible today for the wife of a
1 general administrator to be the company’s prima donna, the practice is in
2 dubious taste and was completely out of the question in Mahler’s day. It was
3 inconceivable that Mahler should resign and leave his wife to pursue her
4 career, while it was equally out of the question that the soprano would move to
5 Berlin or the Met, as this would have meant the couple’s separation. And what
6 about their children? It is all too easy to understand that Mahler should time
7 and again have fallen for his female singers: their physical proximity in the
8 rehearsal room and in the theatre, their shared love of opera, his gratitude for
9 the singer’s artistic, harmonious understanding and his monastic life outside
40 his professional duties as a conductor – how else could he have found a wife,
41R except perhaps among waitresses? And yet even on paper it is clear that
Mahler’s notorious passion for his female singers was highly problematic, and 1
it is no wonder that the woman whom he later married was not a performing 2
artist but a young and inexperienced woman whose ambitions did not extend 3
to opera, even if they included composition – and even this was ruled out by 4
Mahler. All of these considerations must have flashed through Selma Kurz’s 5
mind. Although her letters to Mahler have not survived, there seems no reason 6
to doubt that she was as passionate about him as he was about her, and yet she 7
was still very young and insecure. Her advisers and maternal friends as well as 8
her singing teacher would all have told her not to get involved or at least they 9
would have counselled the most extreme caution. Much the same was true of 10
Alma Schindler, but she, of course, chose to ignore all the nay-sayers. 1
Mahler’s letters to his lover reflect his passion and nervous excitement and 2
reveal how much he was taken aback by her fears and misgivings. The ability 3
to empathize with others, especially with young women, was never one of his 4
strong points. Thought processes and emotional worlds that were not his own 5
were a closed book to him. At first he thought that the problems Selma Kurz 6
was trying to deal with were the result of the ploys they were forced to adopt 7
in public and of the need for secrecy whenever they met. His reaction to her 8
evident complaints that he was too changeable was not very subtle but reveals 9
the condescension of the older and wiser man that he also showed Alma 20
Schindler: ‘What you call my moods and what is grounded so deeply in my 1
nature you do not yet understand because you are still too young to do so. That 2
is why you often misunderstand me. – But it doesn’t mean that my love for you 3
is wanting, still less that it is waning! Believe me – I was dumbstruck when I 4
read this!’19 Within days he seems to have sensed that he was losing Selma as 5
she was not equal to the problems with which they were wrestling and that she 6
thought he lacked the necessary certainty. The emphasis given to certain 7
words in his letter to her is an indication of his strength of feeling and as such 8
typical of a style that he always adopted whenever he was passionate about 9
something: 30
1
Selma, for God’s sake, things simply can’t go on like this! Believe me when I 2
say that I love you and that my love is the only thing in my life and will always 3
remain so! Just bear in mind that we are at the beginning of a long journey, a 4
journey for which we need to be fresh, not exhausted. We must help each 5
other. We are both affected by our moods, leading to the danger of constant 6
misunderstandings even when we continue to assure each other that we 7
understand one another! Let us continue to coexist, and let us love one 8
another without worrying! [. . .] Yes, I am a complicated person – I’m often a 9
mystery to myself – but this must be one more reason for you not to write me 40
off as a subject of gossip and then to lower your dear little head just because 41R
312 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the cap happens to fit me on a purely superficial level. You should examine

2 me yourself, my love – but don’t judge me, just live and love! Only he who
3 loves can see clearly!20
4
5 Mahler was demanding too much. On the one hand, he was evidently not as
6 devoted to the woman he loved as much as she might have expected (and here,
7 too, we see behavioural patterns familiar from Mahler’s later marriage), while
8 on the other hand he showered her with his passion, presenting the young
9 woman with insoluble problems for the future. How could a singer who had
10 worked her way up from the poorest of backgrounds (a point that he should
1 have understood very well) and who obviously had a major career ahead of her
2 (this, too, should have been a familiar situation) guess that, far from ‘judging’
3 him, she should simply ‘love’ him? It is pointless to ask how he himself would
4 have reacted if the roles had been reversed, for Mahler’s thinking was no
5 different from that of every other man at this period.
6 In the end the pressure proved too much for the singer, although it is
7 not entirely clear why the relationship ended when it did. For Selma Kurz, the
8 season in Vienna was over by the end of May and, physically and emotionally
9 exhausted, she travelled to Marienbad to take the waters. Two weeks later
20 Mahler set off for Paris to conduct three concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic
1 at the Trocadéro and the Châtelet as part of the 1900 International Exhibition,
2 where he also met Paul and Sophie Clemenceau, an acquaintanceship that was
3 to prove very valuable. Mahler, too, was exhausted and unhappy with the way in
4 which the concerts were promoted – it is said that they were announced as being
5 ‘Sous la direction de Monsieur Gustav MAHLHEUR’. Nor was he impressed by the
6 acoustics of the Trocadéro. It is by no means unreasonable to assume that the
7 severe migraine he suffered immediately before one of the concerts, forcing him
8 to delay the start for half an hour while he lay, ashen-faced, in his dressing room,
9 was bound up with the turbulent weeks that had just ended. By the time that he
30 arrived at Maiernigg on the Wörthersee on 23 June – he had chosen the place the
1 previous summer, although it was not until 1901 that his beautiful holiday home
2 was to be built there – he could not go on. A letter that he wrote to Selma Kurz
3 shortly after his arrival in Maiernigg shows that at least superficially he had
4 recovered from the storms of the last few months. In it he strikes a note that is
5 friendly but matter-of-fact and offers the soprano sound advice for looking after
6 her voice and planning her future career. If we did not know the earlier letters,
7 only the use of the familiar pronoun ‘Du’ would indicate what had taken place
8 between the couple. The ‘affair’ lasted little more than six weeks, but it went
9 deeper than is generally thought.
40 Selma Kurz was the last love of Mahler’s life before Alma – with the excep-
41R tion of Alma, he was never again to be so infatuated with a woman. Perhaps
the conclusion to be drawn from all this is that he would have done better to 1
have married a singer and that for Mahler artistic accord was an essential 2
ingredient of marriage, something he never achieved with Alma. Selma Kurz 3
later married the distinguished Viennese surgeon Josef Halban, but it would 4
appear from her daughter’s volume of reminiscences that Mahler remained the 5
great love of her life. Although her marriage was by no means unhappy, it 6
burned only at a low heat, for she was incapable of recapturing the intensity of 7
the weeks that she spent with Mahler. Her subsequent career was everything 8
that she might have expected, and for decades she remained the darling of the 9
Viennese, singing all over Europe and creating the role of Zerbinetta in the 10
world première of the revised version of Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos in 1916. 1
She died in Vienna in 1933. 2
3
4
First Steps in the Direction of Reform
5
As we have already noted, Mahler’s reform of Vienna’s operatic scene pre-dates 6
the production of Tristan und Isolde that opened in February 1903 but began 7
on 11 May 1897 when he first raised his conductor’s baton at the Vienna Court 8
Opera. Some of his revolutionary measures have already been described: he 9
banished the claque; he prevented latecomers from disturbing the perform- 20
ance; he lowered the house lights; both onstage and in the pit, he brought new 1
and more rigorous standards to the works in the repertory; and he curtailed 2
his singers’ opportunities for extended leave of absence, when they could sign 3
lucrative guest contracts with other houses. With his disciplinarian’s gaze he 4
would glower at latecomers as they tried to slip into the performance after 5
the curtain had risen, and he would hiss at audiences that began to applaud 6
during an important orchestral postlude or at the end of a scene. It is by 7
no means far-fetched to claim that his behaviour acquired a certain attractive- 8
ness. Audiences wanted to be present when the new director was conducting 9
and threw another of his famous tantrums. People everywhere spoke of his 30
charisma with a mixture of admiration and awe. The name of the conductor 1
was not mentioned on the daily playbills, and so most of the audience could 2
not know who would be conducting the evening’s performance until he 3
appeared in the pit. It is said that a murmur would pass through the house 4
whenever the small, pale man strode briskly towards the podium, his stormy 5
features framed by a shock of black hair. 6
It was Mahler’s first four years in Vienna that laid the foundations for the 7
fascination and enthusiasm that he inspired in audiences and critics alike 8
and that then allowed him to press ahead with even more far-reaching 9
reforms. Such timing speaks volumes for the tactical skill of an artist said to be 40
unworldly. His renewal of the repertory proceeded apace, but even antiquated 41R
314 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 productions that seemed to have reached the end of their days acquired a new
2 lease of life when Mahler was conducting, and he proved a galvanizing influ-
3 ence after only a handful of rehearsals, in some cases re-studying the produc-
4 tion. Curiously enough, his first entirely new production was Lortzing’s Zar
5 und Zimmermann – Mahler’s attitude to German Spieloper was one of friendly
6 respect, avoiding all sense of condescension. In turn this was followed by the
7 local première of Smetana’s Dalibor, a revival of Die Zauberflöte, the local
8 première of Eugene Onegin and a new production of Der fliegende Holländer,
9 all in the space of three months – no modern opera house would feel able to
10 shoulder such a burden. That Mahler had no wish to be seen as a specialist in
1 the German repertory is clear from his decision to mount performances of
2 Bizet’s Djamileh, Leoncavallo’s La Bohème, a commitment that he took on
3 complainingly but which he fulfilled to impressive effect, and Verdi’s Aida.
4 Verdi was far from being a favourite of his, and he would never have thought
5 of equating Verdi and Wagner, yet he felt a certain respect for the Italian
6 composer’s later works. And, once he had assured himself that the musical
7 apparatus was functioning effectively, he slowly began to take an interest in the
8 staging of these works. Critical voices were first raised in October 1898, when
9 he radically rethought the Wolf ’s Glen scene in a restudied production of Der
20 Freischütz, replacing the usual ghost-train aesthetic by cloud projections on
1 the backdrop and by the use of light and shade. But these changes were later
2 silently reversed.
3 Shortly beforehand Mahler had conducted the first uncut performance of
4 Götterdämmerung in the city, allowing the Norns to make their belated debut
5 on the stage of the Vienna Court Opera and at the same time raising the ques-
6 tion of how Wagner himself imagined them tossing the rope of destiny to one
7 another. Mahler had enough experience of staging Wagner’s works and of
8 seeing them performed in Bayreuth to know that a literal presentation of this
9 effect risked becoming involuntarily comic if the Norns failed to catch the
30 rope. He instructed the singers to dispense with the rope completely and
1 merely to mime the gestures. Fifty years later, Wieland Wagner could certainly
2 have appealed to Mahler when staging this scene according to his New
3 Bayreuth aesthetic.
4 Of course, Mahler was unable to conduct everything, and during his early
5 years in Vienna he had to make do with Fuchs and Hellmesberger. Richter, too,
6 was still on the music staff. It was an unsatisfactory situation, not least because
7 Hellmesberger in particular was deeply rooted in mediocrity and made no secret
8 of his hostility to Mahler. But an alternative conductor was soon found in Franz
9 Schalk, whom Mahler knew and respected and who was brought to Vienna from
40 Prague, becoming the house’s principal conductor and from that point of view
41R inheriting Richter’s mantle. Richter was a far more distinguished conductor than
Jahn and had been the company’s leading musical figure. Mahler knew his work 1
from Bayreuth and respected him as a Wagner conductor, but he was undoubt- 2
edly right to think that for all his authority, Richter lacked even a vestige of 3
genius: his performances may have been musically accurate, but for the most 4
part they rarely came to life. None the less, Mahler showed him the respect that 5
was his due and on taking up his new office wrote a scrupulously polite letter to 6
which Richter replied with wounding coolness: once he had persuaded himself 7
that Mahler’s appointment would benefit the company, he would prove himself 8
a good colleague.21 Mahler never forgot this rebuff. Of course, Mahler’s wish to 9
shine as a Wagner conductor – and his brilliant debut in Lohengrin had proved 10
that he could do so – was hardly calculated to make their long-term collabor- 1
ation an attractive prospect. And with the exception of the anti-Semitic section 2
of the press, Vienna’s newspapers lavished such praise on Mahler’s achievements 3
that Richter felt that his own artistry had been impugned and began to think that 4
all his good work for the company had suddenly been forgotten. It must remain 5
an open question as to whether Richter, an old-guard Wagnerian and 6
Bayreuthian, harboured anti-Semitic sentiments towards Mahler. Whatever the 7
answer, he resigned in late February 1900 and withdrew to Manchester, where he 8
was music director of the Hallé Orchestra. (One of his successors was John 9
Barbirolli.) He also appeared frequently in London, where he had several useful 20
contacts. He remained active as a conductor until 1911 – the year of Mahler’s 1
death – and then retired to Bayreuth. In consequence, it was Schalk who became 2
Mahler’s most important assistant. (Schalk became director of the Vienna State 3
Opera after the First World War, for a time running the house in tandem with 4
Strauss.) 5
But in 1901 Mahler also succeeded in luring Bruno Walter to Vienna. Walter 6
was like a son to Mahler and remained loyal to him until his death, playing 7
Kurwenal to Mahler’s Tristan. In Vienna he was initially seen as a mere shadow 8
of Mahler, not least on account of his youth, but he quickly developed a person- 9
ality of his own. For a time they were joined by Ferdinand Löwe and, at the very 30
end of Mahler’s appointment in Vienna, by Alexander Zemlinsky, a former rival 1
for the hand of Alma Schindler and now an outstanding opera conductor and a 2
distinguished composer in his own right – Mahler conducted the first perform- 3
ance of his opera Es war einmal. But Zemlinsky was unable and, arguably, 4
unwilling to remain in Vienna after Mahler left. Walter, conversely, remained 5
until 1913, when he became general music director in Munich. 6
Richter’s name is also associated with the musical directorship of the Vienna 7
Philharmonic’s concerts. Here, too, the changes that were necessary were very 8
quickly implemented. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra had been founded 9
by Otto Nicolai in 1842 from members of the Kärntnerthor-Theater orchestra, 40
in other words, Court Opera musicians. By the time that Richter stepped down 41R
316 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 as its principal conductor in September 1898 it could look back on a long

2 and glorious tradition. There had always been a close and, indeed, inevitable
3 link between the artistic directorship of the Philharmonic and the post of
4 conductor at the Court Opera. Richter had assumed this role on his arrival in
5 Vienna in 1875 and retained it until 1882, after which there was a twelve-
6 month interregnum, Richter’s advocacy of Brahms – not yet the universally
7 admired composer that he was to become ten years later – gaining him a
8 number of enemies both inside the orchestra and within the wider public. For
9 a year, Jahn took over, but Richter then returned and held the post until 1898,
10 his twenty-two seasons in charge of the orchestra an impressive period in its
1 annals. It was only logical, of course, for Mahler to succeed him. If we ignore
2 the ineradicable anti-Semitism that accompanied Mahler wherever he
3 went, the initial relationship was entirely positive, not least because one of
4 Mahler’s first acts on taking up his new post was to raise the salaries of the
5 orchestra’s members. Such an action invariably improves relations, quite
6 apart from the fact that it was consistent with the social improvements that
7 Mahler had always championed for his musicians. Richter handed in his
8 notice, pleading health problems, not that these prevented him from fulfilling
9 his engagements in England. Mahler was elected the orchestra’s new artistic
20 director on 24 September 1898. Richter had proposed him himself, his
1 alternative suggestion, Ferdinand Löwe, not being taken seriously. Mahler
2 immediately announced changes to the concert programmes, without,
3 however, going into detail. He had no interest in administration and rarely
4 attended the relevant meetings, an attitude immediately interpreted as
5 arrogance.
6 Mahler got off to a good start by programming the first complete perform-
7 ance of Bruckner’s Sixth Symphony, but his decision to perform his own
8 Second Symphony on 9 April 1899 served merely to highlight the tensions
9 between at least a section of the orchestra and its new artistic director. It was
30 not that the performance was not a success. Indeed, the management of the
1 orchestra, whose members were court employees, specifically referred to the
2 success of the performance in its letter of thanks, but within the orchestra
3 there was a major coalition between its anti-Semitic members, the supporters
4 of Hans Richter who blamed Mahler for driving away their loyal vassal, and
5 those members who felt that music like Mahler’s was unworthy of them. For a
6 long time the following season’s concerts hung in the balance as a faction in the
7 orchestra tried to persuade Richter to return. Only when Richter declined and
8 Mahler, both scandalized and mortified, had kept the orchestra in suspense,
9 was a vote of confidence taken. Only then did Mahler agree to conduct the
40 next season’s subscription concerts. The visit to the International Exhibition in
41R Paris in June 1900 – it was the orchestra’s first foreign tour – proved sufficiently
successful to defuse the situation, although it had been preceded by a genuine 1

scandal when Mahler had introduced a number of his own instrumental revi- 2
sions to a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on 1 April. This is not 3
the place to discuss the controversial question of Mahler’s aim in undertaking 4
changes both here and elsewhere, changes that often amounted to more than 5
mere retouchings. 6
Mahler’s working relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic continued to 7
be fuelled by resentment and broke down completely in November 1900, when 8
he conducted the local première of his First Symphony, the failure of which 9
was almost complete. As we have noted, Hanslick held Mahler in high regard 10
as the director of the Vienna Court Opera, but he concluded to his consterna- 1
tion that the new work belonged to a kind of music that to him was not music 2
at all. (Even Mahler himself repeatedly conceded that his First Symphony was 3
an extraordinarily difficult piece, more difficult, indeed, than its three succes- 4
sors.) Mahler could hardly be surprised that his audience, for the most part, 5
refused to follow him. But he never forgave the orchestra for abandoning him 6
on the platform, leaving him to face the booing alone, while the expression on 7
their faces revealed their wish to distance themselves from the proceedings. 8
From now on their relationship was irreparably soured, resulting in endless 9
arguments whenever Mahler tried to curtail the players’ activities away from 20
the Court Opera and Philharmonic concerts or when he insisted that they 1
should wear evening dress at opera performances – another of his reforms. He 2
resigned as concert conductor in April 1901, explaining in his letter to the 3
orchestra that his workload at the Opera and his health made it impossible for 4
him to continue in the post. His reference to his health was not entirely far- 5
fetched for only a short time earlier he had suffered from serious intestinal 6
bleeding, a condition to which we shall shortly return. Even so, it remains a 7
fact that at no point in his life had he worried about his own health when the 8
task in hand was a matter close to his heart. The fact that his successor was 9
none other than ‘Pepi’ Hellmesberger will have demonstrated to him that 30
however wonderfully the orchestra may have played, it was not a sounding 1
board for his own artistic goals in the concert hall – an orchestra capable of 2
replacing him with Hellmesberger clearly had difficulty respecting his own 3
high musical standards. It says much for the orchestra’s professionalism that 4
for the next six years their work with Mahler in the opera house was largely 5
unproblematic and even committed. And we should also remember that 6
Mahler’s enemies were far from occupying every desk in the orchestra: Arnold 7
Rosé, who was shortly to become his brother-in-law, was by no means alone in 8
acknowledging Mahler’s genius. 9
Never again did Mahler have to work as hard as he did during these early 40
years in Vienna. His Herculean conducting achievement had to be combined 41R
318 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 with directorial responsibilities. This excessive workload led not only to an

2 almost total suspension of his compositional plans, it also meant that his
3 private life was practically non-existent – and even for an individual as ascetic
4 as Mahler, this was an imposition. Everything he did was related to his work
5 and his own creative endeavours. His extended vacations, with their physical
6 exertions, were ultimately intended to toughen up his body, whose failings he
7 recognized or suspected, and prepare himself for the tasks that lay ahead.
8 Above all he needed to prepare for his work as a composer, which was for the
9 most part restricted to the holidays, while the little free time that he had during
10 the rest of the year, when he was busy conducting, had to be set aside for
1 revising and elaborating his sketches and drafts.
2 The summer of 1897 had proved compositionally unproductive as a result of
3 his frequent changes of address, while the following summer was spent recov-
4 ering from another operation, during which he retired to the Villa Artmann at
5 Vahrn in the South Tyrol, where he managed to complete only two Wunderhorn
6 settings, ‘Das Lied des Verfolgten im Turm’ and ‘Wo die schönen Trompeten
7 blasen’. In 1899 Mahler and his entourage – now that Emma was married, it
8 normally consisted only of Justine and Natalie – planned to spend the summer
9 near Losenstein on the Enns but were unable to find suitable lodgings and so
20 they moved on to Alt-Aussee, where they were visited by Siegfried Lipiner
1 and, for a time, Arnold Rosé, whose presence seems not to have aroused
2 Mahler’s suspicions as far as Justine was concerned. Initially, it seemed as
3 if the summer would pass by without any major compositional achievement,
4 but then Mahler suddenly succeeded in drafting his Fourth Symphony in a
5 single burst of creativity, allowing him to complete the work during the summer
6 of 1900. Normal guest houses proved unsuited to such bursts of creativity,
7 providing Mahler with a painful reminder of the long and unclouded idyll
8 that he had enjoyed at Steinbach on the Attersee. Justine and Natalie decided
9 to do what they could to help, and once Mahler had returned to Vienna, they
30 set off in search of a permanent alternative. While visiting the Wörthersee, they
1 bumped into Anna von Mildenburg, who contacted an amateur architect,
2 Alfred Theuer, who himself owned a villa in Maiernigg. Theuer explained that
3 it would ultimately be preferable for Mahler to build a holiday home of his own
4 rather than renting a place and recommended a site that the owner was willing
5 to sell on the shores of the lake near the village. There was also the possibility
6 of leasing the land in the forest on the hillside above the house. Here a
7 ‘composing hut’ could be built along the lines of the property at Steinbach, even
8 if it would not command a view of the lake.
9 Mahler was summoned from Vienna and arrived in Maiernigg on 18 August
40 1899. He was satisfied with all the arrangements, and the purchase agreement
41R was signed in September. Work on the building took longer than planned, with
the result that in 1900 Mahler was unable to sleep in the new house and had to 1
take rooms at the Villa Antonia. The ‘composing hut’, conversely, was already 2
finished, so that for the first time since Steinbach he could work undisturbed 3
from early morning to lunchtime. It was against this background that he 4
was able to make rapid progress on his Fourth Symphony. By the following 5
year the villa, too, was finished, and the summer months were almost uniquely 6
productive from a compositional standpoint: Mahler completed the bulk 7
of the Kindertotenlieder and made headway on his Fifth Symphony. Even 8
today this setting impresses the visitor with its beauty, although the villa 9
itself, now in private hands, is closed to the public. Mahler will not have 10
imagined that he would ever have to abandon it. But in the summer of 1907 1
events took place that destroyed the idyll, and he never went back to the 2
Wörthersee. 3
Let us return, however, to Mahler’s serious illness in February 1901. On the 4
24th of the month he again had a busy schedule. During the day he conducted 5
a lunchtime performance of Bruckner’s Fifth Symphony, his final appearance 6
with the Philharmonic – the psychological burden of his altercations with the 7
orchestra will have left him emotionally drained. And in the evening he 8
conducted Die Zauberflöte at the Court Opera. Later that night his health took 9
a catastrophic turn for the worse. In a previously unpublished passage in her 20
reminiscences, Natalie Bauer-Lechner reports that 1
2
On Sunday night, to our extreme horror, Gustav suffered an intestinal haem- 3
orrhage, and only the timely intervention of the doctor saved his life. The 4
haemorrhage was so sudden and so violent that Gustav would have bled to 5
death if he hadn’t had a telephone, allowing Justi to summon Dr Singer, who, 6
after various fruitless efforts of his own, was able to summon the surgeon 7
Herr Hohenegg. (‘An hour later and it would have been too late,’ the latter 8
said afterwards.) Gustav had already lost a lot of blood before he woke Justi, 9
whom he had been reluctant to disturb. She found him in a pool of blood that 30
Dr Singer was unable to staunch in spite of the iced water that he poured over 1
him and bathed him in. Hohenegg finally stopped the flow of blood by vigor- 2
ously tamponing the bleeding. 3
4
According to Natalie, Mahler later told her that ‘As I stood on the threshold 5
between life and death, I thought – as we are all bound to believe in such 6
things – that it would almost have been better to have passed over straight- 7
away! There seemed nothing terrible about quitting this life when one has put 8
one’s affairs in order. Indeed, I was almost repelled by the idea of returning to 9
life.’22 This dramatic account of the events on the night of the 24 February 1901 40
is unlikely to have been over-dramatized, although the world at large remained 41R
320 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 in the dark about the threat to Mahler’s life. It provides us with a suitable
2 opportunity to consider the history of Mahler’s illnesses, an account that is
3 bound to lead us to conclude that although he was a powerful swimmer and a
4 tireless hiker who shouldered an unbelievable workload he, none the less,
5 suffered from ill health throughout his adult life.
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41R
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Mahler’s Illnesses: 7
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A Pathographical Sketch 9
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‘He was very often ill’ 4
Anna Mahler on her father 5
6
HIS IS HOW it is with typhus.’ Thus begins the brief penultimate chapter of
T
‘
Thomas Mann’s Buddenbrooks, after which the author describes in detail
the aetiology of a typhoid sufferer, a description which, gleaned from scientific
7
8
9
textbooks, was typical of Mann’s whole methodology. By the end of the 20
chapter, the reader knows that even though no patient is mentioned by name, 1
it is young Hanno Buddenbrooks who is being described. At the end of the 2
previous chapter we were told that while rhapsodizing so ecstatically at the 3
piano, the boy was very pale and weak-kneed. It is Hanno whose death is 4
laconically mourned in the final chapter, the musically highly gifted lad having 5
succumbed to this hideous proletarian illness rather than to consumption, 6
which in the nineteenth century was a sign of greater refinement. Mahler died 7
from neither typhus nor tuberculosis nor even – and in spite of repeated claims 8
to the contrary – from the egotistical brutality of his wife. (We shall consider 9
Alma’s contribution to her husband’s final illness at a later point in our narra- 30
tive.) He died from subacute bacterial endocarditis, or endocarditis lenta, an 1
inflammation of the internal wall of the heart caused by a streptococcal infec- 2
tion. If the body was insufficiently strong to ward off the bacterial attack – and 3
Mahler’s previously weakened heart valves placed him in this category – 4
then there was nothing that contemporary medicine could have done to help. 5
There were no antibiotics to deal with such an illness, although even today 6
endocarditis remains a serious and even a life-threatening condition. 7
The fifty-year-old Mahler was already relatively old, although his physical 8
condition, albeit weakened by his diseased mitral valve, was otherwise sound. 9
Indeed, he was in many respects astonishingly fit. He had been overworked 40
throughout his whole life, and yet he had never collapsed beneath this burden. 41R
322 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Nor can it be said that he deliberately undermined his own health by overwork
2 or by alcohol or nicotine, both of which he enjoyed in moderation. But by the
3 autumn of 1910 he was beginning to suffer from a series of severe sore throats
4 which, more severe than any earlier symptoms in this regard, left him consid-
5 erably weakened. It was not until 1928 that Alexander Fleming discovered
6 penicillin and, with it, the later use of antibiotics as a form of medical treat-
7 ment, and a further twelve years were to pass before this treatment was put
8 into practice by Howard Florey and Ernst Chain. In short, it would have made
9 no difference if Mahler had contracted this illness ten years later. We shall later
10 have occasion to examine in greater detail this final illness, the onset of which
1 appears from all that we now know to date from the time of the rehearsals for
2 his Eighth Symphony in Munich in September 1910. Our present concern is to
3 see to what extent Mahler was a sick man all his life.
4 Even the briefest glance at Mahler’s family history suggests that as far as
5 physical fitness goes, their genetic makeup was not of the best. Mahler’s father
6 lived until he was sixty-two, his mother until she was fifty-two. From a
7 nineteenth-century perspective, this could be considered a good age. Indeed,
8 there is a certain irony to the fact that Marie Mahler was always seen as sickly,
9 the births of her fourteen children having left her physically worn out. And yet
20 in spite of this, she lived to be older than her son. It must give us pause for
1 thought that she is believed to have suffered not only from a bad hip or leg
2 but also from a weak heart, from which she presumably died – the surviving
3 sources make it impossible to be more precise. But it is striking that Mahler’s
4 siblings died while they were still comparatively young, certainly far younger
5 than was normal in the second half of the nineteenth century. That only six out
6 of a total of fourteen children survived infancy is unusual in a family that
7 did not exactly live in the Iglau sewers. No documents have survived to indi-
8 cate the cause of death of these infants, although it is striking that they were
9 all Mahler’s brothers, whereas two of his sisters lived to be relatively old. The
30 third sister, Leopoldine, appears to have died of a brain tumour when she was
1 twenty-six. Justine lived to be seventy – she died in Vienna in August 1938 –
2 and Emma was fifty-eight when she died in Weimar in 1933. It is believed that
3 Ernst, whose death in 1875 at the age of only thirteen, left the young Mahler
4 deeply affected, succumbed to pericarditis, an inflammation of the membrane
5 enclosing the heart that at the time was generally ascribed to tuberculosis.
6 Alois, who has gone down in the family history as a wastrel who emigrated
7 to the United States, where he became a tolerably dependable if inconspicu-
8 ous member of American society, evidently died of chronic myocarditis, an
9 inflammation of the muscular tissue of the heart often due to alcohol abuse. In
40 other words, two of Mahler’s brothers, as well as his mother, died of heart
41R disease. In the case of neither Ernst nor Alois was there any question of a heart
MAHLER’S ILLNESSES: A PATHOGRAPHICAL SKETCH 323
attack but of ongoing conditions leading to irreparable damage to the heart. It 1

is surely unusual to find so many coronary disorders within a single family and 2
it suggests that there was a genetic predisposition within the Mahler family, 3
even if such a diagnosis cannot be supported by any evidence. 4
In the case of Mahler, too, a heart condition was diagnosed four years before 5
his final illness and independent of that illness. The episode in question took 6
place in Maiernigg in July 1907. His daughter Maria died on the 12th and in 7
the wake of her death Mahler’s mother-in-law suffered a ‘heart spasm’ and 8
Alma fainted. The local doctor, Carl Blumenthal, was summoned, and Mahler 9
took the opportunity to ask him to examine his own heart, too. Regular health 10
checks were totally alien to Mahler’s whole nature and, indeed, unusual at this 1
period. It seems likely that until then he had consulted doctors only when he 2
was acutely ill. At all events, it is unlikely that he had ever had his heart exam- 3
ined: only auscultation was available at this time, electrocardiograms and 4
X-ray examinations still lying far in the future. Blumenthal is said to have 5
commented: ‘Well, you’ve no cause to be proud of a heart like that.’ Alma’s 6
comment, ‘This verdict marked the beginning of the end for Mahler’,1 reflects 7
her own medical ignorance and represents a completely unnecessary over- 8
dramatization of the actual facts of the case. Understandably worried, Mahler 9
immediately returned to Vienna and was re-examined by a heart specialist, 20
Friedrich Kovacs, who, according to Alma’s unsupported testimony, diagnosed 1
a compensated congenital heart valve defect, a formulation which, medically 2
speaking, is difficult to sustain. After all, no doctor at this period could ascer- 3
tain whether a heart defect was congenital or acquired. If Mahler’s defect had 4
been congenital, then he is unlikely to have reached the age that he did. And 5
if the valvular defect was compensated (and, as we have noted, Mahler had 6
an extraordinary ability to push himself to the very limits of his physical 7
endurance), then there could be no question of the beginning of the end, for 8
Mahler had demonstrated with his physical and intellectual exertions that he 9
was fitter than most people of his age – he was forty-seven when this diagnosis 30
was made. 1
A second doctor in Vienna, Franz Hamperl, offered a less dramatic diag- 2
nosis in the form of a mild mitral stenosis. In other words, only one of the 3
valves between the left vestibule and the left ventricle was slightly narrower 4
than normal as a result of changes caused by inflammation, so that its function 5
was somewhat impaired. Possibly it was a combined mitral vitium, meaning 6
that the mitral valve did not close properly and tended to leak, while at the 7
same time it did not open sufficiently. In turn this would lead to coronary 8
insufficiency. But if, in the view of Mahler’s doctors, his heart defect was 9
‘compensated’, then this would mean that the body had learnt to cope with a 40
long-standing defect without showing any of the symptoms usually associated 41R
324 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 with such insufficiency, namely, shortage of breath and swollen legs, neither of
2 which is attested in Mahler’s case. Be that as it may, this diagnosis was far from
3 being a death sentence for a man like Mahler who, by contemporary reck-
4 oning, had already completed three-quarters of his life expectancy without
5 apparently suffering from any heart condition. Today the heart valve would
6 probably be replaced, but such an operation was still a distant prospect in
7 Mahler’s day. Hamperl’s diagnosis also had the advantage of ultimately
8 allowing Mahler to ignore Kovacs’s strict instructions to avoid all forms of
9 strenuous exercise, which would have meant a complete change in Mahler’s
10 lifestyle.
1 Above all, the total avoidance of all physical activity beyond the occasional
2 stroll – in other words, a ban on swimming and hiking – briefly turned Mahler
3 into a hypochondriac who kept stopping to check his pulse. For a time he had
4 followed Kovacs’s orders, which admittedly reflected the current state of knowl-
5 edge, but he soon noticed that his physical fitness was unimpaired and that it was
6 now the lack of physical exercise that was making him ill. So he reverted to his
7 former practices, albeit reducing them slightly, and was delighted to discover
8 that they did him the world of good. On more than one occasion he reassured
9 his friends that he felt as fit as he had done in the past. At least until the autumn
20 of 1910 there can be no question of a serious deterioration in Mahler’s health, as
1 one would have expected with someone suffering from a weak heart. In short,
2 Alma’s claim that Blumenthal’s diagnosis marked the beginning of the end for
3 Mahler is no more than a widow over-dramatizing the situation.
4 Hamperl’s diagnosis was to be confirmed by Mahler’s final fatal illness.
5 When Emanuel Libman of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York was asked for a
6 second opinion by the Mahlers’ regular doctor in the city, Joseph Fraenkel, he
7 too found that in addition to endocarditis there was also an older, chronic
8 mitral-valve defect with a presystolic-systolic heart murmur. But it must be
9 stressed that this heart defect was not the cause of Mahler’s death, even if it was
30 a decisive factor in rendering his heart non-resistant to bacterial infection. We
1 can no longer say whether a healthy heart would have succumbed to such a
2 bacterial attack at a time when there was no known remedy, and yet it is
3 correct to say that, medically speaking, such a valve defect is classified as a
4 ‘locus minoris resistentiae’ – a point at which bacterial pathogenics such as the
5 streptococcus that causes endocarditis can settle more readily than in healthy
6 parts of the heart, not least because the inflammation leads to an enlargement
7 of the surfaces that can serve as a colonization area.
8 In spite of all its imponderables, this diagnosis leads us, remarkably, to
9 Mahler’s twitching leg. When considering this characteristic, we already
40 adduced the theory that this tic was a throwback to a childhood illness, chorea
41R minor, more popularly known as St Vitus’s Dance. If Mahler did indeed suffer
from this illness as a child, then it is not unlikely that his mitral-valve defect 1
remained as a consequence, albeit undetected, a diagnosis that has repeatedly 2
been proposed by writers on the subject. The problem is that the evidence that 3
Mahler suffered from this particular type of chorea is so slender that we simply 4
cannot be certain: in short, the connection between his twitching leg and a 5
childhood chorea is impossible to prove. In the case of a person as highly 6
strung as Mahler, we may simply be looking at a nervous tic that he was not 7
always able to control. In much the same way, it was only with difficulty 8
that he was able to stop biting his fingernails at moments of nervous tension. 9
This may or may not have been the case. Whatever the answer, it is likely that 10
Mahler’s mitral stenosis was the fatal consequence of a rheumatic illness or 1
similar disease, and when we examine the frequency of Mahler’s generally 2
severe attacks of tonsillitis, then the link becomes more than likely: his striking 3
susceptibility to this complex of symptoms may more plausibly be seen as the 4
starting point for his final fatal illness than any congenitally weak heart. 5
One of our earliest indications of Mahler’s extreme susceptibility to sore 6
throats is a letter that he wrote to his friend Friedrich Löhr in the summer of 7
1885, when he was twenty-five. He was staying in Iglau and mentions that he has 8
just recovered from a sore throat. It is never entirely clear what he understood by 9
this term: was it a simple inflammation of the pharynx (pharyngitis), streptoc- 20
cocal angina (an acute inflammation of the tonsils and pharynx) or a specific 1
inflammation of the pharyngeal and/or palatine tonsils? Tonsillitis has long been 2
treated by antibiotics and by a routine operation involving either a tonsillectomy 3
(removal of the palatine tonsils) or an adenotomy (removal of the pharyngeal 4
tonsils) as such illnesses often recur; and in the case of pathologically altered 5
tonsils that frequently become infected, the pathogens may enter the blood- 6
stream, causing other organs to become infected and leading to rheumatic 7
disease, pyelitis and endocarditis. In some cases this may also mean the valvular 8
heart defect from which Mahler suffered. It is more than likely that at some point 9
in his life one of Mahler’s illnesses pursued a course of this nature, and his 30
biggest mistake, for which he himself must take full responsibility, is that he 1
never underwent a tonsillectomy, which would have been entirely possible at 2
this time, even if expensive and not without risk. A painful convalescence would 3
also have been involved. 4
The point of no return clearly came in May–June 1897. Mahler had just 5
taken up his new post as conductor at the Vienna Court Opera when a partic- 6
ularly severe sore throat left him so weak that he was seriously ill for a month 7
or more. This may have been the tonsillitis that led to his valvular heart defect. 8
It started as a sore throat that he hoped to get over fairly quickly but which led 9
to a relapse, forcing him to take to his bed again. As was often to be the case 40
with such attacks, an abscess formed directly behind or next to his palatine 41R
326 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 tonsils, a development that even today would be seen as a serious complica-

2 tion. In Mahler’s day, too, it was customary to open the abscess surgically and
3 drain away the pus. But such an abscess can return, especially if the affected
4 tonsil or tonsils are not removed. A century ago it was unusual to combine
5 these two methods – lancing the abscess and, at the same time, removing the
6 palatine tonsils. Instead, doctors preferred to wait for the abscess to clear up
7 before considering whether to operate on the tonsils. A letter that Mahler
8 wrote to Anna von Mildenburg on 12 June 1897 indicates that his doctors
9 planned to perform this operation and that even at this date they assumed a
10 chronic condition: ‘My throat is still in a dreadful state, and I fear I am going
1 to have to put up with one or two more abscesses. It appears, from what the
2 surgeon says, I have a neglected catarrh of the nose and throat and I have to
3 undergo daily treatment with silver nitrate. When I come back in August I
4 have to undergo another radical operation.’2 At this point we could quote Alma
5 and argue that the beginning of Mahler’s end dates from his decision, fourteen
6 years before his death, not to go ahead with this operation, which was presum-
7 ably to remove his tonsils, a decision that stemmed from the fact that
8 outwardly, at least, he appeared to have made a full recovery and was afraid of
9 the painful recovery process that would follow an operation. No doubt he also
20 thought that he would have no time for what he regarded as a triviality. But in
1 this way he ensured that the focus of the disease, presumably already present
2 in his throat, was allowed to develop.
3 A further chance to intervene occurred at a later date, but by then it was almost
4 certainly too late. Following a severe sore throat during the rehearsals for the first
5 performance of his Eighth Symphony in Munich, Mahler consulted his doctor on
6 his return to Vienna in September 1910. The latter was no doubt in favour of a
7 tonsillectomy but according to Alma, he preferred not to operate because Mahler
8 was so sensitive to pain. Instead, he made do with cauterizing the affected area, as
9 he had done in 1909. During previous years he had suffered numerous severe
30 throat infections. In January 1901, for example, Natalie Bauer-Lechner reports
1 that Mahler rehearsed Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in a wretched, enfeebled
2 state that recurred in the middle of March 1902, when he conducted three
3 concerts in St Petersburg. We may assume that in his letters Mahler never
4 mentioned any minor attacks of this kind but only the more serious ones. Such
5 an attack came in September 1910, when he was rehearsing in Munich. His
6 temperature evidently continued to rise, as is typical of such illnesses. Afraid that
7 such a troublesome illness would render him unfit for work, Mahler immediately
8 had himself wrapped in hot packs, while the concert promoter, Emil Gutmann,
9 used hand towels to wipe away the floods of perspiration. Like many of
40 Mahler’s other friends and admirers, Lilli Lehmann came to Munich for the
41R performance and was shocked to discover how sickly Mahler looked. Many other
observers commented on his appearance, too: he was as white as a sheet, his dark 1
eyes burnt like coals in his ashen face, and it was only with the greatest effort that 2
he was able to summon up his last remaining reserves of strength to conduct a 3
performance that was to prove the greatest triumph of his career. 4
In retrospect Bruno Walter felt that Mahler was already marked out by death, 5
an observation that is not entirely wide of the mark, for all that it is all too easy 6
to see such links with hindsight. None the less, everything points to the fact that 7
this severe sore throat, which he was unable to treat because of his concern for 8
his symphony and which may in any case have been incurable, sowed the seeds 9
of the illness that returned in New York in December 1910, leading to his final 10
fatal illness two months later. It was a vicious circle to which Mahler ultimately 1
succumbed, for it is highly likely that a severe sore throat – whether it was 2
during his childhood or adolescence or not until 1897 is immaterial – led to the 3
damage to his mitral valve. As a result of the accompanying bouts of fever, the 4
increasingly severe sore throats and worsening attacks of tonsillitis that can no 5
longer be distinguished from one another led to a further weakening of a body 6
which even when it was healthy had been placed under severe strain by an al- 7
together superhuman workload. By September 1910 Mahler’s constitution was 8
so weakened that it was unable to resist the new streptococcal attack that was 9
concentrated on the already damaged heart and, more particularly, the heart’s 20
weakest point, the morbidly affected mitral valve. It was here that the infection 1
settled and, finding a welcoming host, it spread to the rest of the body, finally 2
leading to a breakdown of the body’s entire defences. 3
It is unclear whether there were already signs of Mahler’s heart defect before 4
the latter was diagnosed in the summer of 1907. There are two independent 5
accounts by reliable witnesses, Alfred Roller and Bruno Walter, who report 6
that during rehearsals for a gala performance of Lohengrin in November 1905 7
Mahler kept rushing to and fro between stage and pit, moving the soloists and 8
chorus members around the stage with a display of physical strength that 9
onlookers found hard to credit, when Mahler suddenly stood still and clutched 30
his heart. Both Roller and Walter were deeply shocked by such an unexpected 1
move. But this cannot be regarded as the start of Mahler’s fatal illness as it may 2
simply have been an isolated instance of arrhythmia or nothing more serious 3
than a stabbing pain in the chest. In itself the evidence is not compelling. 4
When compared to this causal link between Mahler’s chronic bouts of 5
tonsillitis and his final heart disease, all other ailments from which he suffered 6
pale into insignificance. They none the less deserve to be mentioned as they 7
complete our picture of Mahler’s health, a picture that seems so depressing. 8
The second ailment from which Mahler suffered was haemorrhoids. Then as 9
now this was an embarrassing complaint and to that extent it is less well docu- 40
mented, and yet there can be no doubt that in Mahler’s case it was a serious, 41R
328 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 recurring ailment. We know practically nothing about Mahler’s first recorded

2 operation for haemorrhoids on 7 July 1889. He was then twenty-nine, unusu-
3 ally young for such an operation, for the swollen veins in the rectum and wall
4 of the anus normally occur only in older people. None the less, this is an
5 extraordinarily common complaint affecting some 80 per cent of the popula-
6 tion at some point in their lives. Mahler suffered renewed internal bleeding in
7 the autumn of 1893 and again in June 1895. On 3 September 1895 he wrote to
8 Natalie Bauer-Lechner to tell her that the bleeding had started again and that he
9 had no means of dealing with the problem – he had learnt by now to adopt a
10 rather more candid approach to the subject and had no inhibitions about telling
1 a female friend about his malaise.3 On 24 February 1901, as we have already
2 noted, he suffered the worst bleeding of his life. Although some sources claim
3 that it took place during a performance of Die Zauberflöte, the severity of the
4 haemorrhaging suggests that it began only afterwards. Whatever the truth of
5 the matter, his doctors described it as life-threatening, tempting us to think that
6 with Mahler everything was more dramatic than with other people, for haem-
7 orrhoidal bleeding is rarely life-threatening. In Mahler’s case, however, it seems
8 as if a serious vascular weakness had led to severe rectal diverticulation. The
9 bleeding was finally staunched by tamponing the rectum, sitz baths and iced
20 water having failed to help. Shortly afterwards Mahler underwent an operation,
1 although its exact nature is unclear. Presumably it involved a total excision that
2 dealt with the problem comprehensively as there are no further references to
3 this particular ailment in Mahler’s subsequent medical history. The only
4 mystery remains an entry in Alma’s diaries in January 1902 reporting ‘an
5 inflamed swelling’ that was reduced by means of ‘icebags, hot baths etc.’. Alma
6 wondered whether it was ‘because I resisted him so long’, in other words,
7 because she refused to have sexual intercourse with him. It remains unclear
8 whether the swelling was in the region of the anus or if it affected the penis.4
9 A further tiresome chronic complaint that dogged Mahler throughout his
30 life was his tendency to suffer from migraines. We have already mentioned the
1 attack before his concert with the Vienna Philharmonic in Paris in June 1900,
2 when he lay in his dressing room, as white as chalk, unable to move, with the
3 result that the concert began half an hour late. (According to one source, the
4 cause was annoyance at an anti-Semitic jibe from the orchestra.) Mahler
5 suffered another severe migraine during his visit to St Petersburg in March
6 1902, which was also the newlyweds’ honeymoon, allowing Alma to gain a
7 clear idea of the health of a man who she had been warned was ‘degenerate’. It
8 is worth bearing in mind that at this time migraines were considered a
9 woman’s ailment. Statistically speaking, it is almost certainly the case that even
40 today more women suffer from migraines than men. In Mahler’s case this
41R should not be taken to imply that he merely suffered from headaches of greater
or lesser severity. Among his symptoms, rather, were extreme sensitivity to 1

light and nausea, including vomiting, reducing him to a state of almost death- 2
like paralysis. Mahler reacted with extreme sensitivity to all departures from 3
his normal routine: if his hotel room or railway compartment was too warm 4
(he preferred his bedroom to be cool or even cold) and if the meal at the inn 5
disagreed with him, he would find himself suffering from a migraine. Aspirin 6
and brisk walks were his way of dealing with less serious attacks, but they 7
generally left him incapable of working, a condition that a high achiever like 8
Mahler found hard to accept. Alma must have been reminded of a malicious 9
remark by her friend Felix Muhr, who claimed that a doctor had told him that 10
Mahler was incurably ill and growing perceptibly weaker, a remark made in 1
December 1901, shortly before she and Mahler became engaged. Her reaction 2
is significant, for she always believed that she was placing excessive demands 3
on Mahler with a sexual appetite that she preferred to regard as a force of 4
nature: ‘Dear God, I shall nurse him like a child. I’ll not be the cause of his 5
downfall. I shall curb my longing & my passion – I want to make him better – 6
restore him to health through my strength and youth, my beloved master.’5 But 7
when she thought that she had suffered enough privation and was squandering 8
her strength and youth, she abandoned all pretence at self-sacrifice and 9
lavished her unbridled passion and desire on Walter Gropius instead. 20
Mahler’s problems were not restricted to his throat, anus and head but 1
affected his entire gastro-intestinal tract. His life was marked by a whole series 2
of contradictory diets, none of which he ever maintained for long, veering 3
between a vegetarian regime and salted and smoked meat, and between whole- 4
meal bread and pancakes with raisins, regardless of whether such experiments 5
were good for him or not. On this point, too, he adopted his usual precept: 6
however much the body might rebel, it still had to obey him. Mahler evidently 7
had a particularly delicate digestive system. Indeed, it could be said that all 8
his organs were more sensitive than those of ordinary mortals. As a result, his 9
private remarks are full of references to his poor digestion, to air in his stomach, 30
to stomach cramps and much else besides. Only towards the end of his life do 1
things seem to have settled down. 2
If we add to this litany of complaints the recurrent mouth ulcers that can 3
also lead to endocarditis, the occasional bout of lumbago and the spells of 4
dizziness from which Mahler suffered at bedtime and which he finally reports 5
having got rid of in the summer of 1905, we have a picture of dismaying clarity: 6
throughout his life Mahler was seriously and chronically sick. At this point 7
it would be possible, of course, to present the boldest conjectures on the 8
link between genius and illness as proposed by Wilhelm Lange-Eichbaum, 9
although there can be no question of any connection between genius and 40
madness as propounded by Cesare Lombroso. One thinks of Franz Kafka and 41R
330 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 his lifelong obsession with his physical infirmities, including the years that he
2 spent preoccupied with his pulmonary complaint, and its connection with his
3 creative neurosis. It is tempting to presuppose such a link with Mahler, too,
4 and, indeed, such a link has occasionally been advanced by writers on the
5 subject,6 but with unconvincing results. It is impossible to avoid the conclusion
6 that although Mahler was chronically ill, he never felt that he was and never
7 behaved as such. At least until the time of his final fatal illness, he clearly
8 succeeded in regarding all physical disorders as disagreeable side effects of life,
9 dealing with them without delay in order to be able to devote himself once
10 again to his work. He is unlikely to have given any thought to the links between
1 these recurrent problems, his medical knowledge being so limited that he did
2 not regard a ‘chronic sore throat’ as a threat and never thought that such symp-
3 toms might have any more serious consequences. Only the diagnosis of his
4 valvular heart defect threw him. But when far-reaching changes to his lifestyle
5 turned out to be unnecessary he again felt subjectively well and, while he
6 appears not to have forgotten the diagnosis entirely, he dealt with the informa-
7 tion by repressing it.
8 Mahler’s restless energy was no neurotic product of a permanent obsession
9 with death, and the symptoms that we have described cannot be interpreted as
20 evidence of a psychosomatic disorder, even if some of these symptoms invite
1 psychosomatic explanations. Throughout his entire life he was manifestly
2 preoccupied by the idea of death, but in a way that is true of all creative artists.
3 His work proclaims this preoccupation, which varied only in its intensity over
4 the course of his life. He would undoubtedly have subscribed to Thomas
5 Mann’s conviction in The Magic Mountain that we should prefer goodness and
6 love and never allow death to dominate our thoughts. However remarkable it
7 must seem, Mahler never regarded himself as someone who had been allotted
8 just a short life. Only during his final illness would this thought have occurred
9 to him, and even then there were moments when he was filled with hope and
30 asked for medication to support his increasingly weakened heart.
1 On one point Alma was undoubtedly right, when she accused her husband
2 of lacking the instinct for self-preservation.7 He hated mollycoddling, not
3 because he was obsessed with the notion of physical exercise but because he
4 regarded it as a sin against the mind to allow the body to degenerate to the
5 point when it could no longer meet the mind’s demands. He once grew very
6 agitated when his younger daughter Anna Justine – ‘Gucki’ – caught a chill. He
7 was furious with her for having done so in spite of all attempts to toughen her
8 up during their vacation in Toblach: ‘We’ve made her go bare-legged, we’ve
9 forbidden her warm clothing, and all that’s come of it is – anaemia. Sad!’8 For
40 Mahler, illness and weakness were symptoms of an incorrect lifestyle, not the
41R workings of fate to which we are haplessly exposed and which we need to
counter by taking care of ourselves. As far as we know, Mahler consulted his 1

doctor only when it was no longer possible to avoid doing so. 2
We may also observe this lack of any instinct for self-preservation whenever 3
Mahler attempted to counter organic weaknesses by means of harsh measures, 4
on which point, it is true, he was influenced by the beliefs of his own day. He 5
tried various radical diets in an attempt to deal with his obviously weak 6
stomach and intestines, not realizing that in the case of gastritis and other 7
digestive disorders a combination of wholemeal bread and raw fruit and 8
vegetables, however fashionable it may have been, was not necessarily the ideal 9
solution. In spite of her inadequate medical knowledge, Alma was right when 10
she told Mahler not to jump into the cold waters of the Wörthersee while his 1
body was still hot from sunbathing, then to spend hours swimming in the lake 2
before lying in the hot sun again, a routine he repeated several times a day. 3
Unfortunately, her advice went unheeded. For a man who suffered from severe 4
sore throats and tonsillitis, this was not an appropriate form of behaviour, but 5
Mahler refused to see this and felt that he was right to try to toughen himself 6
up in this way. 7
Karl Kraus spoke of Mahler taking up his new appointment in Vienna ‘with 8
the panache of a Siegfried’, and it is indeed difficult not to be reminded here of 9
Siegfried arriving at the Gibichung court in Götterdämmerung, when the hero 20
introduces himself to the men who are to become his mortal enemies: ‘I can 1
offer you neither lands nor men, nor a father’s house and court: I inherited 2
only this body of mine; living, I waste it away.’ Towards the end of his life, and 3
under the influence of various philosophical writings to which we shall later 4
return and which include the works of Gustav Theodor Fechner and Eduard 5
von Hartmann, Mahler became ever more convinced that the body, with all its 6
infirmities, was merely a mortal shell for the creative force that dwells within 7
all creatures. Higher individuals, by which he understood creative men and 8
women, had a kind of awareness of this creative energy working away within 9
them, and they saw it as a challenge to rise to this task, hence the striving and 30
permanent unrest, as Mahler called it, that constituted the artist’s happiness 1
and unhappiness – happiness in the few moments of perfection in a work, and 2
unhappiness in the artist’s constant struggle to deal with the adversities of life 3
that stood in the way of his creativity. In an important letter that he wrote to 4
Alma in the summer of 1909,9 Mahler even went so far as to argue that works 5
which are often described as immortal and that include Die Meistersinger von 6
Nürnberg, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Goethe’s Faust and, we may assume, 7
his own symphonies, were mere husks, outer shells, like the bodies of the 8
artists who created them. In spite of this, the products of this creative energy 9
are necessary as manifestations that allow the individual to grow and that 40
bring joy to the creator and to those who constitute the audience of these 41R
332 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 works. Like Fechner, Mahler regarded death as a transitional stage in our lives,
2 just as the individual life was such a stage. In turn this explains why even
3 during the serious crises of 1907 and 1910 Mahler neither longed for death nor
4 feared it. And it also explains why he was unable to ascribe to the often serious
5 symptoms of his manifold illnesses the importance that should ordinarily be
6 ascribed to them.
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41R
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The Fourth Symphony 7
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DÜSSELDORF conductor Julius Buths informed Mahler of his 4
W HEN THE
decision to perform the composer’s Fourth Symphony in the city in
November 1903, Mahler wrote back to express his delight:
5
6
7
So you mean to try to do the Fourth? This persecuted step-child that has so 8
far known so little joy in the world. I am tremendously glad you like the work, 9
and I can only hope that an audience educated by you will feel and under- 20
stand as you do. My own experience in general has been that humour of this 1
type (as distinct from wit or good humour) is frequently not recognized even 2
by the best of audiences.1 3
4
When Mahler had conducted the first performance of his Fourth Symphony 5
with the Kaim Orchestra in Munich in 1901, the work had found few friends. 6
Prior to this performance, Mahler had run through the work with the Vienna 7
Philharmonic, when the musicians had shown their old stubbornness with 8
regard to his music, causing Mahler to complain with peculiar bitterness: ‘And it 9
is on this miserable rubbish-heap that I have to make a blossoming world arise!’2 30
It had all sounded far too powerful, the finely spun threads of the work being 1
covered by the broad brush strokes of the orchestra. For the present Mahler 2
consoled himself with the thought that all the old animosities were to blame for 3
this negative impression. The Munich orchestra was far better disposed towards 4
him, even if it failed to reach the same high performance standards. Mahler took 5
with him to Munich a young soprano from the Vienna Court Opera, Margarete 6
Michalek, with whom his name has been amorously linked. He hoped that she 7
would bring the requisite naïve immediacy and childlike spontaneity to the final 8
movement, with its soprano solo, ‘Wir genießen die himmlischen Freuden’. 9
In fact, the Munich première was far from being a resounding success. Local 40
audiences still remembered the monumental Second Symphony, which had 41R
334 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 been performed in Munich the previous year. It, too, had proved unsuccessful,
2 but audiences had assumed that Mahler would at least seek to match this
3 gigantic work, if not to surpass it. Instead, they were taken aback by the neoclas-
4 sical, seemingly domesticated Fourth, a work that was considerably shorter
5 than the Second and scored for much smaller forces. Bemusement followed the
6 opening movement, while the hissing after the second movement was louder
7 than the applause. (In Mahler’s day, hissing, not booing, was a sign of disap-
8 proval.) The Adagio inspired fewer signs of displeasure, and the final movement
9 received the warmest applause of all, thanks, not least, to the soprano’s contri-
10 bution. Mahler saw himself confirmed in his suspicion that the good people of
1 Munich would use the Second as a stick with which to beat the Fourth. Above
2 all, he was angered by his colleagues who announced at the end of the final
3 rehearsal that they would understand the piece only after the first performance,
4 which they then proceeded to boycott. In Mahler’s view, it was to Felix
5 Weingartner’s credit that he was the only prominent musician to attend the
6 actual performance and to express his enthusiasm afterwards. Weingartner was
7 to conduct the work several times in the course of the years that followed.
8 A few weeks later Mahler conducted the piece again, this time in Berlin,
9 where the symphony was part of a programme otherwise conducted by
20 Strauss. On this occasion the audience, at least, was more responsive, even if
1 the critics were as hostile as they had been in Munich, where Theodor Kroyer
2 had described the work as ‘sickly, ill-tasting Supermusic’, adding that ‘the
3 weeds that germinated in the Third Symphony, in which Mahler still manages
4 to show himself from his better side, have burgeoned in this work into a thorny
5 mass of noxious vegetation’.3 In Berlin, Mahler at least had the satisfaction
6 of hearing Strauss expressing what for him was real enthusiasm and even
7 claiming that he himself could not have written anything like the Adagio.4
8 Mahler had been proved right: audiences had problems with the strange
9 humour of his Fourth Symphony, making the later and, indeed, the lasting
30 popularity of the work seem positively disconcerting. After all, what are we to
1 make of a ‘symphonia humoristica’ whose Scherzo, in second position, features
2 the Grim Reaper playing a fiddle tuned a whole tone higher to ensure that it
3 produces a particularly screeching, rough-sounding tone.5
4 Some three years had elapsed between the completion of the Third
5 Symphony in 1896 and the start of work on the Fourth during the unsettled
6 summer on the Aussee in 1899. It was the longest break from composition in
7 the whole of Mahler’s life. The main reason was, of course, his new post in
8 Vienna, with its tremendous workload, not to mention his work with the
9 Vienna Philharmonic, and perhaps also the mental exhaustion following his
40 completion of the monumental Third Symphony and the question that he must
41R have put to himself as to how he was to proceed. His refusal to be sidetracked
THE FOURTH SYMPHONY 335
from his creative work during the remaining years of his life seems also to have 1
stemmed from his realization that he could not afford another such interrup- 2
tion. The Fourth’s starkly contrasting resources, when compared to those of the 3
Third, are one answer to the question of how best to proceed, and as such may 4
be comparable to the answer proposed by Schoenberg in his opp. 6 and 8 Songs 5
and First String Quartet after he had broken off work on his monumental 6
Gurre-Lieder in 1903. And whereas the six movements of the Third Symphony 7
are all so obviously disparate, the four movements of the Fourth are all themat- 8
ically linked, culminating in the Wunderhorn song ‘Das himmlische Leben’, 9
which was in fact originally intended for the Third Symphony. One of the last 10
letters that Mahler wrote was to the Leipzig conductor and Mahlerian Georg 1
Göhler in response to the latter’s analysis of the Fourth. Mahler liked his 2
analysis very much but missed any mention of the thematic links between the 3
movements, links that were a matter of great importance to him.6 4
Mahler once told Natalie Bauer-Lechner that he really intended to write 5
only a symphonic humoresque, but it had then turned into a normal-length 6
symphony, whereas whenever he set out to write a normal symphony, it always 7
ended up three times the length. It was probably Robert Schumann who intro- 8
duced the term ‘humoresque’ to music when, appealing to Jean Paul, he gave 9
the title to his op. 20 piano piece. For Schumann, who, among German 20
composers, was the greatest admirer of Jean Paul’s writings before Mahler, 1
the term implied a felicitous combination of rapt infatuation and wit, but in 2
the case of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony there is a further deciding factor in the 3
form of the eerily frightening element that was already prefigured in the Pan- 4
like character of the introduction to the Third. Mahler explicitly reintroduces 5
this element into the Fourth in ways that the naïve listener may neither suspect 6
nor, indeed, hear. As he explained to Natalie Bauer-Lechner: 7
8
What I had in mind here was extraordinarily difficult to bring off. Think of 9
the undifferentiated blue of the sky, which is harder to capture than any 30
changing and contrasting shades. This is the basic tone of the whole work. 1
Only once does it become overcast and uncannily awesome – but it is not the 2
sky itself which grows dark, for it shines eternally blue. It is only that it seems 3
suddenly sinister to us – just as on the most beautiful day, in a forest flooded 4
with sunshine, one is often overcome by a shudder of Panic dread. The 5
Scherzo is so mystical, confused and uncanny that it will make your hair 6
stand on end. But you’ll soon see, in the following Adagio – where everything 7
sorts itself out – that it wasn’t meant so seriously after all.7 8
9
The very opening of the first movement presents its interpreters with a 40
problem. The bells that are heard in the first three bars and that recur in 41R
336 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 several subsequent episodes initially remind the listener of the Musical Sleigh
2 Ride attributed to Leopold Mozart and recall a spirit of childhood innocence,
3 and most commentators accept this interpretation. But in doing so they over-
4 look a passing remark that Mahler made to Natalie Bauer-Lechner in the
5 context of the first performance in Munich: ‘The first [movement] begins
6 characteristically enough, with the bells of the Fool’s Cap.’8 In short, it was not
7 the bells of a child’s sleigh that Mahler had in mind here but a fool’s cap fitted
8 with bells, just as the mirror that Till Eulenspiegel holds up to his fellow
9 human beings in Strauss’s tone poem of 1895 – the work of Strauss’s that
10 Mahler conducted most often – is also set with bells. In this way Mahler
1 establishes the semantic framework within which the piece as a whole is to be
2 interpreted. This apparently seraphic symphony offers an alternative view of
3 the world. As Adorno noted, nothing is as it appears on the surface. The result
4 is a figurative work of irony that embraces anguish and terror as surely as it
5 does the naïvely childlike. The Fourth Symphony dreams of a childhood for
6 which we must grieve but which we can no longer trust. Mahler wanted the
7 heavenly joys of the final movement, with its soprano solo, to be entrusted to
8 a singer with a voice as youthful and childlike as possible. He certainly did not
9 want a rich soprano voice. When Leonard Bernstein used a member of the
20 Tölz Boys’ Choir in his second complete recording of the symphony, he was
1 not only praised for his decision, he was also completely right.
2 Mahler’s humour in this ‘humoresque’ is clearly influenced by his reading of
3 Jean Paul’s ‘Vorschule der Ästhetik’, a text that we may assume he knew. In § 32
4 Jean Paul defines humour as ‘the inverted sublime’, destroying not the indi-
5 vidual but the finite through its contrast with the idea.9 According to Jean Paul,
6 the humorist does not look down on earth from a higher world, thereby
7 becoming conscious of its pettiness and vanity. Rather, he measures the world
8 of infinity against the finite world and sees a connection between them,
9 resulting in the laughter that contains within it both anguish and greatness.
30 Just as there is a world humour, so there is a world irony that ‘soars, singing
1 and playing, not just above the errors of the world (just as the former does not
2 merely soar above its follies) but also above all knowledge. Like a flame, it is
3 free, consuming and delighting us, easily moved and yet rising only towards
4 heaven’.10 Irony professes to treat all that is absurd in the world and in human
5 beings as if it were deadly serious. As such, it appears to depict everything
6 objectively, praising it in its total irrationality and in that way deriving its effec-
7 tiveness from the contrast between constant objectivization and the totality of
8 the folly that is being criticized, and to that extent it is closely related to satire.
9 In this sense Mahler’s Fourth Symphony is a work of humour and irony –
40 whether there is such a thing as humour and irony in music is an old argument
41R rendered obsolete by the present piece. This is no doubt what Mahler meant
when, speaking of irony and joviality in the same breath, he described the 1
mood of the first three movements as follows: ‘They breathe the joviality of a 2
higher world, one unfamiliar to us, which has something awe-inspiring and 3
frightening about it. In the last movement (“Das himmlische Leben”) the child 4
– who, though in a chrysalis-state, nevertheless already belongs to this higher 5
world – explains what it all means.’11 Humour and irony enter here, light- 6
footed, which is yet another reason why Mahler reduces his forces in such a 7
radical manner – how ironic that his malicious detractors so often accuse him 8
of sounding over-blown. Mahler writes symphonic chamber music: ‘There is 9
no music on earth that can be compared with ours,’ sings the soloist in the final 10
movement. And the childlike, unsophisticated nature of the remark is under- 1
scored by the singer’s false emphasis on the first syllable of the word ‘Musik’. 2
Mahler was particularly proud of the work’s subtle orchestration, a point that 3
emerges with some force from his various attempts to compare the style of 4
writing both in this movement and in the work as a whole with other images. 5
On one occasion he spoke of a kaleidoscopic picture whose pieces were repeat- 6
edly recombined and on another of the thousands of millions of droplets in a 7
rainbow that seem to dissolve and yet which produce a brightly coloured 8
picture. And on a third occasion he referred to the gossamer-like weave of a 9
delicate shawl that could be folded as small as a nutshell but when unfolded 20
would suddenly become unexpectedly large. 1
While working on the third movement, Mahler described it variously as an 2
Adagio and an Andante, finally settling on the performance marking ‘Ruhevoll’ 3
(‘Calm’), its soaring stateliness suggesting a glimpse of the smile of Saint Ursula, 4
who is mentioned in the fourth movement. Technically speaking, the third 5
movement is a set of double variations, a technique favoured by Brahms but one 6
which Mahler had hitherto eschewed. Here, too, Mahler provides his listeners 7
with a puzzle, for the movement seems as if it is going to die away pianissimo 8
on a wonderfully melancholic note. Shortly before the end we expect a coda to 9
develop out of the pianissimo melody and fade away gently in a spirit of rapt 30
transfiguration. But Mahler wants to provoke his listeners, and so he suddenly 1
introduces a Luftpause, after which the coda begins with an Adornoesque 2
‘breakthrough’ as unexpected as it is inappropriate. With a fortissimo passage in 3
all the brass and ascending and descending arpeggios and scales in the harp and 4
strings, it could even be argued that Mahler places an ironic gloss on the cat- 5
egory of the ‘breakthrough’: here it is, he seems to be saying, just when you least 6
expect it, disturbing the slumber of the Adagio. But then it passes as quickly as 7
it came, because instead of leading victoriously to the conclusion, the orchestral 8
outburst ends abruptly, and the movement draws to its close, ‘very tender and 9
heartfelt’ and ‘dying away completely’ in the flutes and high violins, just as it 40
would have ended if its night-time rest had not been so rudely disturbed. 41R
338 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 The performance marking at the start of the final movement is ‘Sehr

2 behaglich’ (Molto comodo), while the singer is instructed to sing ‘with an
3 expression of childlike joviality, entirely without parody’. Mahler was evidently
4 worried that listeners might somehow have noticed the inauthenticity of the
5 first three movements and concluded, wrongly, that the final movement was
6 meant to be a parody. In fact, the light that he sheds on the work at this point
7 is refracted through several lenses. After all, the childlike soprano sings of
8 heavenly joys but above all of murder and butchery, or, to be specific, the
9 Massacre of the Innocents, albeit transferred to a heavenly context and to a
10 different kind of victim. Those who are represented by the soprano lead an
1 ‘angelic existence’, but these angels, for all their childlike innocence, are no
2 different from earth’s inhabitants. They, too, are guilty of killing in order to
3 live. For them, too, there is the same guilty association between eating and
4 being eaten. It is not ambrosia and nectar and manna that are the food of
5 heaven but innocent animals: ‘John lets the lamb go, and butcher Herod looks
6 out for it! We lead a patient, blameless, patient, a dear little lamb to its death!
7 St Luke slaughters the ox without a moment’s thought or reflection.’ This
8 heaven is a slaughterhouse, and Herod, having butchered the children of
9 Bethlehem, is rewarded by his being appointed a butcher here too, a task that
20 he performs with ruthless concentration. Sts John and Luke do Herod’s dirty
1 work, while he watches over them. With all the brutal irony at his command,
2 Mahler has given musical expression to the bad joke of the Wunderhorn song,
3 ‘Der Himmel hängt voll Geigen’.
4 The movement consists of four verses and a coda, the start of each new verse
5 accompanied by shrill laughter by way of an ironic commentary. As Mahler
6 noted, all four movements are closely connected, the bells of the opening
7 movement returning here, but on this occasion they are combined with the
8 shrill fortissimo of grinning piccolos and flutes, and with screeching clarinets
9 that expose the apparent gentility of this congenial life in heaven for what it
30 actually is, a travesty of life on earth. Mahler also set ‘Das irdische Leben’ – life
1 on earth – with its embittered complaint of a starving child repeatedly
2 consoled by its mother’s promise of baked bread until it is too late. On earth
3 children die of hunger, while in heaven the angels live it up, but at the expense
4 of the innocent animals that are led to slaughter with childlike naïveté, so
5 innocent, indeed, that they run towards their butchers’ open knives: ‘If you
6 want deer or hare, they run towards you on the open road!’ It is clear that this
7 final movement cannot end on a note of warm-hearted sentimentality. There
8 is no comforting conclusion, no sense of triumph, no wise smile. Instead, the
9 movement dies away sombrely in the low notes of the harp and a final morendo
40 on the double basses. The humoresque is stifled, choked by the course of the
41R world. Here Mahler the ironist abandons the superior humour of Jean Paul’s
aesthetic outlook. The Adagio had tried to suggest that the Scherzo meant 1
no ill, but the final movement undermines this brief assurance. Mahler might 2
have said, Brechtian fashion, ‘In me you have someone you cannot rely on.’ 3
Although programme notes may still mislead readers into thinking that the 4
Fourth Symphony is imbued with the spirit of Mozart, the work turns out to 5
be the most radical commentary on the course of the world that Mahler ever 6
wrote. 7
8
9
10
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3 22
4
5
6
7 Vienna in 1900: Alma as a
8
9
Young Woman
10 (1901–3)
1
2
3
4 Turn-of-the-Century Vienna
5
Mahler has far less in common with fin-de-siècle Vienna than is generally
6
assumed to be the case, a remark that may surprise the reader, but one that is
7
none the less prompted both by the need for accuracy and as a way of justi-
8
fying the relative brevity of what follows. If the ensuing sketch turns out to be
9
less detailed than expected, this is not so much because our picture of turn-of-
20
the-century Vienna is now so clear and varied but because the list of famous
1
names that is rattled off more or less automatically in this context – it includes
2
such cultural giants as Gustav Klimt, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Adolf Loos,
3
Theodor Herzl, Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Joseph Maria
4
Olbrich, Ernst Mach and Mahler himself, to name only the most important –
5
gives a false impression in the specific case of Mahler. Although he contributed
6
to the cultural life of the city between 1897 and 1907, his life was not shaped
7
by turn-of-the-century Vienna. Rather, it was the Vienna of the years around
8
1875 that had left its mark on him, and that is an influence we have already
9
examined elsewhere in all the requisite detail.
30
Mahler was not quite thirty-seven when he returned to Vienna in 1897. By
1
now his thoughts and actions, his feelings and desires had all been clearly
2
conditioned, leaving little to be added. Moreover, he continued to work tire-
3
lessly. He was now director of the Court Opera, with time to compose only
4
during his summer vacations. He was also undertaking increasing numbers of
5
guest engagements as a conductor, especially of his own works: who, after all,
6
was better placed than Mahler himself – the greatest conductor of his age – to
7
ensure that they received a fair hearing in the face of violent opposition from
8
a hard core of recalcitrant listeners? Soon he was also to become the head of a
9
family, at least to the extent that he had time for such a commitment. During
40
his early years in Vienna he would often visit the city’s cafés and even managed
41R
VIENNA IN 1900: ALMA AS A YOUNG WOMAN 341
to get to the theatre – we know that he saw Molière’s Le Misanthrope and 1

Calderón’s El alcalde de Zalamea at the Burgtheater. Only very rarely did he 2
attend concerts, and even these visits were largely limited to his later years in 3
Vienna, when works by protégés such as Schoenberg were being performed. 4
On holiday, conversely, he often spent his free evenings attending operas 5
and concerts in other towns and cities. The famous photographs that show 6
him on his way to and from the Court Opera are typical: he trudges along, 7
eyes unseeing, negligently dressed and apparently oblivious to passing trams 8
and cars. The well-known oil painting by the caricaturist Theo Zasche, The 9
Ringstraße, Vienna (1900), depicts a street filled with some of the city’s most 10
famous inhabitants, elbowing their way through the strolling crowd as if mere 1
chance has brought them all here at the same time. Among them is Mahler. 2
The image can hardly be described as realistic for Mahler is depicted saun- 3
tering along and carefully observing his surroundings, whereas exactly the 4
opposite was the case. His appreciation of architecture and the visual arts was 5
poorly developed, and from this point of view a city famed for its decorative 6
arts could hardly engage his attention. That the Secession was the only 7
Viennese art movement to inspire him to forge any closer contacts with the 8
city was due entirely to Alma and her stepfather Carl Moll, who was a member 9
of the group. Mahler also met Klimt – Alma’s former idol – on the few occa- 20
sions when he socialized with others. 1
In the spring of 1907, by which date Mahler was already planning to leave 2
Vienna, Hermann Bahr published a book called simply Vienna. Although a 3
native of Linz, Bahr was by then the city’s most prolific critic and journalist – 4
Karl Kraus continued to refer to him, ironically, as ‘the gentleman from Linz’. 5
The book was immediately impounded by the authorities in Vienna and for a 6
time it was unobtainable. If it caused offence, this was not for moral or polit- 7
ical reasons but because it was a venomous attack on the city written by one of 8
its most perceptive critics: 9
30
In the rest of Europe, Vienna is known for the fact that it is always Sunday 1
there and that the spit is for ever turning on the hearth. It is also a Capua of 2
the mind, where people live in a semi-poetic state that is dangerous to the 3
whole. They also know the names of a number of waltzes by Lanner and 4
Strauß: one of them is called ‘Life Is a Dance’, another one ‘Glad To Be Alive’, 5
a third one ‘Cheerful Even When Times Are Hard’. They also know a few 6
choruses along the lines of ‘The Viennese Never Go Under’, ‘Never Let the 7
World See that You’re Sad’ and ‘Always Be Merry’, and also that it is the city of 8
roast chickens, smart carriages and a world-famous sense of Gemütlichkeit. To 9
the outside world it has retained this reputation as a city lulled by music and 40
dancing, a city of harmless, slightly dissolute, rather inactive and incompetent 41R
342 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 people who are none the less good and kind. But those who are fated to live
2 here find this hard to believe. Rather, they are filled with anger.
3
4 And Bahr goes on to give vent to that anger, poking fun at the true Viennese
5 who shower their city with scorn and contumely but who never think of
6 leaving it. The true inhabitant of Vienna, Bahr concluded, hates his fellow citi-
7 zens but cannot live without them. He despises himself but also finds himself
8 a touching spectacle. He is permanently abusive towards others but demands
9 that others praise him. He is always complaining and threatening but puts up
10 with everything, except when people want to help him, and then he resists all
1 proffered assistance. The Viennese are profoundly insecure. They never know
2 how to react to others, how to judge them and how to behave. In order to find
3 out what they should do, they ignore Goethe’s advice which is that they should
4 ask the opinion of beautiful women and rather turn to the Viennese institution
5 that they idolize most of all: the theatre. For the true Viennese, the theatre does
6 not imitate life, rather life imitates the theatre. Nowhere else are there so many
7 talented people – people with a talent for politics and the arts. But this talent
8 is left untapped and expresses nothing but itself. In short, it is hollow. However
9 much talent there may be in the city, there is no one capable of embodying it.
20 And with this Bahr comes to the nub of his critique of Vienna, namely, a
1 lack of real people in a city that is otherwise richly endowed. Here Bahr was
2 clearly expressing his own personal disenchantment with a city that forced
3 him to decamp to Salzburg with his wife, Anna von Mildenburg, whom he
4 married in 1909, although, as Thomas Bernhard would have pointed out, it is
5 questionable whether Salzburg was really preferable to Vienna:
6
7 Hence the horror that they feel when a real person appears in their midst.
8 They are terrified. They want to creep away and hide. On the stage at least.
9 For here they know that it will all be over in three hours. The Viennese can
30 still bear reality in the form of pretence. And yet even here their admiration
1 for Mitterwurzer, Kainz and Mildenburg still has more of the sense of a
2 lascivious thrill to it, as though they are in the presence of a dangerous
3 animal. And they are happy that these animals have been chained up by art.
4 The Viennese have never tolerated a real person in their midst, not
5 Beethoven, nor Schreyvogel, nor Hebbel, nor Kürnberger, nor Bruckner, nor
6 Hugo Wolf, nor Waldmüller, nor Klimt, nor Burckhard, nor Mach, nor
7 Mahler, no one. Real people are always kept in a cage of immense loneliness.
8 The Viennese never let them enter their dear carefree easy lives.1
9
40 It is easy to see why the Viennese should have taken this amiss, and yet with
41R his tremendous ability to sniff out trends and see which way the wind was
blowing, Bahr struck a raw nerve: the Viennese – not just the anti-Semites 1
among them – felt only malice towards Mahler. They were unable to abide the 2
living presence of a genius going about his daily business. Mahler’s disenchant- 3
ment with the city, his ultimate resignation and the mendaciousness of the 4
locals’ grief when he returned to Vienna to die – all of this is explained by 5
Bahr’s clinical diagnosis. 6
In the twenty or so years during which Mahler had lived either in the Austrian 7
provinces or Germany or in major cities such as Prague and Budapest, the dual 8
monarchy had changed, and not to its own advantage. The fault lines were 9
becoming increasingly visible and already allowing a glimpse of the catastrophe 10
that was to be the First World War. A simple statistic may suffice here: between 1
1871 and 1917 Germany had five chancellors, whereas Hungary had seventeen 2
prime ministers during the same period, Austria as many as twenty, a figure that 3
points the way forward to the sort of conditions that obtained at the time of the 4
Weimar Republic. Electoral reforms that were implemented in 1896 in response 5
to mounting social pressure were only half-hearted at best, and it was not until 6
1907 that the decisive step was taken in this regard, by which date it was already 7
too late. The planned reforms of a politician like Eduard Franz Joseph von Taaffe 8
– the longest-serving prime minister in the dual monarchy at this period – were 9
designed, by his own admission, to keep the two nations in a state of well- 20
tempered dissatisfaction and in the longer term they were bound to fail. 1
Nationalist aspirations in the multiracial state and the decline in political liber- 2
alism that was bound up with electoral reform had a disruptive and even a 3
damaging effect. The suicide of Crown Prince Rudolf in Mayerling in 1889 was 4
a severe blow not only for the emperor, whose wife, Elisabeth, was to be assassin- 5
ated by an Italian anarchist nine years later, but also for the liberals who had 6
placed their hopes in him – whether they were right to do so is another matter. 7
In 1895 Count Badeni was appointed prime minister, and two years later he tried 8
to solve the problem of the conflicting demands of the Czech and German 9
languages in Bohemia and Moravia by giving them both equal status, only for 30
the German-speaking population to react with undisguised fury, leading to a 1
state of near civil war, the seismic repercussions of which were felt in Parliament 2
itself, resulting in Badeni’s downfall. Attempts on the part of his successors to 3
turn back the clock in favour of the Germans, while making minor concessions 4
to the Czechs, left both parties in the conflict dissatisfied and merely increased 5
the tensions between them. Tensions also mounted between workers, members 6
of the lower and upper middle classes, and between capital, industry and agri- 7
culture. It was entirely typical of the age that these mounting pressures led to an 8
increasing radicalization of right- and left-wing politics. 9
From 1879 onwards, the German Liberal Party grew more and more unattrac- 40
tive and at the same time lost seats in Parliament. In 1891 a new party entered the 41R
344 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 lower house in the form of the Christian Socialists. Initially they had only four-
2 teen representatives, but by 1911, the date of the last elections in pre-war Austria,
3 there were seventy-six. Meanwhile, the Socialists made even greater gains,
4 advancing from fifteen in 1897 – the first time they took part in an election – to
5 eighty-seven in 1907. In 1911 that number then fell back slightly to eighty-two.
6 Social democracy in Austria was largely the work of two of Mahler’s old friends,
7 Engelbert Pernerstorfer and Victor Adler. They had worked together on the
8 German Liberals’ programme in Linz in 1882, when they had been famous for
9 their left-wing views. Another member of their group at that time was the radical
10 nationalist member of Parliament, Georg von Schönerer, who was soon leading
1 the Pan-German Party, with its explicitly nationalist and racist programme.
2 Schönerer thus became the spokesman of an explosive mixture of anti-clericalism
3 and anti-Semitism derived, not least, from the ideas of Wagner, to whom he was
4 fond of appealing. The movement’s watchword was ‘Without Judea and Rome we
5 shall build the German cathedral’. (Hitler paid tribute to Schönerer in Mein
6 Kampf, while deploring his organizational and tactical errors.)
7 Thanks to his wild polemics and inflammatory politics, Schönerer soon found
8 himself on the margins of the parliamentary system and had to make way for
9 Karl Lueger, a far subtler tactician, who set himself up as the mouthpiece of the
20 Christian Socialists in Vienna. With his ‘cosier’ variant of anti-Semitism (‘I shall
1 decide who is a Jew’ was one of his more infamous remarks), he finally managed
2 to become the mayor of Vienna in 1897 in the face of the emperor’s opposition.
3 Once again it is worth pointing out that this was the year in which Mahler
4 returned to Vienna, where he found himself overwhelmed by a particularly viru-
5 lent form of anti-Semitism that did not even spare the director of the Vienna
6 Court Opera. Unlike Schönerer, Lueger was immensely popular in Vienna.
7 ‘Handsome Karl’ cut an imposing figure with his Zeus-like features, his fine head
8 of hair and a luxurious beard. He was also blessed with considerable gifts as an
9 orator, a talent that he exploited to the full in appealing to the basest anti-Semitic
30 and anti-modernist instincts, while politely distancing himself from the excesses
1 bound up with such sentiments. He brought no new arguments to the debate but
2 instead showed great skill in orchestrating the anti-Semitism that was already
3 well established. That his efforts fell on fertile ground is clear from a widely
4 publicized pamphlet, ‘Our Father Lueger’, which was circulated in the summer
5 of 1896 in an attempt to shoot down resistance to a future Mayor Lueger:
6
7 Our Father Lueger, who art in Vienna, hallowed be thy name, protect our
8 Christian people, thy will be done to all Christian peoples on earth, give us no
9 stock exchange but only Christian bread, forgive all debtors who have been
40 betrayed by the hands of Jewish usurers as we forgive them that trespass against
41R us, lead us not into temptation but deliver us from the Jewish evil. Amen.2
As in so many other respects, Vienna was to lead the way on the road to 1
universal disaster, the city’s anti-Semitism being fuelled and ‘justified’ by the 2
arrival of Eastern European Jews. (Hitler’s hatred of the Jews was another 3
by-product of this development.) In 1880 there were 71,600 Jews in Vienna. 4
Within a decade that number had risen to 118,500, and by 1900 it was 147,000. 5
Like many assimilated Jews, Mahler, too, had difficulty with what Arnold 6
Zweig called the ‘Eastern European Jewish countenance’. But it made no differ- 7
ence to assimilated Jews or to former Jews like Mahler that they distanced 8
themselves from their Eastern European brethren, for anti-Semites hated 9
assimilated upper middle-class Jews from Vienna’s exclusive residential areas 10
at least as intensely as they hated the Jews from the ghettos of Poland and 1
Galicia. Austrian Jews were invariably the losers in all these historical develop- 2
ments, and it made no difference how they defined themselves and how they 3
behaved or whatever political positions they thought it appropriate to adopt. 4
As so often, it was Arthur Schnitzler who found the pithiest phrases when in 5
his novel The Road to the Open (1908) he devised the following dialogue 6
between the cynical old Viennese Jew Salomon Ehrenberg and the Jewish 7
Social Democrat Therese Golowski: 8
9
‘I assure you, Therese, that you Jewish Social Democrats will suffer exactly 20
the same fate as the Jewish Liberals and German Nationalists.’ 1
‘How’s that?’ Therese asked with her typical hauteur. ‘In what way will we 2
suffer exactly the same fate?’ 3
‘In what way? I’ll tell you. Who created the liberal movement in Austria? 4
The Jews! By whom were the Jews betrayed and abandoned? By the liberals! 5
Who created the German Nationalist movement in Austria? The Jews. Who 6
left the Jews in the lurch as if they were dogs? The Germans. Exactly the same 7
will happen to you with Socialism and Communism. As soon as the soup has 8
been served, you’ll be driven from the table. It was always like that, and it will 9
always remain so.’3 30
1
The journey from German Nationalism to Socialism that was undertaken by 2
people like Adler, Pernerstorfer and Bahr himself was no less unusual than the 3
one from German Nationalism to Pan-Germanism and anti-Semitism that was 4
taken by Schönerer, for example. The breeding ground for many features of the 5
sort of late Romantic Socialism that was widespread among intellectuals and 6
artists at this time was a mixture of Marx, Nietzsche and Dostoevsky allied to a 7
pre-Expressionist sentimentality based on the slogan that all men are brothers. 8
All these features may be found in Mahler, too. Like Adler, he had not forgotten 9
his humble background. Adler had worked as a doctor among the poor and 40
knew from the sufferings of the inhabitants of Vienna’s tenement buildings that 41R
346 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the prosperity of the 1870s and later had a darker side to it. ‘How can one be
2 happy when a single creature still suffers on earth?’ According to Alma, Mahler
3 was fond of repeating this sentence of Dostoevsky’s. She also adds that it was a
4 favourite remark of other uninhibited egocentrics. According to Adler’s widow,
5 Mahler voted for the Socialist candidate in the 1901 elections, an act of aston-
6 ishing boldness on the part of a director of the Court Opera. The name of the
7 candidate was Victor Adler, but Mahler’s decision to vote for him was almost
8 certainly more than the result of their long-standing friendship.4 Here, too,
9 Mahler showed no trace of the attitude adopted by the writers of Young Vienna,
10 a group of authors remote from politics and devoid of social concerns.
1 Nor did Mahler share the anxieties felt by the local bourgeoisie when the
2 Socialists marched through Vienna for the first time on 1 May 1890, a march
3 organized by Adler and, as such, felt to represent a different kind of threat
4 from the one posed by Princess Metternich’s Flower Festival that was held in
5 the Prater each year. The sense of relief was tangible when the Viennese real-
6 ized that the marching workers were well behaved and even picturesque, with
7 none of the feared associations of a downtrodden proletariat ready to storm
8 the bastions of social order. The sixteen-year-old Hugo von Hofmannsthal
9 struck a precocious and blasé note: ‘Vienna, 1 May 1890, Prater at 5 p.m. If the
20 rabble rages in the streets, well then, my child, let them shout! For their loves
1 and hates are vulgar! As long as they leave us time, let us devote ourselves to
2 more beautiful things. Leave the rabble in the alleyways: empty phrases,
3 hubbub, lies, pretence will fade away and vanish. The beautiful truth alone will
4 survive.’5 In the event, it was not the workers’ movement that curtailed Young
5 Vienna’s aestheticist attempts to devote itself to beauty. Hofmannsthal’s atti-
6 tude cannot be entirely excused by reference to his tender years but was typical
7 of the apolitical, otherworldly approach of his entire generation, an attitude
8 that left even the resigned Naturalists and bohemian anarchists looking like
9 militant activists. Hermann Broch criticized this attitude in his essay on
30 Hofmannsthal, referring to the ‘ethical indifference’ that resulted when polit-
1 ical thought atrophied and there was a concomitant increase in aesthetic
2 thinking. In turn, he believed that this explained the decorative tendencies on
3 the part of the overwhelming majority, who, creatively impotent, ended up
4 worshipping at the shrine of naked hedonism.6 A high achiever like Mahler
5 was constitutionally incapable of such an outlook. According to Alma, he
6 stumbled upon a May demonstration in 1905, when he was walking through
7 the city. It was just as well behaved as it had been fifteen years earlier. For a
8 time he joined the procession and returned home full of enthusiasm: these
9 men, he said, were his brothers. They represented the future.7
40 In spite of all the country’s inadequacies, it comes as no surprise to discover
41R that it was in Vienna that Mahler was able to unlock his greatest potential
in the opera house – he had already demonstrated that he could compose 1

anywhere: all that he needed for that was mountains, green meadows and a 2
lake, and these he could find all over Austria. Until shortly before the end of 3
his tenure in Vienna, he was able to rely on the liberality of the court admin- 4
istrators and on the tolerance of the emperor who, however vaguely, must have 5
felt that his opera house was in the hands of a man of genius unlike any other 6
in the history of an institution that had always been given preferential treat- 7
ment. Such support undoubtedly had a productive and liberating effect on 8
Mahler’s work both as a conductor and as a reformer. From this point of view, 9
it is even necessary to correct Robert Musil, who at the start of his novel The 10
Man Without Qualities paints a picture of the legendary country of Kakania 1
that claims that 2
3
The country’s administration was conducted in an enlightened, unobtrusive 4
manner, with all the sharp edges cautiously smoothed over, by the best 5
bureaucracy in Europe, which could be faulted only in that it regarded 6
genius, and any brilliant individual initiative not backed by noble birth or 7
official status, as insolent and presumptuous. But then, who welcomes inter- 8
ference from unqualified outsiders? And in Kakania, at least, it would only 9
happen that a genius would be regarded as a lout, but never was a mere lout 20
taken – as happens elsewhere – for a genius.8 1
2
On this point Musil was wrong. Sigmund Freud and his vain attempts to 3
obtain a chair at the University of Vienna no doubt confirmed him in his 4
conviction, but it is one of the scarcely credible contradictions in the character 5
of the city that although men of genius like Klimt and Mahler were hated and 6
reviled, it was only in Vienna that they were able to work and that even if only 7
for a limited period of time they received the money and organizational 8
opportunities they needed to pursue their artistic goals unfettered by others. 9
In the case of Mahler and his operatic reforms, there is no indication that the 30
authorities ever tried to dictate his actions or influence his work. Only towards 1
the end of his appointment did problems arise as a result of the sizeable box- 2
office deficit and his increasingly lengthy periods of absence. We shall return 3
to these problems in due course. 4
To the extent that Vienna and, more generally, Austria were willing to 5
tolerate a genius at least for a time, especially when that genius added to the 6
lustre of cultural institutions such as the Burgtheater and the Court Opera, then 7
Bahr’s scepticism was misplaced. Ultimately, however, he was to be proved 8
right. He himself offers an explanation, however ambiguous, for Vienna’s ability 9
to tolerate Mahler as long as it did, at least as director of the Court Opera – the 40
city’s hostility to his music, conversely, continued to grow, starting with the 41R
348 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Vienna Philharmonic and eventually extending, with few exceptions, to the

2 music-loving public as a whole. According to Musil, Kakania was
3
4 just barely able to go along with itself. One enjoyed a negative freedom there,
5 always with the sense of insufficient grounds for one’s own existence, and
6 lapped around by the great fantasy of all that had not happened or at least not
7 yet happened irrevocably as by the breath of those oceans from which
8 mankind had once emerged. Events that might be regarded as momentous
9 elsewhere were here introduced with a casual ‘Es ist passiert . . .’ – a peculiar
10 form of ‘it happened’ unknown elsewhere in German or any other language,
1 whose breath could transform facts and blows of fate into something as light
2 as thistledown or thought. Perhaps, despite so much that can be said against
3 it, Kakania was, after all, a country for geniuses; which is probably what
4 brought it to its ruin.9
5
6 Broch offered a more accurate and pointed diagnosis than Musil when he
7 spoke of a value vacuum in Austria at the end of the nineteenth century.
8 Vienna, he went on, was the centre of that vacuum, joyously celebrating an
9 apocalypse that affected the city’s whole attitude to life and that was summed
20 up in lines from Die Fledermaus, ‘Glücklich ist, wer vergißt, was doch nicht zu
1 ändern ist’ (‘Happy he who forgets what can’t be changed’). Ever since Johann
2 Strauß’s operetta had received its first performance in Vienna in 1874, these
3 lines had coloured all that the Viennese thought and felt. Those inhabitants
4 whose interests were earthier parodied them as ‘Glücklich ist, wer verfrißt, was
5 nicht zu versaufen ist’ (‘Happy he who guzzles up all that can’t be drunk’). They
6 rejected Mahler’s music because it showed them, trenchantly and even
7 brutally, that although there was much that could not be changed, they should
8 never forget what could be changed for the better. In the wistfulness of the
9 transient it held out a promise of utopian happiness and described that happi-
30 ness in music. But these same people then went on to acclaim Mahler when he
1 presented them with the unvarnished truth of the great operas and music
2 dramas in bold and rigorous performances that broke with all the comforting
3 conventions of operatic routine. Vienna’s art lovers were able to tolerate this
4 because, as Bahr pointed out, it was all over in three or four hours at the most.
5 The feeling of superiority would have been intolerable if it had lasted any
6 longer, for, however much they may have complained about the prevailing
7 culture, few thought of abandoning it for good and of living in the rarefied heights
8 to which Mahler himself aspired: the air was simply too thin, the earthy pleasures
9 too few. The cultural historian Carl E. Schorske, to whom we owe a number of
40 important studies of turn-of-the-century Vienna, has argued that by the middle
41R of the nineteenth century two cultures coexisted in the city, representing two
different sets of values: one was the rational culture of the law and the written 1
word as embodied in the University and its brilliant traditions of philosophy, 2
psychology, economics and jurisprudence, while the other was a culture of sensu- 3
ality and charm manifest in the visual arts and the theatre. For the aristocracy and 4
members of the middle class, this aesthetic culture was a symbol of social status 5
and personal happiness, providing them with a feel-good factor found nowhere 6
else in Europe. Once this aesthetic and emotional culture got out of hand and 7
started to supplant a rational culture more closely linked to moral considerations, 8
the result was a culture of self-indulgence that went hand in hand with moral 9
indifference, as Karl Kraus was one of the first to point out. Feelings of decadence 10
and pessimism had first made themselves felt in Europe at the start of the nine- 1
teenth century, most notably in France. In fin-de-siècle Vienna they produced the 2
most exquisite frost patterns on windows looking out on grim reality – they are 3
the same patterns as those seen by Schubert’s wanderer in Winterreise – and the 4
more luxuriant they became, the more opaque was the view of national tensions, 5
economic crises and social ills. Behind these windows, however, there were plenty 6
of opportunities for narcissism to thrive – the narcissism that fuelled turn-of-the- 7
century art and helped that art to evolve in subtly differentiated ways. It is this 8
atmosphere that is generally described as the fin de siècle. 9
The fin de siècle is best summed up as the feeling that contemporaries 20
should avoid nationalist stereotyping, without drifting into the opposing Social 1
Democrat camp. (As we have already noted, Mahler cannot be described as a 2
fully paid-up member of this movement, but the mood still needs to be 3
described in order to depict the context in which he operated.) It is the feeling 4
of dissatisfaction towards state authority and imperialist expansionism, a 5
feeling mitigated in the dual monarchy by a certain sentimental attachment to 6
the old emperor – a final echo of this typically Austrian attitude may be found 7
in Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March, with its desperate belief in monar- 8
chism. It is also the feeling of profound scepticism towards official religion. And 9
it is the fascination with the fragmentation of the self that was diagnosed by 30
empirio-criticism and that led to crises surrounding the identity of the self in 1
the literature of Young Vienna. When Ernst Mach decreed that the self was irre- 2
trievably lost, contemporaries believed him, while attempting to counter his 3
claim by means of yet greater refinement. Freud, it is true, sought to champion 4
the threatened self at the expense of the id, but his theories found little favour, 5
early psychoanalysis being regarded as a threat to bourgeois stability, exposing 6
areas that risked undermining the double standards of the age. Mahler, of 7
course, had no personal dealings with Freud until the two of them met for their 8
famous walk in Leiden in 1910. There is no evidence that he knew more about 9
Freud than any other educated person in Vienna during this period, although 40
Klaus Pringsheim mentions a conversation with Mahler on the subject of the 41R
350 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 psychoanalyst. He then refers to Mahler in October 1910, after his meeting with
2 Freud and shortly before his departure for his final visit to America. On another
3 occasion Mahler’s old friend Bertha Zuckerkandl asked him whether there was
4 not a psychology of cities that could be applied to Vienna, for example, a city
5 that produced men of genius, only to kill them off. ‘Yes, you are right. Freud
6 should add a psychology of cities to his list of publications. What terrible inner
7 struggles there must have been during Vienna’s formative years. Conflicting
8 influences that give the character its duality. Unfortunately, you can’t uncover
9 the subconscious of a city.’10
10 We need to say more about the sense of fin de siècle as a characteristic
1 feature of the age. Contemporaries felt that the legacy bequeathed by their
2 fathers’ generation, when rapid expansion had followed the founding of the
3 Reich in 1871, often allowing art lovers to lead lives freed from the need to
4 earn a living, was more of a burden than a blessing, and yet they lacked the
5 strength to extricate themselves from the quagmire. At the same time, the
6 obsessively detailed interest in the most minute workings of the psyche was
7 seen to culminate in mysticism rather than self-knowledge. Allied to this was
8 the fractured self-awareness of a generation of dilettantes who, looking down
9 contemptuously on the philistines who went to the theatre to see operettas and
20 unpretentious plays, may have acquired an exquisite taste for art but who
1 themselves lacked the ability to create powerful masterpieces like those of
2 Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Wagner, preferring to express themselves
3 instead in the prose poem, the lyric drama and the Nietzschean review.
4 Here, too, it is clear that Mahler’s mighty symphonies belonged to a different
5 generation with a different frame of mind – the artists of Young Vienna were
6 all born between 1870 and 1880 and were thus ten or twenty years younger
7 than Mahler. There was also a need to escape from the unnatural, mindless,
8 barbaric present, a need that contemporaries met by seeking refuge in
9 artificiality. None of the great fin-de-siècle writers, be they Huysmans or
30 Maeterlinck, Schnitzler or Hofmannsthal, offers any true descriptions of
1 nature, for which we have to turn, rather, to the symphonies of Mahler. Finally,
2 there was an attempt at this time to place a positive gloss on the gloomy
3 prospects held out by genetics and by current theories of degeneration. If
4 contemporaries lacked the healthy young blood of an up-and-coming genera-
5 tion, they could at least sail down the river of European decadence, exposing
6 their frayed nerve endings and perishing amid the convulsions of new sensa-
7 tions with all the dignity shown by the later Roman emperors while awaiting
8 the barbarian hordes.
9 Perhaps the finest description of the spirit of the age is the one penned by
40 the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal in his first essay on Italy’s arch-decadent,
41R Gabriele D’Annunzio:
We have nothing but a sentimental memory, a paralysed will and the 1

uncanny gift for self-duplication. We watch our lives pass us by; we empty the 2
cup betimes and yet remain perpetually thirsty . . .. We have, as it were, no 3
roots in life and wander around among life’s children like clairvoyant shades 4
who are yet blind to the daylight. . . . People anatomize their own emotional 5
lives or they dream. Reflection or fantasy, the image in a mirror or alterna- 6
tively in a dream. Old furniture and new neuroses are modern. The psycho- 7
logical exercise of listening to grass grow is modern, as is splashing around in 8
a purely imaginary world of wonders. Paul Bourget and the Buddha are 9
modern, the dissection of atoms and playing ball with the universe; equally 10
modern is the act of dissecting a whim, a sigh or a scruple; and modern, too, 1
is the instinctual, almost somnambulistic abandonment to every manifesta- 2
tion of beauty, to a colour chord, a dazzling metaphor, a wonderful allegory.11 3
4
To sum up, this is not a diagnosis of Mahler’s understanding of the age, for 5
he held himself aloof from turn-of-the-century Vienna. But it is a diagnosis of 6
the world inhabited by Alma Schindler, a world in which Mahler conducted 7
and directed operas and composed. We must imagine that what found its way 8
into his music and flowed out of it again, encountering bewilderment or 9
enthusiasm, hatred or affection, was a process of osmosis. His music is not the 20
immediate or unreflected expression of the fin de siècle but a part of the 1
diagnosis of the age and a reflection on it. 2
3
4
The Secession
5
‘To the age its art, to art its freedom’. These are the words emblazoned in letters 6
of gold on the building housing the Vienna Secession, a structure designed by 7
Joseph Maria Olbrich and erected in record time between April and November 8
1898 at the western end of the Karlsplatz, where it still stands. Even from a 9
purely architectural standpoint, it was in marked contrast to the Artists’ House 30
next to the Musikverein on the other side of the square. It immediately came 1
to symbolize the city with its floral dome, known to the locals as the ‘golden 2
cabbage’. Until now we have tended to stress the differences between turn-of- 3
the-century Vienna and Mahler’s musical imprint, but with regard to the 4
Secession we need to adopt another point of view, a shift of perspective due to 5
more than just Mahler’s famous involvement in the exhibition of Max Klinger’s 6
Beethoven statue and the presentation of Gustav Klimt’s Beethoven frieze and 7
other works in the spring of 1902. As in other artistic centres across Europe, 8
the years leading up to the turn of the century were marked by the emergence 9
of a group of young painters and sculptors opposed to the dominance of tradi- 40
tional and academic views on art and eager to strike out on a path of their own. 41R
352 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 In doing so, they seceded from the main body of artists and formed an associ-
2 ation of their own, hence the term ‘Secession’. First off the mark had been the
3 Munich Secession, whose artists had exhibited their work in Vienna in 1894,
4 encouraging their Viennese colleagues to follow suit. By 1897 – the year of
5 Mahler’s appointment – they were able to announce their plans:
6
7 A band of younger artists, inspired by their ideal and in spite of everything
8 believing unshakeably in Vienna’s artistic future, has now formed an
9 Association of Visual Artists in Austria which, supported by a number of true
10 and self-sacrificial art lovers, is called upon to work in a complementary, pure,
1 ideal and artistic way without any cooperative or material considerations.
2
3 For today’s readers, the names of those artists who from the outset formed
4 the core of the Secession represent all that was most significant about Viennese
5 art in the years around 1900: Gustav Klimt; Kolo Moser; Carl Moll, Alma
6 Schindler’s stepfather; Alfred Roller, who was introduced to Mahler at the
7 Klinger exhibition and who soon became his most crucial associate in his
8 attempts to reform the operatic stage; Otto Wagner, who was the city’s most
9 forward-looking architect before Adolf Loos; Joseph Maria Olbrich, who
20 designed the Secession’s headquarters; and Josef Hoffmann. Only artists like
1 Oskar Kokoschka and Egon Schiele, born in 1886 and 1890 respectively, were
2 still too young to be members, although neither of them would have been the
3 artist he was without the Secession and the Wiener Werkstätte that was formed
4 shortly afterwards. The group was exceptionally disparate, its members having
5 little in common beyond their awareness that they formed the Viennese avant-
6 garde and that they wanted to bring local art closer to the world of art nouveau
7 or, as it was known in the German-speaking world, Jugendstil. A pronounced
8 interest in the arts and crafts movement set the Vienna Secession apart from
9 its slightly later counterpart in Berlin. From the outset there was a marked
30 tendency for the artists to fall into one of two different groups, those who were
1 interested in style and those whose thinking was coloured by Impressionist
2 ideas, leading ultimately to a further secession in 1905, when the artists asso-
3 ciated with Klimt left the organization. In turn, a number of members of the
4 second group embraced an anti-urban, anti-cosmopolitan art.
5 The Secessionists’ style was far from unified. Indeed, their only unifying
6 feature was their desire to organize exhibitions showcasing the whole range of
7 current trends in European art, which was then charting a wayward course on
8 the open sea between Impressionism, art nouveau, Expressionism and, vaguely
9 discernible on the horizon, abstract art. Also in evidence was a local variant of
40 the pluralism of the age that gave greater weight to the decorative element.
41R Particularly significant in this regard was Klimt’s development from the
morbid Makart-influenced style of his early portraits to the shimmering 1

pointillism of his landscapes and, finally, the Byzantine decorativeness of his 2
maturity. Not until later were Kokoschka’s radical Expressionism and Schiele’s 3
gaping sexual wounds to disturb their audiences and exercise the judiciary, 4
while Klimt’s no less lascivious drawings were for the most part kept from 5
public view – not that this prevented him from becoming, quite rightly, the 6
chief erotic artist of the Austrian avant-garde, suborning the senses of the 7
young Alma Schindler, among others. Many of these artists were influenced by 8
Wagner’s idea of a synthesis of the arts and in some cases were also fired by 9
pan-German political convictions. The movement’s synthetic aspirations are 10
well illustrated by the fact that 1902 was not only the year in which Klinger 1
exhibited his Beethoven sculpture, it was also the year in which Isadora 2
Duncan was allowed to perform her ‘classical Greek’ dances at the Secession. 3
The same aspirations were also embodied in the organization’s periodical, Ver 4
sacrum (Sacred Spring). If the Secession’s artists asserted their claims to 5
freedom in their organization’s motto, then this was in part a reflection of a 6
serious disagreement that had arisen in 1900, when Klimt had been commis- 7
sioned to create a new work for the Great Hall of the University, only for his 8
painting Philosophy to encounter armed resistance. Similar protests were 9
directed at his Beethoven frieze, a work that was Mahler’s closest point of 20
contact with the visual arts of his day and that was also the finest example 1
of the Secession’s aspirations to produce a total artwork in the spirit of 2
Richard Wagner. What follows is a brief account of Mahler’s contribution to 3
this project, not a comprehensive assessment of Klimt’s frieze, still less a 4
disquisition of the exhibition as a whole.12 5
For the Secession’s fourteenth exhibition, which was due to open in the 6
middle of April 1902, the organizers planned something special – not just indi- 7
vidual pieces were to be shown, but an entire room was to be the focus of a 8
particular artwork and form a kind of temple. Its contents were designed to 9
demonstrate what these young artists could create if they were commissioned 30
to produce the kind of total artwork that they had not yet been officially invited 1
to undertake. The inspiration was to be a work by an artist who, although only 2
a corresponding member of the Secession, was acknowledged by old and young 3
alike to be one of its leading figures: Max Klinger’s monumental statue of 4
Beethoven depicted a titanic, enthroned composer with an eagle at his feet. The 5
starting point for Klinger’s piece – now in the Gewandhaus in Leipzig – was the 6
nineteenth century’s cult of Beethoven, which he took to its furthest and ulti- 7
mate lengths, combining, as he did, Wagner’s image of Beethoven with 8
Nietzsche’s influential superman. Klimt was not the only artist who helped to 9
design the room’s interior, but his Beethoven frieze overshadowed all the other 40
contributions to such an extent that they appeared to be secondary pieces. The 41R
354 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 overall conception was entrusted to Alfred Roller, although, according to Alma,

2 it was not Roller but Carl Moll who had the idea of inviting Mahler to make a
3 musical contribution to the opening ceremony.
4 In designing his Beethoven frieze, Klimt was concerned, above all, to depict
5 the struggle between the lonely genius and the hostility and lack of under-
6 standing that characterize large sections of the world around him. The various
7 panels reflect this interpretation, suggesting nothing so much as the stations of
8 the Cross: they depict, in sequence, the longing for happiness; the sufferings of
9 feeble humanity; the pleas addressed to a powerful individual – the artist – to
10 fight the good fight on behalf of the weak; the hostile forces that are opposed
1 to humanity and their champion and that are embodied in the terrifying figure
2 of Typhon; illness, madness and death defeated by humanity’s aspirations; the
3 arts leading ultimately to a world of ideality; and, finally, a representation of
4 Schiller’s ‘Ode to Joy’ that had provided Beethoven with the words for his
5 Choral Symphony: ‘Joy, beautiful divine spark – this kiss to the whole world.’
6 Klimt was inspired on every level by Klinger’s view of Beethoven as an alto-
7 gether titanic figure. But the artists of the Secession who paid this extraordi-
8 nary tribute to Klinger and his work were clearly also thinking of the role of
9 art and artists in the present day. This was a subject particularly close to Klimt’s
20 heart, for his paintings Philosophy and Medicine, which were intended for the
1 Great Hall of the University, had provoked a veritable scandal when exhibited
2 at the Secession in previous years. (His third commission, Jurisprudence, was
3 not unveiled until 1903.) Most of the city’s ‘art lovers’ and the majority of the
4 teaching staff at the University dismissed his works as symbolically obtuse and
5 in their depiction of nude bodies positively obscene. Klimt felt that he was
6 battling with the Viennese over the place that was rightfully his in the city’s
7 artistic life, with the result that he saw himself as the knight in his Beethoven
8 frieze. The claim that the knight resembles Mahler is difficult to sustain. True,
9 Klimt may have thought of Mahler, who had fought and lost his battle with the
30 Vienna Philharmonic only twelve months earlier. No less true is the fact that
1 his position as a composer who championed the new and inaccessible was
2 becoming increasingly precarious in Vienna. It is clear, moreover, from Karl
3 Kraus’s enthusiasm for ‘Young Siegfried’ at the Court Opera that the city’s
4 young and unruly artists and intellectuals saw Mahler as one of their own. But
5 there is no question of any physical similarity between Mahler and the figure
6 in the frieze. Indeed, Klimt himself would have regarded such a resemblance
7 as trivializing in the extreme.
8 But Klimt’s work is more than merely an expression of current disputes in the
9 world of art. Far more important from Mahler’s point of view was the artist’s
40 eclectic recourse to ideas associated with Wagner, whose essay on his own
41R performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony in Dresden in 1846, for example,
demonstrably left its mark on some of the details of Klimt’s monumental frieze. 1
Wagner, Klimt and Mahler all held the view that art alone was capable of leading 2
disorientated humanity into a better world. ‘Music is a sacred art,’ sings the 3
Composer in Hofmannsthal’s libretto to Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos. The artist 4
is the high priest of this religious view of art. The tragedy and heroism of his own 5
artistry that Klinger depicted in his statue of Beethoven were characteristics that 6
Klimt and Mahler likewise divined in the composer. It made perfect sense that 7
Beethoven and Wagner were Mahler’s gods. And then there was Nietzsche, 8
struggling with the philistines and idols of modernity – and even though Mahler 9
was increasingly sceptical of Nietzsche from 1900 onwards, it was impossible for 10
him to forget his old ties to the iconoclastic philosopher. Ideas about a compre- 1
hensive reform of culture designed to counter the debilitating interest in the 2
whole problem of turn-of-the-century decadence were by no means unfamiliar 3
to Mahler. The fact that he was best known and, indeed, notorious as a 4
conductor of Beethoven and Wagner will also have played a part in the decision 5
to invite him to participate in the venture – just over a year earlier his retouch- 6
ings of the Ninth Symphony had given rise to arguments that the Viennese still 7
remembered. (His legendary production of Fidelio at the Court Opera, 8
conversely, did not take place until October 1904.) 9
It made sense, then, for the organizers to enlist Mahler’s services if they 20
wanted a musical element to their Secessionist artwork – and, given their 1
claims to artistic universality, an opening ceremony without music would have 2
been absurd, especially where Beethoven was the focus of interest. According 3
to Alma, it was her stepfather, Carl Moll, who approached Mahler: the couple 4
married in March 1902 and the exhibition opened on 15 April, not May, as 5
claimed by Alma. We do not know when the earliest discussions between 6
Mahler and the Secessionists took place, but he will have needed only a short 7
time to prepare a suitable passage from the finale of the Ninth Symphony – the 8
movement to which Klimt explicitly alludes – and to provide an arrangement 9
of it. The original plan to perform the whole symphony with the Vienna 30
Philharmonic, the Vienna Court Opera chorus and four vocal soloists 1
foundered on reasons that are no longer clear – although it appears that the 2
orchestra declared itself overworked and unable to appear, a reaction that is 3
fully understandable in the light of the strained relations between the orchestra 4
and its conductor, who could not compel his players to perform.13 As a result, 5
Mahler had to content himself with a wind-band arrangement of a passage 6
from the final chorus performed by those members of the Court Opera 7
orchestra who were willing to take part. Alma reports that the passage ran 8
from ‘Ihr stürzt nieder’ to ‘Überm Sternenzelt muß ein guter Vater wohnen’, 9
adding that when Klinger entered the hall to the strains of Beethoven’s music, 40
his eyes immediately filled with tears.14 41R
356 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 At one of the preliminary rehearsals, probably on 12 April, the audience

2 included Ludwig Hevesi, who loyally and enthusiastically observed the work-
3 ings of the Secession: ‘On the podium in the left-hand side aisle, Director
4 Mahler was standing with his brass players and rehearsing a motif from the
5 Ninth that he had arranged for trombones. In the evening, prior to the Klinger
6 banquet at the Grand Hotel, an entirely private reception is planned at the
7 Secession. Its members will welcome their beloved visitor and these strains of
8 Beethoven’s music will greet him as he enters.’15 Mahler’s involvement is not
9 mentioned in the newspapers, leaving a number of questions open. Alma, for
10 example, does not say exactly when Klinger was reduced to tears, but Hevesi
1 leads us to assume that it was on the eve of the official opening that Mahler
2 conducted this excerpt from Beethoven’s symphony at the Secession, in other
3 words, 14 April, and that it was not performed at the next day’s official opening.
4 But we cannot be certain. Even less clear is the excerpt that was performed.
5 Hevesi speaks simply of a motif, whereas Alma refers to an entire passage from
6 the final chorus. But a closer look at the score reveals that, no matter how it was
7 arranged, this passage cannot have lasted more than a minute. Is it plausible
8 that having abandoned their original plans for a complete performance of the
9 symphony, the organizers, including Mahler, would have invested all this time
20 and effort in an excerpt that can have been little more than a fanfare? Neither
1 the score nor the parts that were used for this performance appear to have
2 survived, but it is none the less tempting to think in terms of a longer excerpt
3 rather than the same passage repeated several times. At least a few minutes
4 would have been set aside for Beethoven’s music.
5 Mahler will have felt at ease with the Secessionists, a feeling bolstered by his
6 sense of solidarity with them, especially with Klimt, who in his own field had
7 encountered exactly the same sort of resistance as Mahler had in his. All the
8 members of the organization shared a common belief in the sacred mission
9 of art and in the power of an art that embraced all the arts and all classes of
30 society to change the world. The Secession was thus Mahler’s closest point of
1 contact with the artistic and intellectual aspirations of turn-of-the-century
2 Vienna. None the less, it is worth remembering that until now Mahler had
3 taken no obvious interest in the work of Klimt or Olbrich or Otto Wagner.
4 Over and above any shared beliefs, it will have been Mahler’s personal contacts
5 with Moll and Klimt that inspired and encouraged him to lend his support to
6 the venture. We do not know exactly when he met his future father-in-law, but
7 it was presumably only after Alma had introduced him to the Moll household.
8 It is unlikely that he got to know Klimt before early November 1901, when they
9 were both invited to dine at the home of Emil and Bertha Zuckerkandl – this
40 was also the evening when Mahler and Alma really got to know one another.
41R It was presumably only during the preparations for the exhibition that Mahler
was introduced to Alfred Roller, but the encounter soon led to closer contacts, 1
including an invitation to supper at the newlyweds’ home in May 1902, when 2
another of the guests was Kolo Moser. The invitation also included the word 3
‘Tristan’ and thus looked forward to the epoch-making collaboration between 4
Roller and Mahler whose first fruits were their new production of Tristan und 5
Isolde in February 1903 – their plans must already have been discussed at the 6
time of the Secession exhibition, for the initial set models were approved in 7
June 1902.16 8
We do not know much more about contacts between Mahler and Klimt: 9
although the two men remained in touch, Klimt appears to have visited the 10
Mahlers only infrequently, but this was due in part, of course, to the fact that 1
Alma had almost married him and, indeed, would have done so if cowardice 2
had not prevented him. All three parties knew this, and it must have placed a 3
certain strain on their relations. And yet the two men continued to respect each 4
other and to take an interest in one another’s work. In the context of a rather 5
later episode in New York, Alma notes that her husband had developed a 6
deeper interest in the visual arts: ‘Mahler had no native feeling for painting; his 7
mind was too much under the dominion of literature. Yet by degrees, through 8
much looking and an exorbitant desire to know all that was to be known, he 9
began to derive pleasure from pure painting and the ability to judge it. Moll, 20
Klimt, Roller and Kolo Moser disputed the right to be his teacher.’17 When Paul 1
Stefan published his tribute to Mahler in 1910 to mark the composer’s fiftieth 2
birthday, Klimt – who was to survive Mahler by only seven years – contributed 3
a textless reproduction of the knight from his Beethoven frieze. 4
5
6
A Salon Acquaintanceship
7
The name of Bertha Zuckerkandl takes us from the general to the particular: 8
from our wider conspectus of turn-of-the-century Viennese culture to a 9
narrower circle in the form of the most famous salon of the period, a place 30
where many paths crossed. For Mahler, who had always maintained a 1
respectful distance from the wider cultural context of which he was none the 2
less a part, this was the path on which he met his future wife. As a literary and 3
aesthetic phenomenon, the Viennese salon had flourished during the heyday 4
of Romanticism and Biedermeier art in the first half of the nineteenth century, 5
Fanny Arnstein’s salon being the most important such meeting place at this 6
time. By the end of the nineteenth century the tradition still existed, and 7
observers could still catch an occasional glimpse of the older generation in the 8
salons of Baron Todesco, the patron of the arts Nikolaus Dumba, the industri- 9
alist Ludwig Lobmeyr and the publisher Moritz von Gerold. The home of 40
Josephine von Wertheimstein at Döbling was a place where representatives of 41R
358 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Old Europe – men like Ferdinand von Saar, Eduard Bauernfeld and Moritz
2 von Schwind – could indulge their memories of an earlier age, the present
3 generation having effectively forgotten their existence. The young Hugo von
4 Hofmannsthal also had the honour of receiving an invitation, an honour he no
5 doubt owed to his reputation as a precociously gifted poet whose earliest
6 collection of verse was published under the pen name of Loris while he was
7 still at school. When the ‘old lady’, as he called her, died in 1894, he wrote an
8 eloquent obituary, his lifelong respect of the powerful ability of the precious
9 and superannuated to exert a lasting sway drawing its strength from encoun-
10 ters such as this.
1 Bertha Zuckerkandl, by contrast, was a typical product of turn-of-the-
2 century Vienna, her salon set apart from its predecessors not least by virtue of
3 the fact that her principal means of communication was the still relatively
4 recent invention of the telephone. She was four years younger than Mahler and
5 the daughter of a successful journalist, Moritz Szeps, who had come to Vienna
6 from Galicia and founded first the Morgenpost, then the Neues Wiener
7 Tagblatt. As editor-in-chief of both, he was for half a century one of the most
8 influential press barons in Vienna. Friendly with Crown Prince Rudolf, he
9 advised the latter on political and personal matters. His daughter, too, had
20 journalistic ambitions – an unusual career for a woman at this time. Her
1 brother became editor-in-chief of the Allgemeine Zeitung, and for him she
2 wrote articles and translated stage plays, mainly from the French. Her
3 marriage to the eminent anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl in 1886 gave her a
4 chance to lend the glamour of an upper-class salon to her far-flung attempts to
5 infiltrate and consolidate the city’s cultural scene. Her husband introduced her
6 to his famous colleague Johann Schnitzler and the latter’s son, Arthur. In turn,
7 Schnitzler brought her into contact with Hugo von Hofmannsthal, through
8 whom she met Richard Beer-Hofmann and Hermann Bahr. Bahr put her in
9 touch with the writer Peter Altenberg, and so on.
30 Bertha’s sister, Sophie, was married to Paul Clemenceau, a brother of
1 Georges Clemenceau, who, after qualifying as a doctor, entered politics, cham-
2 pioning Alfred Dreyfus and twice holding ministerial positions, initially as
3 minister of the interior from 1906 to 1909 and then as prime minister from
4 1917 to 1920. In the latter capacity he was responsible for guiding France’s
5 fortunes during the final stages of the war and its aftermath. In Paris, Paul
6 and Sophie Clemenceau formed the hard core of a group of enthusiastic
7 Mahlerians that included another of Dreyfus’s sympathizers, Georges Picquart,
8 who was one of the first to become involved in the Dreyfus Affair when he
9 exposed the tissue of lies surrounding the case. Another member of the group
40 was Paul Painlevé, who likewise went on to become the country’s prime
41R minister. This band of loyal supporters followed Mahler whenever his concert
tours brought him closer to Paris, and they also met him on their visits to 1
Vienna. 2
Inasmuch as Bertha Zuckerkandl was an early champion of the Secession in 3
turn-of-the-century Vienna, supporting the movement both through her jour- 4
nalism and through her salon, it was only a question of time before her address 5
book included the name of Gustav Mahler, for all that the latter was notorious 6
for his hatred of private gatherings, when he might find himself placed next to 7
a guest with whom he had nothing to say.18 The invitation duly arrived for 6 or 8
7 November 1901 – the sources differ, Bertha herself confusing the matter still 9
further by giving 3 November 1900 as the date, although this is ruled out by 10
other evidence. Alma’s diaries suggest that it was 7 November 1901. According 1
to Bertha’s reminiscences, Mahler accepted the invitation in the course of a 2
telephone call in which he passed on the good wishes of the Zuckerkandls’ 3
relatives in Paris, although this seems unlikely as Mahler had not been in Paris 4
that year. Even so, Bertha’s account of their telephone conversation is undeni- 5
ably entertaining, Mahler insisting that he would not have to meet any of the 6
other guests and that his diet consisted solely of wholemeal bread and apples 7
grown in Meran in the Tyrol. At the same time, Alma’s mother, Anna Moll, had 8
apparently telephoned Emil Zuckerkandl to report that her daughter was 9
spending all her time at the opera, returning home in tears and, pale and silent, 20
rushing straight over to the piano. Knowing what was afoot, Zuckerkandl 1
invited Alma to attend the same supper party as Mahler. However accurate the 2
details of her account, Bertha’s version of events is at least amusing and acutely 3
perceptive: in order to provide Mahler with appropriate company, she also 4
invited Hermann Bahr, Gustav Klimt and Max Burckhard, the former director 5
of the Burgtheater, who had been more than just a fatherly friend to Alma. The 6
guests launched into a discussion of the freedom of art in turn-of-the-century 7
Vienna, each of the participants having a tale to tell about the erosions of that 8
freedom and his manly attempts to resist it. 9
At the end of the meal the guests retired to the salon to relax, only for an 30
argument to break out between Alma and the director of the Court Opera. She 1
complained, somewhat presumptuously, that he had failed to give his response 2
to a ballet submitted by Alexander Zemlinsky – her piano and composition 3
teacher and also the man to whom she had been closer than to any other in her 4
life so far. Such an extended silence, she went on, amounted to a snub. Her crit- 5
icisms became increasingly strident, and Mahler’s counterclaim that the piece 6
was worthless did nothing to calm her. In the end he admitted defeat, prom- 7
ising to invite Zemlinsky to his office the very next day in order to discuss the 8
matter. The ballet in question must have been Der Triumph der Zeit (The 9
Triumph of the Age), a collaboration between Zemlinsky and Hofmannsthal, 40
even if Alma erroneously calls it Das goldene Herz (The Golden Heart) – a 41R
360 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 further example of her unreliable memory. She does, however, state that it was
2 a ballet by Hofmannsthal and that the composer worked on it during the first
3 half of 1901 but never completed it. Conversely, it is strange that Mahler
4 should have spoken so dismissively about Zemlinsky, whose opera Es war
5 einmal he had introduced to the Court Opera repertory in 1900. Be that as it
6 may, it seems entirely plausible that as he was leaving Mahler invited his
7 hostess and Fräulein Schindler to the dress rehearsal of Les Contes d’Hoffmann,
8 the first performance of a new production which Mahler conducted on 11
9 November 1901. Bertha Zuckerkandl takes up the story in a letter to her sister:
10 ‘Three weeks have gone by since then. Yesterday Alma and Mahler became
1 engaged. Immediately after the evening with me he called on Alma’s mother,
2 Frau Moll, and was delighted by the atmosphere in their home – he thawed
3 and forgot his ascetic view of the world, becoming young again and falling
4 foolishly in love.’19
5 Alma recalled the fateful evening in her diary, and although her account
6 differs on points of detail, it basically tallies with Bertha Zuckerkandl’s. But
7 with the publication of her diary, we also know that this legendary evening at
8 the Zuckerkandls was not the first meeting between Mahler and Alma. They
9 had first met more than two years earlier, when she had been on holiday with
20 friends at Stambach near Goisern on Lake Hallstatt. She had been out cycling,
1 a then fashionable sport that Mahler, too, enjoyed. On 11 July 1899, just
2 outside Gosaumühle, Alma’s group met Mahler’s party, consisting of Mahler
3 himself, his sister Justi, Arnold Rosé and an ‘old woman’, who may or may not
4 have been Natalie Bauer-Lechner. Alma had repeatedly confided her infatua-
5 tion with Mahler in her diary and shortly before their velocipedestrian
6 encounter in the Salzkammergut she had written to ask him for his autograph.
7 He had duly obliged, sending her a picture postcard of Aussee that was post-
8 marked 5 July and adding the note: ‘Sole authenticated and copyrighted signa-
9 ture: Gustav Mahler. Imitators are liable to prosecution.’ But now she found it
30 unsettling that he kept staring at her and that her beauty had clearly not left
1 him unmoved. It is by no means implausible that he saw a connection between
2 her and her request for his autograph:
3
4 Mahler is following us.
5 He soon overtook us, and we met some four or five times. Each time he
6 struck up a conversation. Shortly before Hallstatt he dismounted. We were
7 pushing our bikes, and he started up another conversation, staring hard at
8 me. I jumped onto my bike and rode off into the distance. The Geiringers
9 were angry: they’d wanted to introduce me, and he was expecting it too.
40 Judging by the way he looked at me, he appears to have perceived the connec-
41R tion between myself and the postcard – which I found most embarrassing.
Anyway I feel absolutely no urge to meet him. I love and honour him as an 1
artist, but as a man he doesn’t interest me at all. I wouldn’t want to lose my 2
illusions either.20 3
4
This, then, was the first meeting between Mahler and Alma Schindler, not the 5
evening at the Zuckerkandls almost two and a half years later, although it is 6
this later encounter which, of the two, deserves to be described as ‘fateful’. 7
8
9
Alma Schindler: A Portrait of a Very Young Woman
10
For her three female biographers Françoise Giroud, Susanne Keegan and 1
Karen Monson, Alma Mahler-Gropius-Werfel née Schindler was a highly 2
gifted artist, the victim of her own matchless beauty, and prevented from 3
working as a composer in her own right by the domineeringly patriarchal 4
Mahler, who tolerated no gods beside himself. Other observers – mostly men 5
– see her differently. Strauss, for example, called her a ‘dissolute woman’, while 6
Adorno is said to have described her in conversation as a ‘monster’. The most 7
ungallant description, however, is that of Elias Canetti in the third part of his 8
autobiography, The Play of the Eyes. Canetti was friendly with the Mahlers’ 9
daughter, Anna, and in 1934 he was introduced to Alma: ‘A large woman, over- 20
flowing in all directions, with a sickly-sweet smile and bright, wide-open, 1
glassy eyes.’ This, then, was Canetti’s first impression, the glassiness of Alma’s 2
stare the result of her intake of alcohol. She had gathered all her ‘trophies’ 3
around her, namely, the score of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony, with 4
the composer’s effusive marginalia referring to her, and the portrait that 5
Kokoschka had painted of her as Lucrezia Borgia. Her sixteen-year-old 6
daughter, Manon Gropius, then entered the room, leading Alma to wax lyrical 7
about the ‘Aryan’ Gropius, the only man who was ‘racially suited’ to her. ‘All the 8
others who fell in love with me were little Jews. Like Mahler.’21 9
More recently, the German littérateur Hans Wollschläger has spoken of her 30
‘complete inability to think a single coherent thought’ and of her ‘turgid gossip, 1
hare-brained to the point of utter confusion’ – Wollschläger was reviewing the 2
first German edition of the complete correspondence between Alma and 3
Mahler when it appeared in 1995.22 Claire Goll painted an even more lurid 4
portrait of Alma as Werfel’s widow: ‘In order to revitalize her fading charms, 5
she wore gigantic hats with ostrich feathers, leaving us unsure whether she 6
wanted to appear as a horse which, apparelled in black, traditionally precedes 7
a funeral carriage or as a latter-day d’Artagnan. She was also powdered, 8
rouged, perfumed and completely drunk. This bloated Valkyrie drank like a 9
fish.’23 Our picture of Alma Schindler has clearly changed over the years. Now, 40
however, her recently published diaries for the years between 1898 and 1902, 41R
362 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 when she married Mahler, offer us a picture of fin-de-siècle Vienna seen from
2 the standpoint of a young woman aged between nineteen and twenty-three. It
3 is not the sort of picture that might be gleaned from Karl Kraus’s Die Fackel or
4 from Arthur Schnitzler’s diary or from any of the reminiscences of other men
5 and women of the period casting a nostalgic glance back over their lives. (It is
6 worth mentioning in passing that Alma evidently read Die Fackel on a regular
7 basis and even got to know its editor, even though there were never any close
8 contacts between them.)
9 Alma was incapable of gazing down on a situation from Olympian heights
10 but was torn to and fro by her feelings and moods and by her premature and
1 immature assessments of people and events, a paper boat tossed about on the
2 white crests of the waves of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Yet it is precisely this
3 volatility that lends her jottings their immediacy. (It has to be noted, however,
4 that towards the end of her life, Alma subjected their content to a censorious
5 revisionary process. What was destroyed cannot be reconstructed, although
6 passages that were merely blacked out have for the most part been deciphered.)
7 The picture that emerges from these entries is bound to encourage us to
8 qualify the negative views of Alma quoted a moment ago and help to explain
9 much that would otherwise be hidden to anyone approaching the subject
20 merely from Mahler’s standpoint.
1 First and foremost, the diaries help to throw light on the problematical
2 family structure. Alma’s father, Emil Jakob Schindler, was a respected land-
3 scape painter who died when she was only thirteen. Like Electra, she spent her
4 whole life grieving for the loss of her father, and all her feelings of loneliness
5 were bound up with the thought of Emil Schindler. Her mother very quickly
6 married the artist Carl Moll, but Alma grew increasingly remote from her,
7 especially after the birth of a stepsister. Although her stepfather was an avun-
8 cular figure and by no means unsympathetic, there were repeated arguments
9 with her mother. In the case of all her serious affairs before her marriage to
30 Mahler – ‘serious’ in the fin-de-siècle sense of emotional involvement but
1 physical abstinence – it is striking that she felt particularly attracted to much
2 older men. Although earlier commentators had noted this fact, it was only
3 with the publication of her diaries that it became clear to what an extent the
4 loss of her father had played a decisive role in shaping her behavioural
5 patterns. Gustav Klimt, the first great love of her life, was fifteen years older;
6 Joseph Maria Olbrich was twelve years older; the heldentenor Erik Schmedes,
7 whom she worshipped for his ‘winning body’ and bel canto approach to
8 Wagner, was eleven years older; the Belgian Symbolist Fernand Khnopff
9 was twenty-one years older; and Max Burckhard, the former director of the
40 Burgtheater, was twenty-five years older. Alexander Zemlinsky, who was
41R arguably the most important person in Alma’s love life between Klimt and
Mahler, was only eight years older and, as such, the exception that confirms 1
the rule. (Alma reproached him for not trusting himself enough with her.) 2
Nineteen years her senior, Mahler redressed the balance. 3
Alma was a coquettish femme fatale who was still developing. She flirted 4
unceasingly, the increasingly attractive centre of attention on the part of innu- 5
merable younger and older men. Her diaries make it clear that she was an 6
erotic volcano, her sensuality almost untameable, a woman horribly drawn to 7
the animalistic aspect of love. With a degree of detail that is bound to leave 8
even the modern reader feeling slightly uncomfortable, she left little to the 9
imagination when recording in her diary the expressions of her increasingly 10
ungovernable sexuality. In her hands every Zola novel and Wagnerian vocal 1
score became an erotic stimulus. It is significant that in the decisive weeks 2
leading up to her engagement with Mahler her lack of sexual fulfilment had 3
reached an unbearable level. The tender-hearted but all too bashful Zemlinsky 4
was no more capable of quenching her raging thirst than she was herself. Fired 5
by self-love, she was vain and flirtatious, delighting in all the compliments that 6
she received wherever she went. But how could it be otherwise? After all, she 7
was without doubt the most beautiful twenty-year-old in all the circles she 8
frequented. Photographs from the period prove that the sweet little girls who 9
filled the pages of the insatiable Schnitzler’s catalogue of conquests could not 20
hold a candle to her. The young Alma was tall, voluptuous and, in keeping with 1
the ideal beauty of the age, a little Rubenesque. Even at this early date she had 2
a tendency to look a little bloated, a tendency that became more pronounced 3
with time. She had a magnificent head of hair and a round, soft-featured face 4
of childlike beauty that was eye-catching even while she was still a young girl. 5
She came from a well-respected family of artists, moving almost daily with 6
perceptible assurance from the Secession and Musikverein to the Court Opera 7
and Burgtheater, the object of male desire on the part of many of the leading 8
representatives of all four of these institutions. She enjoyed sports and was an 9
enthusiastic cyclist who was not afraid of falling off. Above all, she was gifted 30
as an artist, although opinions of her abilities diverge. She was able to draw (a 1
point well illustrated by her published diaries), she played the piano extremely 2
well, and she wrote music. 3
Her piano playing served chiefly to allow her to revel in the works of her 4
favourite composer, Wagner, and to give full rein to the feelings that she was 5
unable to express in real life. Her cult of Wagner and his music was so 6
all-encompassing that it has been difficult until now to gain an overview of it. 7
In her eyes, he towered over Goethe and Arnold Böcklin, a saint whom she 8
worshipped, like Ludwig II, to distraction. Her piano at home was a private 9
altar at which she offered up sacrifices to Wagner. Good performances at 40
the Court Opera induced in her a sense of ecstasy of positively orgasmic 41R
364 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 proportions. It was no accident that she was infatuated with the Wagnerian
2 tenor Erik Schmedes, freely admitting that after a performance of Siegfried
3 there was nothing she would not have done with him. Her Wagnerian fanati-
4 cism is undoubtedly connected to her anti-Semitism, an aspect of her char-
5 acter that has always occasioned surprise. With few exceptions, all Wagnerians
6 at this time were almost by nature anti-Semites. ‘No Jew can ever understand
7 Wagner,’ she noted in her diary after a performance of Siegfried in September
8 1899.24 Her later dismissive references to Jews and all things Jewish are well
9 documented, a point that Canetti was not slow to make. Her diaries, too,
10 contain a whole catalogue of anti-Jewish remarks, although they cannot be
1 said to amount to a coherent or consistent outlook. In July 1899 she called in
2 at a local hostelry in Goisern and was disturbed by the endless jostling: ‘A
3 disgusting pack of Jews.’25 There is absolutely no sense of self-irony when she
4 describes herself elsewhere as a philo-Semite who stumbled at the occasional
5 blow but who never lost her footing.26 While lacking the systematic thinking
6 that is part and parcel of anti-Semitism, Alma Schindler punctiliously
7 mimicked the common prejudices of her age both in Vienna and elsewhere. In
8 this she was confirmed by the anti-Semitism of her idol Wagner and by similar
9 views within her own family, views that could not be shaken even by leading
20 figures on the local cultural scene who, themselves Jewish, left a deep impres-
1 sion on her and included Zemlinsky and Mahler. But she was more selective
2 when taking over the casual, everyday anti-Semitism that was to be found at
3 every turn in fin-de-siècle Vienna and, indeed, elsewhere, the only exceptions
4 being those towns and cities that did not have Jewish populations or where,
5 even more rarely, Jews were positively welcomed.
6 In itself her decision to marry a Jew represents a significant rejection of the
7 anti-Semitism of her age. (As we have already pointed out, the term ‘Jew’ is used
8 here in the sense in which it was understood by Alma’s contemporaries, Mahler’s
9 status in this regard being far from unequivocal.) She married Mahler in the face
30 of opposition from her mother and stepfather, both of whom harboured anti-
1 Jewish feelings – Carl Moll later joined the National Socialists, taking his own life
2 in his mid-eighties in 1945. But it was impossible for her not to have been
3 infected by the casual anti-Semitism of the age. She merely repeated such preju-
4 dices unthinkingly, while remaining ready to forget them as soon as she found a
5 man attractive. Her parodies of Jewish characteristics made her the life and soul
6 of all the parties she attended, but at the same time she felt sympathy for a friend
7 who was the victim of an anti-Semitic hate campaign. As for Zemlinsky, her
8 diaries contradict her later reminiscences and give the distinct impression that
9 she would have married him if Mahler had not turned up at the very last
40 moment. She was clearly deeply in love with Zemlinsky, and yet she baulked at
41R the idea of marriage and of bringing ‘little, degenerate Jew-kids’ into the world,
as she put it.27 Even so, this thought did nothing to dampen her passion, and 1
this consideration played no part in her decision to get to know Mahler, for all 2
that she was advised not to marry a Jew – and this Jew in particular. Max 3
Burckhard, Alma’s fatherly friend who harboured more than fatherly feelings for 4
her, summed up her contemporaries’ response when her passion for Mahler 5
became obvious: ‘It would be a positive sin. A fine girl like you – and such a 6
pedigree too. Don’t spoil it all by marrying an elderly degenerate. Think of your 7
children – it’d be a sin!’28 Given Alma’s youth, the age difference was certainly 8
considerable when judged by the standards of the time and, with a pinch of salt, 9
it would probably also be regarded as such today. But Burckhard’s warning 10
was also racially motivated – one is almost inevitably reminded of the term 1
‘Rassenschande’, which the National Socialists used for sexual relations with a 2
non-Aryan. Certainly, it is clear from such a comment that ideas of a genetically 3
sound Aryan race and a degenerate Jewish race were already percolating the 4
thinking of even well-educated Germans – Burckhard was anything but an anti- 5
Semitic backwoodsman. Indeed, Alma even thought of Burckhard as infected by 6
Jewish ideas: ‘I must admit, though, that the bad company he keeps is causing 7
his pure, Aryan blood to semitify. He’s even beginning to look Jewish.’29 8
Many writers have made fun of Alma’s apparent tendency to collect men of 9
genius as if they were butterflies. Indeed, she herself admitted that it was enough 20
for a man of genius to look at her and she went weak at the knees. Her sensuality 1
was easily roused, but pure manhood was not in itself sufficient to excite her. She 2
also needed intellectual or artistic brilliance. In the case of Erik Schmedes, a 3
strapping body and a beautiful voice were enough. Above all, he sang Wagner’s 4
heroic tenor roles. Before Zemlinsky arrived on the scene, it was Klimt who 5
impressed her the most, and if he had not proved weak on one decisive point, 6
then Alma would have gone down in history as Alma Klimt. But, instead, he 7
came to an arrangement with Carl Moll and withdrew his candidacy following a 8
visit to Italy when Alma almost became his lover. Klimt had the advantage of not 9
being Jewish and of being considerably more attractive than Zemlinsky. If 30
Klimt’s reputation as a womanizer alarmed Alma, then it also made him more 1
interesting in her eyes. A nightmare that she noted down in her diary and that 2
might almost have come from a film by David Lynch reveals the extent of her 3
feelings for Klimt: 4
5
I got undressed. – and suddenly I felt as if I were disgorging some slimy 6
object. It hardened rapidly, only to melt again. I grasped it in my hands – it 7
was nothing but a pair of blue eyes, blue eyes! I held the shadow in a stran- 8
glehold, thrust it from me. It cried out: I am your child – yours and Klimt’s. 9
More than once in your imagination you have conceived me – and now you 40
deny my very existence.30 41R
366 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 At the same time she ended her flirtation with Max Burckhard with the words:
2 ‘The minor excitement would not have harmed me. If only I knew whose turn
3 it was now – it’s terrible to be unoccupied.’31 It was a sensation that Alma
4 Schindler never had to endure for long. One wonders, however, whether her
5 instinctual urges left her with any time to train as an artist.
6 This brings us to the question of Alma’s compositional ambitions and
7 Mahler’s notorious insistence in his letter to her of 19 December 1901 that she
8 must curb those ambitions if and when he married her. Although her
9 surviving songs cannot be dated with any accuracy, they reveal an undoubted
10 talent, but whether they demonstrate more than that remains questionable.
1 Her composition lessons with the blind Bohemian pianist and organist Josef
2 Labor were notable for his paternal forbearance. Her lessons with Zemlinsky,
3 conversely, could have achieved something but in the end they remained too
4 desultory. Antony Beaumont, the co-editor of Alma’s diaries, argues on the
5 basis of the music examples included in their pages that she lacked a musical
6 ear and also a sound knowledge of theory and orchestration. As a result she
7 never progressed beyond songs and short piano pieces. In a moment of anger
8 Zemlinsky once dismissed her as ‘only half a person’, a woman who turned her
9 hand to many things but never managed to complete anything.
20 It would be unfair to quote these opinions, were it not for the fact that Alma’s
1 diaries are full of self-criticisms on precisely this point. Even as a nineteen-year
2 old, she was already striking a note of despair: ‘In a word, I want to be a some-
3 body. But it’s impossible – & why? I don’t lack talent, but my attitude is too friv-
4 olous for my objectives, for artistic achievement.’32 Towards the end of her diary,
5 she even repeats Zemlinsky’s dismissal of her abilities: ‘I have this feeling that
6 nothing really moves me. I am, truly, only half a person. I’m deeply saddened –
7 no, I’m incapable of being deeply sad. Tepid – just tepid! I feel sorry for anyone
8 who sincerely loves me. I’m disgusted at my behaviour.’33 Alma’s situation was
9 hopeless, and the unspeakable loneliness and unhappiness to which she often
30 refers are bound to leave the reader deeply affected. Even at the end of her
1 life she still felt that she had not fully explored the whole range of her talents as
2 a result of her inability to concentrate and her tendency to be all too easily
3 distracted by her breathtaking beauty, so that she lacked the energy and
4 industry to change a situation that she ascribed at times to her feminine
5 existence and at others to individual failure. In the course of a discussion as to
6 why women had achieved nothing notable in the field of music, she astonished
7 her audience by arguing that women could achieve something as artists only as
8 long as they merely copied from nature, hence their distinction as portraitists
9 and landscape artists. But if the whole heart and mind were involved – and
40 in the visual arts she named Böcklin as an example – then women must
41R necessarily fail:
There is nothing like this with women, and there never will be because they 1
have too little intellectual depth and philosophical training. They lack creative 2
power. . . . And then there is music, of all the arts the one that is most difficult 3
to understand and that is the most completely permeated by the mind – it 4
comes entirely from the heart. Here there is no copying of nature – you 5
wouldn’t get beyond the sort of songs that imitate birdsong and millwheels. 6
Here it is a question of reproducing a mood, and atmosphere is a momentary 7
state involving the heart. And I – a young woman with such a small heart and 8
an even smaller brain – I want to achieve something in this field? – Bah!34 9
10
A woman who had learnt to think like this would be unable to develop 1
much self-confidence as a composer. How could she remain steadfast when 2
Mahler came along and asked her whether she could imagine herself working 3
alongside him as his equal as a composer? Alma never broke free from these 4
inhibitions. 5
She was undoubtedly considerably more gifted than the other daughters of 6
upper middle-class parents in fin-de-siècle Vienna, and yet she was hardly 7
another Fanny Mendelssohn. What puzzled her about Mahler from the outset 8
was that he was so ruthless in pointing out her weaknesses – his ruthlessness 9
may have been objectively justified but from a psychological and personal 20
point of view it was little short of catastrophic. Undeterred by his great love for 1
her, he even spelt out these weaknesses for her. Inwardly, she was forced to 2
admit that he was right, but at the same time she inevitably felt humiliated 3
whenever he tried to educate her, told her what she should be reading, shook 4
his head at her half-baked philosophizing, chastised her for her superficiality 5
and, in the ominous letter to which we have already referred, demanded that 6
she should regard his own music as hers. In spite of claims to the contrary and 7
notwithstanding Alma’s own later attempts to rewrite history, this was not an 8
outright ban on composition but merely reflected Mahler’s all too sober obser- 9
vation that he could not envisage a marriage between two composers, hence 30
his question – posed before it was too late – whether she saw things in the 1
same light: 2
3
Let me speak in general terms. A husband and wife who are both composers: 4
how do you envisage that? Such a strange relationship between rivals: do you 5
have any idea how ridiculous it would appear, can you imagine the loss of 6
self-respect it would later cause us both? . . . If you were to abandon your 7
music in order to take possession of mine, and also to be mine: would this 8
signify the end of life as you know it, and if you did so, would you feel you 9
were renouncing a higher existence? Before we can think of forging a bond 40
for life, we must agree on this question. What do you mean when you write: 41R
368 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 ‘I haven’t worked any more – since then!’ ‘Now I have to return to my work’
2 etc. etc.? What kind of work is this? Composition? Do you compose for your
3 own pleasure or for the benefit of mankind?35
4
5 We cannot call this a ban because by now Alma must have known what
6 she was letting herself in for. Nor was it a kind of blackmail but the spelling out
7 of a precondition for their planned marriage. It was a condition laid down
8 independently of the quality of her compositions which, as Mahler admitted
9 on more than one occasion, he simply did not know. One may dismiss this as
10 patriarchal or worse, but Mahler was not alone in holding this view – suffice it
1 to recall a letter that Freud wrote to his fiancée Martha Bernays in 1883
2 in which he expressed the very same convictions with regard to a woman’s
3 role in life:
4
5 It seems a completely unrealistic notion to send women into the struggle for
6 existence in the same way as men. Am I to think of my delicate, sweet girl as
7 a competitor? After all, the encounter could only end by my telling her, as I
8 did seventeen months ago, that I love her, and that I will make every effort to
9 get her out of the competitive role into the quiet, undisturbed activity of my
20 home. . . .
1 No, in this respect I adhere to the old ways, to my longing for my Martha
2 as she is, and she herself will not want it different; legislation and custom have
3 to grant to women many rights kept from them, but the position of woman
4 cannot be other than what it is: to be an adored sweetheart in youth, and a
5 beloved wife in maturity.
6 There is so much more to be said on this subject, but I think we see eye to
7 eye anyway.36
8
9 Martha Bernays had none of Alma Schindler’s artistic ambitions, but she was
30 none the less a clever and self-possessed young woman not untouched by the
1 first stirrings of the movement for women’s emancipation. Only four years
2 older than Mahler, Freud reacted with the same patriarchal condescension. No
3 matter how much he may have felt like any other young intellectual and
4 acknowledged that women were owed more rights, he could not conceive of a
5 woman as his rival or as a competitor.
6 On the other hand, it cannot be denied that Mahler was right – and no
7 amount of embittered feminist dogma will alter this fact. There is simply no
8 comparison between the short-breathed, atmospheric pointillism of Alma’s
9 songs and the opening movements of the Fifth Symphony on which Mahler
40 was then working. It is doubtful whether Alma would ever have overcome the
41R opposition to female composers at this time and been taken seriously as a
composer, at least in the way that Mahler’s contemporary, Ethel Smyth, was. 1
But none of these considerations carries any weight when set aside Alma’s 2
reaction to Mahler’s letter, a reaction confided in one of the final entries in her 3
diary: ‘It will leave an indelible scar. . . .’37 And so it did, even if by the very next 4
day Alma had voluntarily decided to abandon her own artistic ambitions out 5
of her love of Mahler. 6
The young Alma Schindler’s diaries cannot be called in evidence to support 7
the spiteful comments that were quoted above. Rather, their author appears in 8
the sort of gentle, transfigured light with which her father suffused his 9
Austrian landscapes. True, she gives the impression of a coquette hopelessly in 10
love with herself, unable to settle down but addicted to entertainment, while 1
many of her opinions strike one as immature and supercilious. And yet the 2
intensity with which she lived her life and her capacity for enthusiasm were 3
unparalleled. What other man or woman of this period was prepared to live 4
life so unsparingly? How much of the prudery of her age did she not have to 5
overcome to keep such a matter-of-fact account of her irrepressible sexuality? 6
How uninhibitedly she abandoned herself to the enjoyment of art, to which 7
she responded with an unfailing depth of emotion! How drunkenly she 8
imbibed the world of nature and how eloquently she described her experi- 9
ences! There is humour to her descriptions of the way in which she soiled her 20
clothing after drinking too much alcohol (her later alcoholism is mentioned 1
here in astonishingly graphic terms) or how she had to run away down side 2
streets, her garters torn to shreds, in order to escape from the attentions of 3
importunate men. In the sexually charged atmosphere of turn-of-the-century 4
Vienna such a sensual creature was bound to end up marrying prematurely or 5
leading a life of libertinage, and of this she was incapable. 6
Alma Schindler was not the ‘Bohemian Countess’ Franziska zu Reventlow, but 7
nor was she a suffragette. Rather, she was a versatile, highly talented, ravishingly 8
beautiful woman who married too soon. The sexual and aesthetic experiences 9
that the city had to offer her assailed her with such ferocity that any young woman 30
was bound to bend like a reed in the wind. A woman who was successively and 1
even simultaneously wooed by Gustav Klimt, Joseph Maria Olbrich, Kolo Moser, 2
Max Burckhard, Alexander Zemlinsky and Gustav Mahler, and who ran from the 3
opening of the Secession to a performance of Die Walküre at the Court Opera in 4
order to revel in the sounds of Wagner’s music, could scarcely evolve into an inde- 5
pendent thinker. More than once her diaries describe her profound loneliness 6
and thoughts of suicide, providing a background against which her unbridled 7
love of life stands out with all the more shocking clarity. She simply had no time 8
or opportunity to develop any strength of character of her own. Was Mahler the 9
right man for her? It is doubtful, just as it is doubtful whether Alma was the right 40
woman for Mahler. Her diaries provide the prehistory to this relationship, and at 41R
370 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 least for the period that they cover, they help us to see her in a different light from
2 the one in which she has tended to appear until now.
3
4
Disorder and Early Sorrow: Preparations for a Wedding
5
6 The four months that passed between the fateful evening at the Zuckerkandls’
7 apartment on 7 November 1901 and the Mahlers’ wedding in the Karlskirche on
8 9 March 1902 were a time of tension and turmoil for both Mahler and Alma. The
9 soirée at the Zuckerkandls certainly left Alma in a state of agitation: ‘I must say,
10 I liked him immensely – although he’s dreadfully restless. He stormed around the
1 room like a savage. The fellow is made entirely of oxygen. When you go near
2 him, you get burnt.’38 It is a description that says much for the young woman’s
3 powers of observation and art of characterization. Mahler left the party with
4 Max Burckhard, who lost no time in informing Alma that when he had told his
5 companion that she was a clever and interesting young woman, Mahler had
6 replied: ‘I didn’t care for her at first. I thought she was just a doll. But then I real-
7 ized that she’s also very perceptive. Maybe my first impression was because one
8 doesn’t normally expect such a good-looking girl to take anything seriously.’39 In
9 both Alma and Mahler a spark had been ignited. And the fire that had been lit
20 consumed them both with uncanny speed. Alma sensed that the incandescent
1 love that she had felt for Zemlinsky had suddenly cooled. She felt ashamed, was
2 overcome by self-doubt and wanted to destroy the ‘poisonous weed’ that was
3 growing inside her but was unable to resist its sway. Not everything about the
4 Court Opera director was to her liking. She did not care for his habit of singing
5 a particular phrase to make a musical point, nor did she like the way he articu-
6 lated the letter ‘r’ – it is conceivable that he used a softer-sounding apical flap,
7 rather than the usual harder alveolar trill. Above all, she disapproved of the way
8 he smelled.40 Alma had an acute sense of smell – time and again she had noted
9 in her diary that Zemlinsky smelled because he rarely washed, but to the extent
30 that Mahler’s meticulous physical cleanliness was confirmed by other observers,
1 the same cannot have been true of him. Was it the clothing of the cigar smoker
2 whose smell she did not like? Or was it the infamous foetor judaicus, the
3 racially segregating smell of the Jew that many anti-Semites, including Arthur
4 Schopenhauer, believed that they could detect? We simply do not know. But it
5 remains a remarkable comment on the part of a woman who was distractedly in
6 love. At best, it is a symptom of her scruples and underlying lack of certainty.
7 Throughout the important first weeks and months of their courtship, both
8 parties felt profound uncertainty and ambivalence, and if these feelings were
9 more pronounced in the case of Alma, there is no doubt that Mahler too, albeit
40 for different reasons, was unable to commit himself unquestioningly to their
41R relationship. Far from exulting in a sense of effusive elation, they vacillated
between wild enthusiasm and the deepest of gnawing doubts. Already we 1

may see here the seeds of the marriage’s failure, a marriage to which Alma 2
agreed only amidst extreme misgivings. These doubts never left her but were 3
suppressed, only to resurface in moments of crisis, while constantly being 4
fuelled and fomented by those members of her family and circle of friends who 5
opposed her marriage to Mahler. She also had doubts about his music, music 6
that caused her own to be suppressed. All these feelings find undisguised 7
expression in one of the final entries in her diary prior to her wedding: 8
9
If it ever comes to my marrying him, I must do everything now to stake 10
my rightful claim . . . particularly in artistic questions. He thinks nothing of 1
my art – and much of his own. And I think nothing of his art and much of my 2
own. – That’s how it is! Now he talks unceasingly of safeguarding his art. I 3
can’t do that. With Zemlinsky it would have been possible, because I have 4
sympathy for his art – he’s such a brilliant fellow. But Gustav is so poor – so 5
dreadfully poor. If he knew just how poor he was – he would cover his face in 6
shame. . . . And I am supposed to lie, lie for the rest of my life.41 7
8
And so she continued to vacillate. Did she love Mahler merely because he was 9
the director of the Vienna Court Opera and a great conductor? Or was she 20
attracted to his human qualities? Was he not too old, too ill and too degenerate, 1
as a number of her friends insisted? Or was he a roué, as his future father-in- 2
law furiously exclaimed when his wife went to see the director with their 3
daughter? Many of these accusations were anti-Semitically charged, the Jews 4
being the most degenerate of the degenerate in the eyes of many contempor- 5
aries. Even Alma herself saw the question of Mahler’s Jewish ancestry as prob- 6
lematical, but as with Zemlinsky she was able to overlook it. She also found 7
Mahler physically unattractive, neither as tall and imposing as the tenor Erik 8
Schmedes nor as virile as Klimt. Although he had beautiful hands, he bit his 9
nails, a habit that an aesthete like Alma found deeply offensive. Nor did 30
burgeoning passion prevent her from ogling other men, and at a performance 1
of Die Meistersinger on 12 December 1901, she began to flirt with a young 2
doctor, Louis Adler, who was sitting in the same row. Deep and meaningful 3
glances were exchanged, glances which, as she noted in her diary, bespoke 4
unprecedented desire. Adler was also very attractive, with dark eyes: ‘There’s 5
good stock for you. Mahler can’t compete with that.’42 To judge by his name, 6
Adler was Jewish, and so Alma must have been using the word ‘Rasse’ not in a 7
racial sense but as a synonym for ‘Rassigkeit’, hot-blooded sex appeal. Whatever 8
the answer, it boded ill for the marriage of a passionate young woman boiling 9
over with sensual desire. She also heard rumours of Mahler’s affairs with Anna 40
von Mildenburg, Selma Kurz and even Margarete Michalek, who had worked 41R
372 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 with Mahler on his Fourth Symphony. When she was reading through her diary
2 at a later date, Alma added the words ‘Later I discovered it was all lies!’ In fact,
3 it was Alma’s note that was untrue, but it was all part of her lifelong ploy to
4 portray Mahler as an ascetic right up to the time of his marriage, a man who
5 feared women and who owed his discovery of a ‘woman’s delights and worth’ –
6 to quote Wagner’s Loge – to Alma herself. As we know, the truth of the matter
7 was rather different.43
8 Even so, we need to bear in mind that in contradistinction to Zemlinsky
9 and, we may add, to Klimt, Alma always insisted that she harboured only ‘the
10 most sacred feelings’ for Mahler, and the reason for these feelings emerges to
1 shocking effect when she confides in her diary that her principal emotion was
2 pity: ‘He’s sick, my poor dear, weighs under 10 stone – far too little. I shall care
3 for him like a child. My love for him is infinitely touching.’44 During his stroll
4 with Mahler through the streets of Leiden in 1910, Freud was to speak of a
5 Mary complex, but this Mary complex clearly had two sides to it: the large,
6 voluptuous, ‘Aryan’ Alma saw herself as a mother imago holding the sickly
7 little Jew in her lap in the manner of a Pietà, protecting and caring for him –
8 hardly an encouraging portent for their future marriage. But nor should we
9 forget that Alma’s feelings for Zemlinsky, although very different, were not
20 significantly affected by the fact that Zemlinsky was a Jew and, indeed, even
1 smaller and more unattractive than Mahler – not that we would describe
2 Mahler as unattractive. He also smelt even worse than Mahler.
3 And yet Alma’s love continued to grow. Mahler even paraded the fact that
4 he was much older than she was. And by means of the self-doubts that he
5 passed on to her or that third parties dutifully retailed, he sought to silence his
6 own doubts on the matter. In the course of the long walks that they took
7 together, he explained to Alma that it was difficult to marry someone in a high
8 but by no means secure position – in raising this objection, he clearly took it
9 for granted that the two of them would marry. He also stressed his need for
30 freedom and independence, while antagonizing her by trying to exert a
1 schoolmasterly influence, notably when he advised her to burn her edition of
2 Nietzsche’s writings. He even compared their relationship to that between
3 Sachs and Eva in Die Meistersinger – here, of course, he was on shaky ground,
4 for Sachs renounces Eva in favour of the much younger and more presentable
5 Walther von Stolzing. Alma was rightly annoyed at such a comparison, which
6 she saw as a mere excuse. This critical phase in their relationship dates from
7 early December 1901, predating by a few days Mahler’s departure for Berlin,
8 where he conducted his Fourth Symphony at a concert whose conducting
9 duties he shared with Strauss. In fact, his tactics, however risky, seem to have
40 been prompted by genuine doubts and misgivings. Shortly before he left for
41R Berlin, he wrote a letter to Alma in which his profound love for her finds no
less powerful expression than a patronizing didacticism that any young 1

woman would surely have found intolerable: 2
3
And sometimes I shall pause for thought with that ‘distrustful’ look on my 4
face that so often surprises you. It isn’t mistrust in the usual sense of the word, 5
but uncertainty with regard to yourself and the future. My dearest, learn to 6
reply! It’s not at all easy, for one has to have weighed oneself in the balance, 7
one has to know oneself. And asking is even harder. It can be learnt only in 8
the light of a complete and intimate relationship with one’s partner. My 9
dearest dear, learn to ask! 10
Yesterday you made a completely changed impression and appeared far 1
more mature. I can sense that the past few days have opened you up, have 2
revealed you. – And after my return, what then? – Then I shall ask: Do you 3
love me? More than yesterday? Did you know me then, and do you recognize 4
me now? And now, my love, my comrade, addio! Your Gustav.45 5
6
Throughout his absence in Berlin, Mahler continued to bombard Alma with 7
long letters telling her to write more clearly (‘Use bigger gaps between the 8
characters’) and speaking of his ambition to be understood and respected by 9
his colleagues, a desire that had nothing to do with the ambition of the 20
conductor and opera-house director: ‘Please tell me if you understand what I 1
mean and whether you can follow me. Alma! Could you stand by me and take 2
all these burdens upon yourself – even to the point of humiliation – could you 3
happily bear this cross with me?’46 Is this the language with which one wins 4
over a twenty-two-year-old woman? Marriage as a via crucis in the company 5
of a vilified saviour of art? In her edition of her correspondence with Mahler, 6
Alma changed ‘can follow me’ to ‘want to follow me’, a change that reflects the 7
disquiet that Mahler’s question caused in her. 8
Time and again Mahler condescended to Alma, adopting the position of the 9
older, wiser and more educated man and telling her what she must do or give 30
up or bear in mind, never for a moment thinking that he must adapt to her and 1
take account of her own needs and limitations. His basic attitude was that she 2
must raise herself to his level: ‘On cloud-covered heights there dwell the gods,’ 3
the Wanderer proclaims in Siegfried, and it would be scant exaggeration to see 4
the hand of the brilliant composer reaching down from these cloud-covered 5
heights and grasping the hand of the young creature who, beautiful, naïve and 6
untouched by the breath of the spirit and the highest art, is drawn aloft towards 7
him. Mahler was at his most candid not in conversation with Alma but in a 8
letter to his sister Justine. On 13 December 1901 – by which date Alma was 9
already clear in her own mind about her future marriage – we find him writing 40
to her: ‘The dear girl herself is in quite a state, finding herself in a completely 41R
374 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 unfamiliar situation, to which I have to open both her eyes and my own. As I
2 recently realized, she will have to mature considerably before I can consider
3 taking such a momentous decision.’47 Mahler’s turn of phrase makes it sound
4 ominously as if he were thinking of buying a piece of property rather than
5 describing the love of his life. His tone of voice suggests a counterpart to
6 Alma’s attitude to him, an attitude in which a religious sense of pity was
7 designed to place open ground between them. None of the famous marriages
8 between artists that were entered into at this period began as inauspiciously as
9 the one between Mahler and Alma.
10 And yet we should be wary of dismissing Mahler as no more than a cold-
1 hearted schoolteacher who did not deserve his young bride. After all, his coolness
2 was a cloak with which to shield the passion that took even him by surprise and
3 which he, already a relatively old man, felt for this young woman. The many
4 misgivings that beset him needed to be put into words. The more barriers that
5 were placed in his way, the more he would be justified in feeling remorse: this was
6 what she wanted – she had been duly warned. In another letter to his sister, he
7 referred openly to the age gap between him and Alma and to the torment that it
8 caused him: ‘Only one thing still worries me: whether a person who is already
9 growing old has the right to so much youthfulness and vigour, whether that
20 person has the right to tether the spring to the autumn, to force his partner to
1 forgo the summer. I know I have much to offer, but that is no fair exchange for
2 the right to be young.’48 There is no doubt that Mahler saw quite clearly what
3 would be one of the problems that might – and indeed did – affect his marriage.
4 Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius is already prefigured in these words, and this
5 includes more than just the cooling of the libido on the part of a much older man.
6 It is something of a miracle that in spite of the hail of warnings on the part
7 of Alma’s family and friends, and also in spite of her own profound doubts and
8 misgivings and Mahler’s avuncular but ultimately condescending attitude
9 towards her, the real reasons for which were largely concealed from her, she
30 remained steadfast. Anyone familiar with the true facts of the matter must
1 regard her marriage as the most unlikely development of all. In normal
2 circumstances, her relationship with Mahler would have remained a brief if
3 impassioned liaison. It would presumably have been Mahler who took her
4 virginity, but with that the affair would have been over. (It may none the less
5 be recalled that Alma became pregnant even before she was married.) If we
6 take a detailed look at the letters and diary entries from these decisive weeks,
7 we shall see that it was ultimately Alma whose violent passion for Mahler
8 helped her to overcome her misgivings. If she had hesitated even half as much
9 as Mahler, failure would surely have followed. It was Alma’s impetuous youth
40 that overcame the ageing genius’s emotional and moral scruples, although it
41R remains open to question who was the ultimate victor here.
But there were still two further bridges to be crossed. One was a letter, the 1
other a soirée at the home of Mahler and his sister. Initially, at least, Alma got 2
on very well with Justine, even if in her later reminiscences she did not have a 3
good word to say about her sister-in-law. In his letters to Justine, Mahler 4
speaks of Alma’s fondness for her. Only later are there any signs of a cooling 5
off and talk of Justine’s ‘touchiness’. 6
Mahler’s letter of 19 December 1901 is a remarkable document not only 7
because it implicitly prevents Alma from composing any more music of her 8
own, but also because, worryingly and even alarmingly, Mahler stakes every- 9
thing on a single card, telling Alma any number of home truths and expressing 10
himself so bluntly that the reader is left with the distinct impression that this 1
was Alma’s ordeal by fire and water. If she were able to withstand this scrutiny 2
of her immaturity and lack of personal development, her relationship with 3
Mahler could survive every other strain that might be placed upon it. But if it 4
was unable to bear such an analysis, then it would be better if this passionate 5
and troublesome affair ended without further ado. One thing is certain: Alma 6
would never be able to claim that she had no idea of what lay in store. Mahler’s 7
‘ban’ on her compositional activities is at the heart of this inordinately long 8
letter, and it cannot be viewed in isolation for it is based on a view of Alma that 9
amounts to nothing less than the belief that she was still immature as a person. 20
It seems that the letter that prompted his reply had annoyed him for its super- 1
ficiality. (Like all her letters to Mahler, it was destroyed by Alma herself.) 2
Evidently she had mentioned a discussion with her former beau, Max 3
Burckhard, that had revolved around her individuality. With the brutal 4
honesty that he invariably evinced, especially when dealing with people who 5
were important to him, Mahler simply denied that she had any individuality at 6
all, at least in the higher sense: 7
8
Young, sympathetic and boundlessly delightful as you are, unsullied in body 9
and soul, richly gifted, open-hearted and precociously self-assured, all this 30
still makes no true individual of you. What you are for me, my Alma, what 1
you could perhaps one day be for me – the highest and dearest part of my life, 2
a faithful, valiant partner, who understands me and spurs me on to higher 3
things, an unassailable fortress, who shields me from all my intrinsic and 4
extrinsic enemies, a haven, a heaven, in which I can always submerge, 5
retrieve and reconstitute myself – all this is so indescribably noble and 6
beautiful – so much and so great – in a word: MY WIFE – but even this is still 7
no individuality in the sense of those superior beings who determine the 8
course of their own existence as well as that of mankind, and who alone bear 9
that name.49 40
41R
376 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 And Mahler then goes on to pick to pieces all of Alma’s youthful enthusiasms
2 and ideals, ideals buoyed up by the intellectual Zeitgeist and made up of a
3 mixture of ‘Schopenhauer’s writings on womanhood, Nietzsche’s utterly false
4 and brazenly arrogant theories of masculine supremacy, the gut-rotting,
5 murky fuddle of Maeterlinck and the public-house rhetoric of Bierbaum’. And
6 he blames Alma’s entourage – in particular Burckhard and Zemlinsky – for her
7 subjective belief that she can maintain her own with the intellectual giants of
8 the age. It is people like these who, inspired by her youthful beauty, have given
9 her the deceptive feeling that she is intellectually and emotionally mature. (He
10 could have said that they had given her this feeling in order to get her into bed
1 with them, but he evidently preferred a more elegant turn of phrase here.)
2 Anyone who has read Alma’s diaries in detail will be bound to agree with
3 Mahler when, discussing the negative side of her personality, he goes on: ‘My
4 Alma, you have grown vain – . . . your vanity is a result of what these people
5 think they see in you or would like to see in you. . . . With your charm, you
6 serve such people as an uncommonly delightful, agreeable adversary, and one,
7 moreover, who lacks the force of factual argument. Thus, in the belief that you
8 are mutually benefiting mankind, you move together in ever-diminishing
9 circles.’ Unfortunately, Mahler went on, Alma was not entirely innocent of this
20 immodesty on the part of people who regarded their own limited gossip as the
1 centre of the universe. Mahler’s diagnosis is hard to dispute, and he undoubt-
2 edly had a deeper and clearer view of the situation than the people in Alma’s
3 entourage, whose self-interest was all too apparent – only in the case of
4 Zemlinsky was he manifestly unjust. And yet his assessment was both
5 implacable and positively malicious. Above all, the candid expression of views
6 that may have been modified in personal conversation and in that way
7 acquired a more conciliatory tone reads like an official character reference
8 when couched in the form of a letter – and such references are normally with-
9 held from the candidate. Having dismissed this immature, albeit gifted, young
30 woman as an inferior creature who might yet be capable of improvement – and
1 it is clear that Mahler saw himself as an example of those ‘higher existences’
2 who can give artistic shape to other people’s lives – Mahler presumes to inform
3 her that she must give up composition if she is to marry him. He then broke
4 off the letter in order to attend the final rehearsal of his Second Symphony. On
5 resuming the letter, he insisted once again that his was the role of the composer
6 and breadwinner, hers that of the loving companion and understanding
7 comrade. ‘Are you satisfied with that role? – I am asking much of you, very
8 much – but I can and must do so, because I also know what I have to offer (and
9 shall offer) in return.’ It is striking that Mahler is so proud of what he can offer
40 that he does not even think it necessary to go into detail and explain what it
41R may involve. The final section of the letter strikes an even more sombre and
forceful note, and at least from the standpoint of the modern reader becomes 1
altogether insufferable: 2
3
Almschi, I beg you, read this letter carefully. Our relationship must not 4
degenerate into a mere flirt. Before we speak again, we must have clarified 5
everything, you must know what I demand and expect of you, and what I can 6
give in return – what you must be for me. You must ‘renounce’ (your word) 7
everything superficial and conventional, all vanity and outward show 8
(concerning your individuality and your work) – you must surrender your- 9
self to me unconditionally, make every detail of your future life completely 10
dependent on my needs, in return you must wish for nothing except my love! 1
2
Mahler then demands that Alma reply by return of post. 3
4
This letter will come as a dreadful shock to you – I know it, Alma, and even 5
if this is only cold comfort, you can well imagine that I am suffering just as 6
much. I call to God, though aware that you have not yet made His acquain- 7
tance, to guide your hand, my love, in writing the truth and not letting your- 8
self be led astray by ostentation. – For this is a moment of great importance, 9
these are decisions that will weld two people together for eternity. I bless you, 20
my dearest, no matter how you react. – I shall not write tomorrow, but wait 1
instead for your letter on Saturday. A servant will be sent round and kept 2
waiting in readiness. Many tender kisses, my Alma. And I beg you: be 3
truthful! Your Gustav. 4
5
Mahler’s letter has been quoted at length because it is arguably the most 6
important one that he ever wrote to Alma. Its tone is ruthless, brutal, 7
unadorned and honest and undoubtedly prompted by the profound need to 8
get at the truth, and on a number of decisive points he had the truth on his 9
side. But it is beyond question that no twenty-two-year-old woman could 30
possibly know how to respond to such a letter. After all, he himself had 1
observed her relative immaturity, and so it seems incredible that he should 2
have regarded her reaction to his letter as an acid test that would allow him to 3
tell whether two such different people could live their lives together. Her 4
apparent ability to handle the shock caused by his letter and to pass the test 5
that he had set her convinced him that she was mature enough to marry him, 6
whereas it was in fact a further sign of her immaturity. All the problems and 7
crises that later bedevilled their marriage were prefigured in this letter. We do 8
not know whether Alma replied to it. All that we do know is her reaction to it, 9
a reaction she confided in her diary when she found the letter waiting for her 40
on her return home: 41R
378 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 My heart missed a beat . . . give up my music – abandon what has until now
2 been my life? My first reaction was – to pass him up. I had to weep – for then
3 I understood that I loved him. Half-crazed with grief, I got into my finery and
4 drove to ‘Siegfried’ in tears! . . . I feel as if a cold hand has torn the heart from
5 my breast.
6 Mama & I talked it over until late at night. She had read the letter . . .! I was
7 dumbfounded. I find his behaviour so ill-considered, so inept. It might have
8 come all of its own . . . quite gently. . . . But like this it will leave an indelible
9 scar . . .50
10
1 She took out the ominous letter again the next day:
2
3 I forced myself to sleep the night through. This morning I reread his letter –
4 and suddenly I felt such warmth. What if I were to renounce [my music] out
5 of love for him? Just forget all about it! I must admit that scarcely any music
6 now interests me except his.
7 Yes – he’s right. I must live entirely for him, to make him happy. And now
8 I have a strange feeling that my love for him is deep & genuine. For how long?
9 I don’t know, but already that means much. I long for him boundlessly.51
20
1 If Mahler had been able to read Alma’s diary, he would surely have felt
2 confirmed in his view that she was immature and would have responded even
3 more critically. His refusal to allow her to write music apparently caused her
4 lifelong distress, but was it simply a tactical error? Would she have accepted his
5 injunction if he had issued it at a later date and expressed it rather more
6 circumspectly?
7 Another remarkable aspect of Alma’s reaction is that it was confined to
8 Mahler’s ban on her activities as a composer, a ban that she accepted volun-
9 tarily and wholeheartedly. Conversely, she was not cut to the quick by Mahler’s
30 description of her as an immature woman who had not even completed the
1 first step on the road to individuality and had no ideas of her own but merely
2 parroted the inanities of the people around her, all of whom were as superfi-
3 cial as she was and who were repeating the fashionable remarks of others.
4 None of this seems to have affected her. Rather, she was affected only by the
5 single logical result of this criticism, namely, the insinuation that the music
6 that she wrote was itself no more than a superficial mimicking of the music
7 that was then in fashion, a reheating of a dish already served up by her
8 teachers, Labor and Zemlinsky. Mahler’s own conviction on this score was as
9 implacable as it was logical: if only one of the partners in a marriage could
40 work creatively as a composer, then it could only be Mahler himself, for he was
41R a fully developed individual whose music improved and enriched humanity.
Alma was in no position to think through the implications of this attitude, and 1
it did not occur to her that in the light of this letter marriage with a man like 2
Mahler would not make her happy. Indeed, she did not even know how long 3
this love, however deep and genuine, might last. Nor did she wonder what 4
would happen if her love were to cool. Should her mother have done more to 5
influence her here? Was Mahler, like the Burckhards and Zemlinskys of this 6
world, not himself too dazzled by her beauty? Was he so convinced of his own 7
Socratic abilities as to think that he could transform an immature future 8
housewife and mother into a mature individual? It is impossible not to be 9
reminded of a line in Wagner’s Lohengrin: ‘Thus misfortune enters this house.’ 10
And then there was the evening when, to use Alma’s expression, she was 1
‘passed in review’, an evening that she never forgot and that she described in 2
detail in her reminiscences. It was the evening of 5 January 1902, when Mahler 3
invited Alma and her parents, together with a few of his own closest friends 4
from the 1870s, to his apartment in the Auenbruggergasse in order for the 5
parties to get to know each other a little better, news of his engagement having 6
appeared in all the local papers in the days just after Christmas. This had been 7
a turbulent time for the couple. They had tried to make love on the afternoon 8
of 1 January, but Mahler’s erectile dysfunction had turned the occasion into a 9
fiasco, reducing an already overwrought Alma to a state of near hysteria. 20
Within two days, however, Mahler had made amends: ‘Bliss and rapture,’ Alma 1
noted in her diary.52 That the physical consummation of their love was 2
followed so closely by the dispiriting evening at Mahler’s apartment needs to 3
be stressed. After she had desired it for so long, physical union with a man – 4
and with this man in particular – seems to have swept aside all doubts and all 5
the grounds for conflict that had still not been resolved, but within two days 6
they had returned in the context of what had been planned as an innocent 7
social get-together. 8
The guest list included not only Alma and her mother and stepfather but 9
also the Lipiners, the Spieglers, Anna von Mildenburg, Kolo Moser and Justine 30
Mahler and Arnold Rosé. Having failed to realize his early promise, Siegfried 1
Lipiner, the Nietzschean Wagnerian and thaumaturge of 1870s Vienna, now 2
led a reclusive life as librarian to the Imperial Senate. He had married his first 3
wife, Anna née Hoffmann, in 1881 but they had been divorced since 1890. 4
Anna, or ‘Nina’ as she preferred to be known, was a close friend of Mahler’s 5
and went on to become a mother figure to Bruno Walter, who felt that no one 6
understood him as well as she did. On divorcing Lipiner, she had married 7
Albert Spiegler in 1891. Trained as a doctor, Spiegler had sufficient inde- 8
pendent means to work as a private tutor in the field of dietetics. He, too, had 9
been a friend of Mahler’s since the 1870s and was thus a guest on 5 January 40
1902. Lipiner’s relations with his former wife appear to have been relatively 41R
380 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 harmonious, and in general he seems to have left a deep impression on all the
2 women in his life, for they evidently tolerated his various escapades. At least
3 this is the only possible explanation for the fact that the supper guests that
4 evening in the Auenbruggergasse included not only Lipiner’s ex-wife, but also
5 his current spouse, Clementine, and his mistress, Anna von Mildenburg, who,
6 unable to have Mahler, had sought consolation with his spiritual confidant.
7 Also present was Arnold Rosé, the leader of the Court Opera orchestra.
8 Mahler had finally discovered that his sister Justine, who was running his
9 household in Vienna, had been secretly seeing Rosé, a discovery that appar-
10 ently infuriated him – not least because he had failed to notice what was going
1 on under his very nose. It was she who threw the party, an act of sisterly hospi-
2 tality that was one of her last under Mahler’s roof. The group was rounded off
3 by the Secessionist artist Kolo Moser.
4 Such an illustrious and well-mixed group of interesting, clever and in part
5 amiable individuals should have ensured that the evening passed off smoothly.
6 But according to Alma, the supper party was a deliberate attempt to under-
7 mine her liaison with Mahler. It seems that there had already been contacts
8 with Lipiner’s group of friends, including a meeting at Mahler’s apartment,
9 where Alma met Lipiner for the first time. Among this group of Mahler’s
20 acquaintances (‘His friends could not ever be friends of mine’53), Alma also
1 numbered an ‘old barrister, stupid and importunate’, who was presumably Emil
2 Freund, a friend of Mahler’s from his grammar-school days in Iglau; and an
3 old librarian, equally ‘stupid and importunate’, who must have been Friedrich
4 Löhr. Turning to Lipiner, Alma quoted an apocryphal remark of Brahms: ‘That
5 lying hound of a Pole interests me.’ The anti-Semitic undertone in this alleged
6 put-down is unmistakable, for Lipiner hailed from Galicia, and at least the
7 western half of Galicia was Polish. Anti-Semites regarded Polish and Russian
8 Jews as the lowest of the low. But, unlike Brahms, Alma was not interested in
9 Lipiner. If she described him as a ‘lying hound of a Pole’, it was to stress the
30 anti-Semitic subtext of Brahms’s ostensible slight, adding that he was ‘an ill-
1 natured, harsh-tempered brute – his eyes much too close together and
2 surmounted by an enormous bald skull. He had a stammer; he was a bogus
3 Goethe in his writing and a haggling Jew in his talk.’54 Alma was evidently
4 jealous of the fact that Mahler set such store by Lipiner and was envious of his
5 education, in comparison to which her own seemed merely desultory and
6 second-hand. In comparison to Mahler, too, this was an immense problem,
7 prompting Alma to seek revenge by dismissing Lipiner’s impressive erudition
8 as altogether sterile.
9 Even on this first evening the atmosphere had been frosty. If Alma’s account
40 can be trusted, the other guests pried into her education, questioned her about
41R Guido Reni, who meant nothing to her, and ridiculed her for reading Plato’s
Symposium, a text that they claimed was far above her. Mahler could have seen 1
this coming. Again and again the reader is struck by his lack of sympathetic 2
understanding and unfamiliarity with the ways of the world. It would have 3
been better if the ‘full-dress review’ had not taken place at all. Certainly, it was 4
hardly necessary that it should do so. Writing with hindsight, Alma spoke of 5
the ‘grandiose and festive air which so completely belied the hollowness of that 6
occasion’. In her diary she added an anti-Semitic dig to her sense of unease and 7
rejection, claiming that all the other guests were ‘conspicuously Jewish’. In 8
general, it is noticeable that a person’s Jewishness was overlooked only when 9
he or she struck her as sympathetic, but if they were unsympathetic, then it 10
suddenly became all-important. It was an attitude that she maintained all her 1
life. For Lipiner and his circle, the situation was far from easy. Here, after all, 2
was a young woman who, famous as a beauty throughout the city, was poised 3
to take away their friend but who was incapable of competing with him or, 4
indeed, with themselves on any artistic or intellectual level. They, too, were 5
jealous and also, it seems, they lacked openness and tolerance. The atmosphere 6
was poisonous. In her diary Alma admits that she wanted to shock the other 7
guests with her unparalleled effrontery and when Anna von Mildenburg, fired 8
by malice, asked her more successful rival for Mahler’s favours, ‘What is your 9
opinion of Gustav’s music?’, she replied: ‘I know very little of it, but what I do 20
know I don’t like.’ This was simply untrue, for in a diary entry only shortly 1
beforehand she had noted her increasing enthusiasm for it.55 The temperature 2
sank to below freezing point, but Mahler is said to have laughed and to have 3
drawn Alma into an adjoining room. 4
Meanwhile, next door, her ‘downfall’ was being decreed. Alma’s account 5
makes it sound as if she was indulging her love of drama and trying to break 6
down the bridges between her and Mahler’s friends. In short, it is tempting to 7
see it as yet another of her exaggerations. On this occasion, however, we may 8
well be right to believe her, for a long letter has survived from Lipiner to 9
Mahler that was written in the wake of this ominous evening in the 30
Auenbruggergasse in reply to a letter from Mahler that has not survived. The 1
letter seals the breach between Mahler and his old circle of friends and at the 2
same time indicates that the supper party brought to the surface resentments 3
which until then had simmered away unseen. Lipiner evidently felt that 4
Mahler, at the pinnacle of his career and newly in love, no longer valued his old 5
friends as much as he had done in the past and that he was now less willing to 6
share his life with them. Lipiner sums up Mahler’s attitude in the following 7
sentence, which was presumably based on an actual remark of Mahler’s: ‘My 8
dear Siegfried, you simply don’t know how little I care about you all.’56 When 9
Lipiner goes on to complain about Mahler’s habit of alienating even loyal 40
friends and of dropping them only to pick them up again when it suited him, 41R
382 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 he is merely repeating a complaint repeatedly made by others: there was

2 a high-handedness and a ruthlessness about the way in which he broke off
3 relations with others and then renewed contact some time later. Lipiner
4 reproaches Mahler for having spent the whole evening cosseting Alma even
5 though he had spent most of the previous weeks with her, and for treating his
6 old friends as mere extras in a scene designed to showcase the billing and
7 cooing of the newly enamoured couple. Lipiner then turns his heavy guns on
8 Alma. Did Mahler know what a risk he was running by marrying her? She had
9 behaved in an unnatural, dishonest and foolish manner and was totally shame-
10 less. She had also been offensively disinterested in the other guests. ‘I have
1 always felt a chill in Alma’s presence and the impression that she has left on me
2 is not that of a woman who is at all bashful but one who is disagreeably disen-
3 gaged, immodest and argumentative; I may say this precisely because I was not
4 affected by it.’ Her supercilious comments on Guido Reni and Plato merely
5 served to demonstrate her ‘lack of any natural feeling for all that is great and a
6 want of respect and, indeed, a lack of all that is natural’. In short, Lipiner
7 implied, how could such a woman understand what was great about Mahler’s
8 music? This letter seems to have precipitated the breach not only with Lipiner
9 but also with all their other mutual friends.
20 Mahler’s reaction has not survived, but we know that there was no further
1 contact between the two erstwhile friends at least until such time as Bruno
2 Walter attempted to bring them together again during one of the most turbu-
3 lent periods in Mahler’s life. As we have seen, the breach was caused by more
4 than merely Alma’s behaviour and Mahler’s defence thereof. Mahler’s relations
5 with his old friends were no longer what they had been during the latter half
6 of the 1870s. They had evidently imagined that the situation would be rather
7 different when their student comrade returned to Vienna to run the musical
8 life of the city. Moreover, Mahler and Lipiner had once argued violently over
9 Wagner when Lipiner, referring to Wagner’s relations with Liszt, had let slip a
30 dismissive remark that Mahler took in bad part. Even so, one wonders why a
1 ruined evening in Mahler’s apartment should have had such repercussions.
2 Mahler was bound to side with his fiancée when she found herself under attack
3 from a band of conspirators who appeared to constitute a vipers’ nest of petty
4 jealousies and older rights, and who included one of Mahler’s ex-mistresses.
5 And yet a single conversation would have sufficed to resolve the situation and
6 clear the air. There is only one psychologically convincing reason why Mahler
7 suddenly abandoned an entire group of people who had been important to
8 him for so long: it was painfully clear to him that his friends were right, even
9 if the tone they adopted was wrong, but this was something that he was unable
40 to admit to himself and others in the heady intoxication of his possession of
41R the most beautiful woman in Vienna, a woman, moreover, who appeared to
have survived every test. As the spokesman of the group, Lipiner merely said 1
what Mahler himself knew, for all that his comments were undiplomatic and 2
aggressively worded: neither as an artist nor as an intellectual nor yet as a 3
mature woman was Alma Schindler a suitable wife for him. He forced himself 4
to ignore these misgivings and at the same time to ignore the people from his 5
past who shared these doubts and who, forgetting the sympathy and tolerance 6
that they owed a woman like Alma, were all too quick to judge and summarily 7
dismiss her. 8
There was a further victim who was left behind on the battlefield of this 9
marriage: Natalie Bauer-Lechner. She deserves at least a brief excursus on her 10
own significance and on that of her reminiscences. She was born in 1858, two 1
years before Mahler, and began her career as a violinist, later switching to the 2
viola. She was well known in her day as a member of the all-women Soldat- 3
Roeger Quartet – a line-up as unusual in our own day as it was in hers. She first 4
got to know Mahler in Budapest in the autumn of 1890, a meeting that marked 5
the start of a twelve-year friendship. It would be no exaggeration to say that 6
there were few other people who understood Mahler as well as she did. She 7
was a fine musician and unusually clever, even if she had little experience of 8
the world. She was also sensitive, and she loved and worshipped Mahler. Her 9
reminiscences were first published in a much-abridged form in 1923 and in a 20
fuller version in 1984. By general agreement they constitute the most valuable 1
surviving record of Mahler’s life apart from his own letters. As an impassioned 2
pacifist she was imprisoned for one of her publications shortly before the end 3
of the First World War. She died in 1921 at the age of sixty-three, two years 4
before her reminiscences first appeared in print. She always said that Mahler 5
and Lipiner were the two greatest men she had ever met – and there is no 6
doubt that Mahler was the greater of the two. The sudden end of their friend- 7
ship is shrouded in mystery, but there is no doubt that she was hopelessly in 8
love with Mahler, who valued her highly for her utter devotion and under- 9
standing but who was not attracted to her physically: prematurely greying, 30
she looked older than she was. Although more attractive than Anna von 1
Mildenburg, she could not compare with the singer as an artist. Sometimes her 2
doglike devotion grated on Mahler, but for many years she was effectively a 3
part of the family and spent her summer holidays with them. Justine, too, liked 4
her and valued her support in practical matters. 5
The breach came with Mahler’s engagement to Alma Schindler at Christmas 6
1901. Until then, it is conceivable that Natalie harboured vague hopes that the 7
apparently confirmed bachelor might still fall back on her, but now even this 8
dim prospect faded from sight. Natalie attended the first Viennese perform- 9
ance of the Fourth Symphony on 12 January 1902 and left with Bruno Walter 40
and his wife. The three of them discussed the work’s hostile reception. But this 41R
384 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 is her last reference to Mahler in her reminiscences. In an unpublished passage

2 in her own memoirs, Alma – constitutionally jealous and consumed by
3 malevolence where other women were concerned – purports to recount the
4 scene that led to the breach, claiming that Natalie had for a long time kept
5 Mahler in the dark about the liaison between Justine and Arnold Rosé in order
6 to ‘blackmail’ Justine – presumably in order to ensure that she remained close
7 to Mahler. This is sheer malice on Alma’s part, because Mahler opened himself
8 up to Natalie in a way that he would never have done with an acquaintance
9 who had been forced upon him. Alma then refers to the decisive conversation
10 in the course of which Mahler accused Natalie of complicity with Justine,
1 whereupon Natalie defended herself by declaring her love and attempting to
2 embrace him. She is said to have begged Mahler to marry her, but he allegedly
3 refused, claiming that he would love only a beautiful woman. In her despera-
4 tion Natalie had insisted that she was beautiful, a point that Alma and Justine
5 spitefully repeated whenever they could – one hopes that Mahler did not join
6 in their malicious jibes. According to Alma, this was the last time that Mahler
7 and Natalie spoke to each other. Her account raises more questions than it
8 answers. But it is true that he detested scenes of this nature, and there is no
9 doubt that something serious occurred.
20 Whatever the truth of the matter, Natalie’s indispensable reminiscences end
1 with the following sentences: ‘Six weeks ago Mahler became engaged to Alma
2 Schindler. If I wished to speak about this, I should find myself in the position of
3 the physician who has to treat his nearest and dearest in a matter of life and
4 death. In order, therefore, to bring this matter to an end, I place it in the hands
5 of the supreme, eternal master!’57 Unlike Lipiner, with whom he severed his
6 links on account of Alma only to reforge them at a later date, Natalie disap-
7 peared without trace from Mahler’s life, a disappearance difficult to understand
8 when we read her reminiscences, which are characterized by their profound
9 love and deep understanding. This is not to say that Mahler would have done
30 better to marry Natalie, and yet there is not a single surviving line from Alma’s
1 pen that can compare to Natalie’s in terms of its affection, loyalty and empathy.
2 Mahler and Alma were married in Vienna’s St Charles’s Church on
3 9 March 1902. It was a Catholic ceremony. The marriage register, which erro-
4 neously gives the date as 9 February, names two witnesses: Arnold Rosé, who
5 was to marry Mahler’s sister Justine the following day, and, on the bride’s side,
6 Alma’s stepfather, Carl Moll.
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
23 3
4
5
6
The Fifth Symphony 7
8
9
10
1
2
3
ITH THE FIFTH Symphony we enter a new part of Mahler’s symphonic 4
W world. He himself justified this statement by describing his first four
symphonies as a tetralogy, and there is no doubt that they belong together, not
5
6
least because of their links with various Wunderhorn poems. As a result they 7
are often bracketed together as the Wunderhorn symphonies and as such 8
distinguished from the instrumental symphonies of the middle period – the 9
Fifth, Sixth and Seventh. The Eighth is in any case set apart from the others, 20
while the Ninth and the unfinished Tenth are understandably classed as late 1
works. One thing is certain: even in the case of the Fourth, Mahler had claimed 2
that he was now in total control of his technical resources, and the Fifth finds 3
him taking a further decisive step in this direction. Only in one respect did it 4
turn out that he had not made as much progress as he had wanted, and that 5
was in the field of instrumentation. Shortly before his death, he subjected the 6
Fifth Symphony to a further fundamental overhaul in terms of its orchestra- 7
tion. In a letter to the conductor Georg Göhler, he admitted that even as a 8
forty-year-old composer at the height of his powers, he could still commit 9
the sort of mistakes that a novice might make: the experience acquired in 30
his first four symphonies let him down – a new style needed a new technique. 1
But while working on his Fifth Symphony he was not yet aware of this 2
shortcoming. 3
During the summer of 1901, when he started work on the symphony, 4
Mahler told Natalie Bauer-Lechner, in a relatively uncharacteristic expression 5
of his own self-worth as a composer: ‘It is the prime of a man’s life; even if the 6
inspiration does not reach the same high level as it once did, it is replaced by 7
full strength and complete ability. I feel that I can achieve anything and that for 8
a long time to come my resources will belong to me and obey me.’1 The Fifth 9
Symphony also represents a caesura inasmuch as Mahler stopped producing 40
the lengthy programme notes that had characterized his earlier symphonies. 41R
386 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 From now on, performers and commentators can no longer appeal to Mahler
2 in the way that they had been able to do previously. However well-intentioned
3 Mahler may have been in the past, he now realized that he was not doing
4 himself or his works any favours by promulgating such programme notes and
5 that any short-term advantages could in no way make up for the long-term
6 damage that they caused. Nor should we forget that Mahler’s association with
7 Alma marked the end of his contacts with Natalie Bauer-Lechner. The Fifth
8 Symphony was written in Maiernigg during the summers of 1901 and 1902. In
9 February 1902, six weeks after he and Alma became engaged, Natalie stopped
10 recording her conversations with Mahler, conversations that are of inestimable
1 value for the light that they throw on his thoughts and feelings. It was, more-
2 over, with particular care that Natalie had faithfully noted down his comments
3 on his individual works. A conversation about the Fifth Symphony that took
4 place during the summer of 1901 is the last of this kind to be recorded – Alma
5 left only rudimentary jottings on Mahler’s music, a state of affairs that stems
6 from the fact that she unfortunately did not feel called upon to act as an
7 Eckermann to her husband’s Goethe.
8 Mahler’s conversation with Natalie Bauer-Lechner is effectively limited to
9 the symphony’s third movement, its Scherzo, which was presumably the first of
20 the five to be written and the first in which he experimented with his new
1 musical style. The novelty about the Scherzo – and about the rest of the
2 emerging score – is to be found in the unprecedented complexity of the writing.
3 Drawing on one of his typical images, Mahler expressed this as follows: ‘It is
4 kneaded through and through till not a grain of the mixture remains unmixed
5 and unchanged. Every note is charged with life, and the whole thing whirls
6 round in a giddy dance.’ And he went on to add an important pointer to his
7 decision to abandon the world of the Wunderhorn songs and of the written or
8 sung word in general: ‘The human voice would be absolutely out of place here.
9 There is no need for words, everything is purely musically expressed.’2 Mahler
30 was now certain, therefore, that everything he wanted to express could be
1 expressed by purely musical means, something that had not been possible
2 earlier. The orchestra was now able to absorb the written and sung word and
3 render them dispensable. It alone now spoke more clearly than orchestra and
4 singers, whether soloists or chorus, had previously been capable of doing. This
5 was bound up, of course, with a reduction in the number of the work’s poten-
6 tial meanings or, rather, a reluctance to be precise as to what those meanings
7 might be. The fewer the narrative structures that could be recounted by
8 linguistic means, the less it was necessary to flag them up with linguistic images.
9 Here we are once again reminded of Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht’s term ‘vocab-
40 ular music’ to describe Mahler’s musical language, a term that Eggebrecht takes
41R to mean structures within the music that hark back to material formed during
THE FIFTH SYMPHONY 387
the pre-compositional phase. These are musical phrases which, part of the 1
common currency, can derive from all areas of music and which had previously 2
never found their way into art music or, having once formed part of it, had sunk 3
to the level of a commonplace. Here we may find an important key to under- 4
standing the notorious banalities and trivialities that are contained in Mahler’s 5
music but which are in fact elemental idioms. If listeners think that a particular 6
passage sounds familiar, even if they cannot point to a concrete quotation, then 7
this is an example of the sort of pre-existing material that Mahler needed and 8
has nothing to do with eclecticism or paucity of invention. (It may be added in 9
parentheses that with the single exception of his own songs and the Bruder 10
Martin round in the First Symphony, Mahler never included direct quotations 1
of other works in his music.) 2
Mahler created his symphonies out of this raw material that had left its 3
mark on the world around him, from the singing of his childhood nanny to 4
the strains of Bohemian musicians and the brass-band music played in 5
garrison towns. He produced a new and infinitely varied idiom out of which 6
he constructed the world of his symphonies, a world which, although artificial 7
in the highest degree, is none the less linked to the real world through count- 8
less veins and arteries. The blood corpuscles that flow through these veins, 9
turning the new body into a vital organism, are the elements that make up 20
Mahler’s vocabulary. These may consist of themes and motifs, but they may 1
also express themselves harmonically as shifts from major to minor or as 2
cadences. And they may also be conveyed in the choice of unusual instruments 3
that found their way into Mahler’s late Romantic symphony orchestra: 4
cowbells, posthorn, guitar and mandolin are semantically charged signs that 5
evoke certain extra-musical associations, recalling the last booming sound of 6
the mountain slope before the hiker ascends to heights devoid of beasts and 7
humans or suggesting the melancholy of a coach ride or a night-time serenade. 8
The linguistic power of these scores extends even to their performance mark- 9
ings: ‘In a folk tone’, ‘Like the song of a bird’, ‘Shyly’ – these are all instructions 30
that attest to this expressive quality. This same variety of expression is taken 1
further than ever in the Fifth Symphony. Not even in the later works is it 2
surpassed but merely more subtly differentiated.3 Or we could put it another 3
way: using a vocabulary that seems familiar and sometimes even intimately 4
colloquial, Mahler expresses all that is unheard of and uncanny, all that is 5
unsettling and upsetting. What was alien sounds familiar, and what is familiar 6
now seems alien. Such an analysis may also be applied to Mahler himself, an 7
individual who time and again seems to us to be so perplexing. 8
The very opening of the Fifth Symphony helps to explain what we mean by 9
‘vocabular composition’. The first trumpet intones a fanfare alone before the 40
full orchestra joins in, taking up the rhythm of the fanfare. For every musically 41R
388 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 educated listener, this rhythm recalls the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth

2 Symphony, where it is, however, differently instrumented. At the same time it
3 is as banal as any trumpet fanfare – and Mahler was not thinking of a quota-
4 tion or even an allusion here. But in the years around 1900 the musically uned-
5 ucated Austrian listener might also be reminded of something altogether
6 different, namely, the opening of the ‘General marsch’ associated with the
7 Austro-Hungarian Army. The whole of the opening movement draws on
8 the exceptional banality of this trumpet fanfare for its underlying gestures, the
9 apparent triviality of the beginning generating a symphonic structure of
10 extraordinary subtlety and complexity. The actual beginning of this ‘Funeral
1 March’, as the opening movement is headed, is like a folksong that continues to
2 evolve while alternating and combining with the highly rhythmical fanfare
3 from the beginning, offering the world a funeral march of a kind never heard
4 before. We may be tempted to imagine a scene in which the fanfare guides us
5 to a field of battle, while the dirge takes us from the battlefield to a mass grave.
6 In the first Trio section after figure 7, the movement strikes a note of positively
7 cosmic terror, the performance marking ‘Suddenly faster, impassioned, wild’
8 ushering in a completely unexpected frenetic outburst that eventually relapses
9 into the fanfare rhythm of the opening. Some commentators and performers
20 see in this a gesture of hysterical screaming, an interpretation taken to its
1 furthest extreme by Adorno, who writes that this music ‘must have created an
2 appalling impression at the time of its composition, retaining its power as a
3 fearful dream of coming pogroms in which the piercing voice of the man
4 ordering their murder combines with the screams of his victims. Passages such
5 as these make it clear just how dangerous Mahler’s music is in spite of its tonal
6 resources: there is nothing pre-war about it.’4 Rarely did Mahler write anything
7 as daring as this. It was the starting point for Berg’s Three Pieces op. 6 of
8 1914–15, especially the final piece, a march apparently written under the
9 immediate impression of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and
30 his wife at Sarajevo in 1914 and also containing an echo of the final movement
1 of the Sixth Symphony.
2 The second movement is no less complex than the first, not least because it
3 uses material from the Trio section of the funeral march, but transforms the
4 earlier terror into a melody that is unexpectedly tuneful. Here Mahler ‘kneads’
5 the material together in an altogether masterly manner that is impossible to
6 overpraise: everything is interwoven, the most complex structures emerging
7 from the most ‘banal’ beginnings, while radiant cantabile lines evolve out of
8 themes that seem suited only to strident outbursts, only for them to be swal-
9 lowed up or stifled as if their note of comfort had suddenly become untrust-
40 worthy. It is here, in bar 500, that we have an example of the familiar concept
41R of a ‘breakthrough’. There is something almost touching about the fact that
Mahler entered two arrows in the score at this point, an indication of his 1
justified mistrust of performers whom he thought would fail to recognize it as 2
a breakthrough. A chorale suddenly enters here in the most radiant of brass 3
sonorities. The same chorale will later leave its mark on the end of the final 4
movement. Here, however, it enters full-throatedly only to sink back again 5
very quickly. In his own analysis of this passage, Mathias Hansen proposes the 6
impressive image of an organ in full cry whose air supply is suddenly cut off, 7
leading the sound to die away abruptly.5 8
The third movement is the Scherzo that Mahler mentioned in conversation 9
with Natalie Bauer-Lechner. Its sheer length – almost twenty minutes in 10
performance – means that it is no Scherzo in the traditional sense but a high 1
point of Mahler’s skill as a contrapuntalist. Using the basic pattern of a dance 2
– principally waltz-like in character – he raises an edifice that almost defies the 3
laws of architecture. He was fully aware of the difficulties of what he had 4
designed, and while preparing for the first performance of the work with the 5
Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne in October 1904, he wrote to Alma: 6
7
That scherzo is an accursed movement! It will have a long tale of woe! For the 8
next fifty years conductors will take it too fast and make nonsense of it. And 9
audiences – heavens! – how should they react to this chaos, which is 20
constantly giving birth to new worlds and promptly destroying them again? 1
What should they make of these primeval noises, this rushing, roaring, 2
raging sea, these dancing stars, these ebbing, shimmering, gleaming waves? 3
What can a herd of sheep answer to an ‘ancient lay ’mid brother-spheres’, 4
other than bleat?6 5
6
Mahler was to be proved right, and the Fifth Symphony continues to be one of 7
his least popular works, a fate that it shares with the Sixth and Seventh, the two 8
other instrumental symphonies from his middle period. But he was also right in 9
his assessment of the way in which conductors would approach this movement: 30
most take it too quickly and fail to observe the second half of the tempo marking 1
‘Powerful, but not too fast’. The hectic quality of the movement as a whole should 2
not be obtained by rushing it but should emerge of its own accord. 3
Whatever the standing of the work as a whole, it is the fourth movement – 4
the Adagietto – that remains the single best-known movement in the whole of 5
Mahler’s output, a status that it owes to Luchino Visconti’s film Death in 6
Venice. The film did much to popularize Mahler’s music and is by no means 7
without merit. But the Adagietto is used throughout the film with the 8
frequency of a leitmotif and, as such, is overexposed. (We shall have more to 9
say on this point in our chapter on Mahler and posterity.) Even Mahler’s own 40
admirers have mixed feelings about this short movement, Mathias Hansen, for 41R
390 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 example, writing of its ‘rutting sonorities’.7 Here the crucial factor is again the
2 way in which the movement is interpreted by the conductor and, above all, the
3 latter’s understanding of the tempo modifications. Briefly, the performer
4 should not be tied down by the marking ‘Sehr langsam’ (‘Very slow’) that is
5 found at the start of the movement but must also take account of later mark-
6 ings, including ‘Do not drag’, ‘Pressing forward a little’ and ‘Flowing’, which
7 alternate with ‘Slow’ and ‘Even slower’ and, taken together, produce an organic
8 whole. Among gramophone recordings, Bernard Haitink and the Berlin
9 Philharmonic hold the record for the slowest performance of a movement
10 that runs to only five pages in the printed score and for which they require a
1 full fourteen minutes. One of Haitink’s predecessors at the Concertgebouw,
2 Willem Mengelberg, heard Mahler himself conduct the symphony in
3 Amsterdam in March 1906 and although he recorded Mahler’s timing for only
4 this single movement, it was a little over seven minutes. Bruno Walter, too,
5 was present at the first performance in Cologne in 1904 and he also adopts
6 Mengelberg’s tempo. Only in this way does the movement acquire the char-
7 acter of an intimate confession of love and lose its rutting fervour and
8 sentimentality.
9 Mahler wrote the Adagietto during his first summer with Alma, and even
20 commentators disinclined to adopt a straightforwardly biographical approach
1 may abandon their reservations here: it is a musical declaration of love, a
2 reading that Mahler and Alma confirmed when Mengelberg questioned him
3 on the subject of the searingly expressive violin line that constitutes the move-
4 ment’s principal theme. He even added a kind of text to go with the violin
5 theme: ‘How I love you, / You my sun / I cannot tell you / with words / Only
6 my longing / Can I pour out to you / And my love / My joy!’8 Listeners tempted
7 – perhaps a little indecorously – to sing these words to the violin line will find
8 that they fit it. It is not clear, however, whether they were authorized by Mahler
9 and Alma or whether it was Mengelberg himself who cobbled them together.
30 But they are so similar in tone to the sort of poems that Mahler addressed to
1 Alma that they may surely be regarded as authentic. It may be added that
2 Strauss attended the final rehearsal of the work under Nikisch in Berlin in
3 March 1905 and afterwards wrote very positively to Mahler on the subject,
4 while criticizing the Adagietto and claiming that it served Mahler right that
5 the audience had enjoyed this movement so much. As such, his letter serves
6 merely to demonstrate the difficulty that people have when dealing with
7 questions of ‘taste’.9
8 The final movement is cast in the form of a rondo and causes Mahlerians even
9 more problems than the Adagietto. Time and again critics have reproached
40 Mahler for striking an unduly ‘affirmative’, dubiously positive note. It is a
41R reproach that is directed above all at the final chorale, which now places the
second-movement chorale under what might be termed the most impossible 1

semantic pressure. There is no doubt that after the screams of the persecuted and 2
tortured souls in the opening movement, this final apotheosis creates the 3
effortful impression of a ‘per ardua ad astra’, and even Alma, not always sensitive 4
to such niceties, was disturbed by the chorale, which she described as ‘hymnal 5
and boring’, prompting Mahler to protest: ‘Yes, but Bruckner –.’ ‘He, yes; but not 6
you’ was her instant rejoinder.10 We are in a position similar to the one in 7
which we found ourselves when discussing the final movement of the Third 8
Symphony: is it figurative or literal? Commentators disposed to fall back on the 9
notion of ‘failure at the highest level’ are guilty of presupposing that Mahler was 10
trying to achieve something that he was unable adequately to express, hence the 1
apparent superficiality of the ending. But it is clear that the chorale cannot be 2
used in a straightforward way after it had been called into question in the second 3
movement. The first three movements had already advanced so far into hostile, 4
uncharted terrain that it must have seemed impossible to go beyond this and 5
find a suitably climactic ending, so it is conceivable that Mahler opted for what 6
Hansen has termed a ‘compromise’: the chorale and the wildly coruscating final 7
stretta at the end of the symphony are used to give the impression that the aston- 8
ishingly crass contradictions and inconsistencies that typify the first three move- 9
ments above all can still be papered over with the tried and tested resources of 20
the sort of apotheosis typical of symphonies from this and earlier periods.11 It is 1
worth bearing in mind that contemporary critics could make nothing of the 2
first three movements, whereas they liked the Adagietto and praised the final 3
movement as the high point of the piece. But the process of papering over the 4
cracks is only partially successful, and the present apotheosis is no different from 5
all the others like it in Mahler’s output, conveying, as it does, an element that 6
Adorno – writing in a different context – aptly summed up as that of ‘extorted 7
reconciliation’. 8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3 24
4
5
6
7 ‘Nothing is lost to you’: Faith and
8
9
Philosophy
10
1
2
3
4 OR ALMA, IT was all very straightforward: ‘He believed in Christ and had
5
6
F certainly not been baptised purely out of opportunism in order to get the
job as director of the Vienna Court Opera.’ As proof of Mahler’s Christian
7 faith, Alma cites a polemical remark of her own in which she had preferred
8 Plato to Christ, prompting Mahler to write a letter in which he had vigorously
9 opposed this view. He also, she went on, was deeply attracted to Catholic
20 mysticism.1 Although Alma herself had been brought up as a Catholic, her
1 reading of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche meant that during the early weeks and
2 months of their acquaintanceship, she had been something of a freethinker
3 and, as a result, critical of religion, but Mahler had championed the teachings
4 of Christ. As Alma later remarked, it was ‘paradoxical that a Jew should hotly
5 defend Christ against a Christian’.2 It is worth recalling that Alma did not
6 remain a freethinker and that in later life, when she wrote down her reminis-
7 cences and memoirs, she felt increasingly drawn to the Catholic Church,
8 especially while she was still living in Austria and maintaining close contacts
9 with some of its leading figures. She had a scandalous liaison with the Catholic
30 cleric Johannes Hollnsteiner, for example, and the pseudo-Catholic Song of
1 Bernadette by her third husband, Franz Werfel, will hardly have assumed its
2 definitive form without her. Given her somewhat bigoted devotion to
3 Catholicism towards the end of her life, her attempts to press Mahler into the
4 service of the Catholic religion need to be treated with caution. In this context
5 it is enough to cite the testimony of one of Mahler’s closest confidants, Bruno
6 Walter, to expose the problematical nature of Alma’s claim. It was Walter, after
7 all, who wrote that he ‘could not call Mahler a believer’.3 In spite of attempts by
8 recent writers to turn Mahler into a Christian, doubts remain in order.
9 These doubts increase when we turn to the letter to which Alma was refer-
40 ring.4 Here the reader will note with some surprise that Mahler was far from
41R aligning himself with Christ or admitting to being a believer, as Alma sought
‘NOTHING IS LOST TO YOU’: FAITH AND PHILOSOPHY 393
to imply. Written in Munich in 1910, while Mahler was preparing for the world 1
première of his Eighth Symphony, the letter was in fact intended to confirm a 2
thesis that Alma had expressed in a letter which has not survived and that 3
revolved around her comparison between Plato and Christ, a comparison that 4
she herself claimed was not only self-evident but also entirely justified: 5
6
All contrast is determined by milieu and Zeitgeist. On the one side, the radi- 7
ance of culture in its highest form, with pupils and commentators of greatest 8
intellectual brilliance; on the other, the darkness of a naive, infantile world, in 9
which the child serves as a vessel for the marvels of worldly wisdom, an 10
outcome of pure instinct, of a direct and intense way of looking at things and 1
understanding them.5 2
3
For whatever reason, Alma falsified the meaning of this letter. Far from 4
defending Christ against Plato, Mahler presents them both as equals and as 5
two sides of the same coin, which is hardly the view of a Christian believer. 6
Even more important is the opinion that he puts forward in a passage that 7
precedes the one just quoted: the decisive element in Plato’s thinking, he 8
argues, was subsumed by Goethe’s outlook on life, whereby all love is founded 9
on procreation and creation, and procreation is an activity not only of the body 20
but also of the soul. Nowhere was this better expressed than in the closing 1
scene of Faust, Mahler’s own musical setting of which he was currently 2
rehearsing in Munich. In short, Goethe was the authority who assimilated the 3
ideas of both Plato and Christ and fashioned them in a way that was 4
compelling both philosophically and poetically. This certainly brings us much 5
closer to Mahler’s own faith. 6
Mahler was not a Christian in the sense of organized Christianity, which he 7
had adopted for purely practical reasons and from which he maintained an 8
inner distance, just as he remained aloof from the Jewish religion. But there is 9
no doubt that he had a concept of God. Even so, it is difficult to say exactly 30
what this concept was. His young follower, Oskar Fried, recalled that ‘he was a 1
God-seeker. With incredible fanaticism, with unparalleled dedication and with 2
unshakeable love he pursued a constant search for the divine, both in the indi- 3
vidual and in man as a whole. But he saw himself as divinely sent, a mission 4
that suffused his entire being. His nature was religious through and through in 5
a mystical, not a dogmatic, sense.’ Fried’s formulation is somewhat unfortu- 6
nate, as Mahler certainly did not see himself as divinely sent. Rather, he 7
thought of himself as the mouthpiece and vehicle of a divine mission. None the 8
less, the gist of Fried’s remark is worth taking seriously. Mahler’s faith in his 9
calling and his belief that he could fulfil his mission through his art was not 40
unshakeable, and in moments of uncertainty he sought confirmation of his 41R
394 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 mission in his fellow humans, including the young people around him. ‘And if
2 he received no answer, no echo from my direction, if I was not immediately
3 ready and willing to follow him wherever he desired to go, his face would
4 become remarkably set and he would retreat into his impenetrable spiritual
5 shell, a child enduring mortal disappointments and bewailing his divine
6 origins.’6 Fried’s belief that Mahler was religious in a mystical but not a
7 dogmatic sense is similar to Bruno Walter’s and is confirmed by other
8 observers. The God who is invoked in ‘Urlicht’, which Mahler set to music in
9 the fourth movement of his Second Symphony, is not the God whose praise is
10 extolled from church pulpits: ‘I am from God and would go back to God!’
1 insists the Wunderhorn poet. ‘Dear God will give me a light, will light me to
2 blissful everlasting life!’
3 Ernst Decsey reports a conversation with Mahler in the summer of 1909,
4 when the composer had justified his faith in God by arguing that the materi-
5 alism to which the nineteenth century had pinned its colours was incapable of
6 satisfying him any longer. He recommended an essay by the Russian physicist
7 Orest Danilovich Khvolson attacking the materialism championed by the
8 popular and influential writings of Ernst Haeckel. ‘When you see a compli-
9 cated machine, a motor car,’ Mahler told Decsey, ‘you don’t assume, do you,
20 that there is no means of propulsion involved, because you can’t see it? Well,
1 don’t you think there exists a concealed driving force within man?’7 As we
2 know, Mahler’s bookshelves in Toblach included not only Khvolson’s critique
3 of materialism but also Alfred Brehm’s multi-volume study of the life of
4 animals, a choice of reading matter that says much about the composer’s
5 interest in all forms of life. Another book that formed part of his library and
6 that he recommended to all his acquaintances was Friedrich August Lange’s
7 History of Materialism, which, first published in 1866, was no less successful
8 than the writings of Ernst Haeckel that he criticized. A neo-Kantian, Lange
9 attacked materialism for ignoring humanity’s metaphysical needs.
30 Apart from Bruno Walter, Oskar Fried and a handful of other initiates, it
1 was undoubtedly Alfred Roller who knew Mahler best of all, at least towards
2 the end of his life. Roller, too, includes a number of important remarks about
3 his friend and colleague’s religious beliefs in the course of his characterization:
4
5 He was deeply religious. His faith was that of a child. God is love and love is
6 God. This idea came up a thousand times in his conversation. I once asked
7 him why he did not write a Mass, and he seemed taken back. ‘Do you think
8 I could take that upon myself? Well, why not? But no, there’s the Credo in it.’
9 And he began to recite the Credo in Latin. ‘No, I couldn’t do it.’
40 But after a rehearsal of the Eighth in Munich he called cheerfully across to
41R me, referring to this conversation: ‘There you are, that’s my Mass.’
I never heard a word of blasphemy from him. But he needed no intermediary 1

to God. He spoke with Him face to face. God lived easily within him. How else 2
can one define the state of complete transcendency in which he wrote?8 3
4
This anecdote is quoted by many writers anxious to demonstrate that Mahler’s 5
thinking was grounded in Christianity.9 But in order to sustain this interpreta- 6
tion, they are obliged to end the quotation with the words ‘There you are, that’s 7
my Mass.’ It is clear, however, from the passage that follows that Roller weak- 8
ened the Christian connection by stating that Mahler needed no intermediary 9
to God. Above all, the anecdote – and its authenticity is beyond doubt – proves 10
the exact opposite of what many commentators have read into it. Mahler 1
found it impossible to set the Nicene Creed that became the Credo of the 2
Catholic Mass: ‘I believe in one God, the Father almighty, Maker of heaven and 3
earth and of all things visible and invisible. And in one Lord Jesus Christ. . . . 4
And I believe in the Holy Ghost. . . . And I believe in one Catholic and 5
Apostolic Church.’ Mahler was unable to bring himself to set these lines. If he 6
believed in an Almighty Father, it was in a wider sense than the one intended 7
here. And if he had been honest with himself, this is where his setting of these 8
lines would have had to end. If – ‘cheerfully’ and with a nod and a wink – he 9
described his Eighth Symphony as his Mass, it was because it includes a setting 20
of Hrabanus Maurus’s Pentecostal hymn Veni creator spiritus. And in Mahler’s 1
eyes, the spirit of creation was not only the Holy Ghost but above all the creator 2
spiritus. The second part of the work, conversely, is a setting of the final scene 3
from Faust II, and there is no connection whatsoever between this scene and 4
the Credo of the Catholic Church, unless it be the colourful resplendence of 5
Catholic mysticism, a resplendence that fascinated Mahler as much as it did 6
the elderly Goethe but which has nothing to do with Catholicism as such. In 7
general, this final scene yields little to a Christian interpretation. 8
It is impossible to say for certain when Mahler was first introduced to the 9
ideas of Gustav Theodor Fechner,10 but it is more than likely that it was Lipiner 30
who drew his attention to them for Lipiner had studied in Leipzig in 1876, 1
when he had grown extraordinarily close to the much older man, who was at 2
that time still teaching at the University. Fechner had developed a transcen- 3
dental school of thought marked by the sort of natural philosophy that was 4
typical of Romantic writers such as the German naturalist Lorenz Oken and 5
which included all manner of mystical elements that many contemporaries 6
regarded as wayward on account of Fechner’s highly remarkable life and 7
history of illness. His three-part investigation, Zend-Avesta, or The Things of 8
Heaven and the Beyond from the Standpoint of Natural Observation, appeared 9
in 1851 and rapidly achieved cult status among those readers who, unshackled 40
by religious dogma, had no time for the crude materialism and empiricism of 41R
396 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the second half of the nineteenth century, with its growing reliance on tech-
2 nology. Even before this, Fechner had pseudonymously published a Booklet on
3 Life after Death that proved particularly popular in Austria. Of interest from a
4 Mahlerian perspective is Fechner’s doctrine of the three stages of life: the
5 prenatal stage, life itself, and death. Every individual, Fechner argued, lived
6 three lives on earth. In his prenatal stage he lived alone in darkness, while the
7 second stage was spent sociably in the light. In the third stage his life became
8 interwoven with those of other spirits raised to a higher existence. Birth
9 marked the transition from the first to the second stage, while death was the
10 step from the second to the third stage. For Fechner, the earth was a more
1 animate being than man, while the earth and the other planets were in turn the
2 organs of a more animate world, just as men and women must be imagined as
3 the sense organs of the earth. This interpretation has repercussions for our
4 idea of death. If the individual who inhabits the animate earth serves as its eye,
5 for example, this eye closes only in order that it may enter a higher world, the
6 world of memory of the earth’s soul:
7
8 Just as the spirits of men and women are visions in a higher sense during
9 their lives here on earth, so they are memories after their deaths. When a
20 man briefly closes his eyes in life and his vision grows dim, then a memory
1 awakens within him; and when man closes his eyes for ever in death and his
2 intuitive existence grows dim, a life of memory awakens in a higher sense. . . .
3 Now it is no longer individual visions that he experiences. Rather, his entire
4 intuitive existence is raised up within him to a life of memory in a higher
5 sense, a life which none the less still belongs to him as a person as much as
6 the intuitive existence from which it derives.11
7
8 Because the metabolism is constantly changing, with the result that after a
9 while new matter sustains the same memories and the same consciousness,
30 Fechner concludes that in spite of physical change, there is psychic continuity.
1 In turn, it seemed to him possible that psychic reality might survive death.
2 During his life on earth, the active individual creates for himself something
3 that Fechner terms an ‘active body’ into which his soul passes when the body
4 dies. Our actions, whether visible or mental, continue to have an effect. The
5 survival of the individual after death is a survival of the soul with a new phys-
6 ical body. Just as we can recall earlier sense impressions without the correspon-
7 ding stimulus, so our souls will continue to lead a life of memory even after our
8 bodies have decayed. In this new existence all the causal consequences of our
9 lives will become conscious to us. Until it finds a new body, this soul has no
40 sense organs and cannot, therefore, lead a life of visionary contemplation, but
41R it does have memories. In a new body, it can acquire new insights.
For a man like Mahler, who was looking for a meaning to life and death 1
beyond the limitations of Judaism and Christianity, Fechner’s world of ideas 2
must have seemed like a revelation. Even as late as 1903, while fulfilling a 3
concert engagement in Lemberg, he wrote to Alma: ‘Between whiles I have 4
avidly been reading Zend-Avesta, a book like an old, cherished friend, that 5
brings one face to face with many things one has oneself seen and experi- 6
enced.’12 It was inevitable that the poetry of Friedrich Rückert should strike him 7
as a faithful echo of Fechner’s ideas. Rückert’s lines in the Kindertotenlieder, 8
‘What are only eyes to you in these days will be only stars to you in future 9
nights’, and his apostrophization of death as a ‘journey to those heights’, are 10
entirely typical of Fechner, a point that occurred to Mahler at once, for in his 1
letter to Alma of April 1903 he continues: ‘Fechner’s world is strangely like 2
Rückert’s; the two are closely related, and one side of me is deeply in accord with 3
both of them. How few people know anything about those two! When you come 4
to understand them, it will be a great step forward. Then you will be able to rid 5
yourself of certain trivial ideas that are obscuring your vision and blinding you 6
to reality.’13 7
Fechner’s ideas, which Mahler had got to know as a young man (it is not 8
clear whether he was reading Fechner’s Zend-Avesta for the first time in 1903, 9
although it seems more likely that he had read it before), were later combined 20
with Goethe’s even more crucial ideas on entelechy, a point that emerges with 1
some force from an important letter that Mahler wrote to Alma in the summer 2
of 1909, when he insisted that what matters is not man’s works nor even the 3
works of a man of genius but ‘what a man creates of his own person, what his 4
restless striving and vitality combine to make him’. It is this part of him that 5
survives. What is decisive is not what he produces but his striving towards the 6
light and towards the heights, in short, towards God: ‘Draw increasingly on 7
your inner strength (indeed you do!),’ Mahler goes on; ‘assimilate as much of 8
the world’s beauty and power as you can (more than this one cannot do – and 9
even then it is given only to the few). “Spread your wings,” occupy your mind 30
with all that is good and beautiful, never cease to grow (for that is true produc- 1
tivity).’14 Mahler would certainly not have regarded Alma’s attempts to turn 2
him into a Catholic as the acts of an enlightened woman. Here, rather, we have 3
the origins of his belief in immortality. In the Second Symphony this belief was 4
still combined with the Christian doctrine of immortality, but, increasingly, it 5
was to break free from it. The lines that Mahler added to Klopstock’s hymn in 6
the symphony’s final movement include the following: ‘O believe, my heart, O 7
believe: nothing will be lost to you! What you longed for is yours, yes, yours! 8
What you loved and strove for is yours!’ 9
Fechner’s writings were the crucial philosophical influence on Mahler 40
during his youth, a point confirmed by many of the people who were close to 41R
398 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 him. Bruno Walter, for example, recalled that ‘a lasting impression was made
2 by Fechner’s Zend-Avesta, and he delighted in Nana, or the Spiritual Life of
3 Plants by the same author’.15 In this last-named monograph, which dates from
4 1848, Fechner had extended the sphere of influence of the life of the spirit from
5 humankind to animals and plants. It was only logical, therefore, that the belief
6 in immortality should also apply to their spiritual lives as well. Alfred Roller
7 records a moving example of Mahler’s belief in the immortality of an insect’s
8 soul, and it is hard to resist its strange charm. Mahler was at home in Vienna
9 with two visitors, one of whom was Roller. The conversation was interrupted
10 by a troublesome fly, which Mahler tried to drive away by waving his hand at
1 it. By chance he caught it such a blow that it fell to the floor, twitching and
2 dying. In order to put it out of its misery, he raised his foot to squash it but for
3 a long time held his leg in the air, clearly struggling with the decision: ‘He
4 gazed in distress at the crushed little corpse at his feet and with an agitated
5 movement of the hand towards it, as if to calm and console it, he murmured:
6 “There, there, don’t fret: you too are immortal!” He turned away, wandered
7 around the room, upset, and did not go on with what he had been saying.’16
8 This is Mahler through and through: while sharing Fechner’s belief that the
9 whole of nature possessed an immortal soul, he would none the less grow
20 uncertain, tormented, as he was, by the sufferings of the world, but imbued
1 with a sense of profound respect in the face of life’s mystery, a mystery which
2 for him embraced both animals and plants. There is no doubt that he believed
3 profoundly that the whole of nature was animated by God. If he can be said to
4 have been a member of any religion, then it was a natural religion. Anna von
5 Mildenburg, who was closer to him than anyone else at a decisive point in his
6 life, recalled him suddenly stopping during a walk and listening to a bird or
7 watching some other creature going about its business:
8
9 This serenity always gave way to reflection and serious, pensive contempla-
30 tion, an awareness of God’s wisdom, will and influence. He always felt the
1 miracle and the mystery, awestruck and with a touchingly childlike astonish-
2 ment. He could not understand his fellow humans’ indifference to these
3 wondrous acts of nature.17
4
5 Whereas Fechner’s importance for Mahler’s world of ideas is well attested, the
6 impact of a book by the German philosopher Hermann Lotze is rather more
7 obscure. Of all Mahler’s friends and acquaintances, only Bruno Walter refers to
8 Lotze in a single sentence, but he insists that the writer’s three-volume Microcosm
9 (1856–64) was a key influence on Mahler and that it preoccupied his thoughts
40 for some time. Lotze has gone down in the history of ideas as the founder of a
41R system of teleological idealism that sought to demonstrate the validity of a causal
mechanism for all that occurs in the outer and inner world. In this way he hoped 1
to prove that this mechanism was understandable only as the expression of a 2
morally purposeful world. This was an idea that Lotze elaborated above all in his 3
System of Philosophy during the 1870s and 1880s. But Mahler will have been less 4
interested in this aspect of his work than in his older study, whose subtitle, 5
‘Attempt at an Anthropology’, caught the interest of contemporaries inasmuch as 6
Lotze’s aim, especially in the second volume, was to write a history of the evolu- 7
tion of human culture at odds with the age’s interest in natural science and in the 8
way in which nature developed. In this sense, Lotze was the first systematic 9
cultural anthropologist.18 He rejected the idea that all living things develop 10
according to an ascending scale from the lowest to the highest. In turn this hier- 1
archy implied that all living things could be graded according to their value and 2
significance, with man being placed above all other natural phenomena and 3
regarded as an ‘advance’ on plants and animals. Within the context of the nine- 4
teenth century’s belief in progress, this view also ascribed to humankind an 5
absolute right to rule over lower forms on the evolutionary ladder. 6
Lotze’s rejection of these prevailing ideas must have appealed to Mahler, 7
who saw in nature a confirmation of the sheer fragility of the human race. 8
Above all, it must have pleased him that Lotze stressed that the labours and 9
efforts of bygone generations were not lost either to those who had undertaken 20
them or to future generations. It was, Lotze believed, on this very misunder- 1
standing that rationalistic historiography was based, with its assumption that 2
the individual was willing to sacrifice his or her independent happiness to the 3
continuing development of the whole. The problem could be resolved if one 4
were to concede that loving commitment or self-sacrifice to the greater good 5
were unthinkable unless the individual were himself to derive enjoyment from 6
it. For Lotze, these finest aspects of human morality were additionally founded 7
in the belief that individuals are preserved for ever: such individuals would be 8
destroyed by all attempts at development if those attempts were themselves 9
repeatedly destroyed. Lotze’s belief in the eternal preservation of the individual 30
clearly recalls Fechner’s ideas, and it comes as no surprise to find that Lotze 1
was a close friend and critical colleague of the older man: 2
3
The presentiment that we are not lost to the future, that those who were here 4
before us may have departed this earthly life but have not left all reality 5
behind them and that, however mysterious the process may be, history 6
progresses for them too: it is this belief that allows us to speak of a human 7
race and of its history in the way that we do.19 8
9
This passage throws even clearer light on the lines that Mahler added to 40
Klopstock’s poem in his Second Symphony (‘Nothing is lost to you’) and on the 41R
400 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 real reasons for his work ethic, including his fanatical desire to achieve: his
2 inspired gift for music had, he believed, been given to him to bring joy and
3 edification to himself and his closer contemporaries. And, irrespective of the
4 success or failure of his achievements, a distillation of that gift would be
5 preserved and would continue to leave its mark on future generations. The
6 sense of continuity, of rising to greater heights, was merely an expression of
7 what Mahler described as ‘restless striving and vitality’ in his letter to Alma,
8 qualities effectively given to all of us but felt to be an obligation only by higher
9 individuals, among whom Mahler numbered all great thinkers, scientists and
10 artists such as himself. It was an obligation which, as he himself admitted, was
1 unrelenting and often a source of pain and torment. A letter that Alban Berg
2 wrote to his later wife, Helene, in the summer of 1910 may serve to illustrate the
3 extent to which such ideas were rife among artists and intellectuals at this time.
4 Berg’s premise was his inability to share his wife’s tremendous love of animals:
5
6 I find that on closer acquaintance animals (e.g. dogs) are also human, and for
7 the present I’ve had my fill of them. After all, all that we ever strive to achieve
8 is to pass from the mortal to the divine, and yet we know that it is nowadays
9 no art to possess a soul because, as you rightly say, every dog has one. . . . It
20 is no merit simply to possess a soul! Unless a person uses it to achieve godlike
1 goals, then he is no different from the dog that has learnt to think and feel as
2 a human being possessed of a soul.20
3
4 The letter that Mahler famously wrote to Alma in June 1909 draws above all on
5 the ideas of Fechner and Lotze in addition to those of Goethe. Here he expresses
6 his ‘philosophy’ at its most candid. Alma was currently staying at Levico in Italy,
7 where she had abandoned herself to a feeling of indolence, dissatisfaction and
8 sexual frustration. She evidently found Mahler’s letters an effort to read and in her
9 replies appears to have struck a petulant, ill-humoured note. Mahler was clearly
30 reacting to such a letter in which Alma, as a frustrated composer and companion
1 to genius, had wondered whether life acquired its value and importance only
2 from creativity, a creativity which, as she understood it, she was prevented by her
3 husband from pursuing. Mahler’s response was expressly intended to console her
4 and help her to understand herself better. As such, it is one of his most important
5 statements of intent and as a result deserves to be quoted at length. He begins by
6 considerably broadening his definition of creativity:
7
8 Human beings – and probably all creatures on Earth – are incessantly
9 productive.
40 At every level, this process is inseparable from the nature of life itself.
41R When productive energy ceases to flow, its ‘entelechy’ dies with it, i.e. it needs
a new body to be reborn. On that level at which higher forms of humanity 1

exist, the creative act (which comes to most people in the natural guise of 2
procreation) is coupled with a gesture of self-awareness. On the one hand this 3
enhances the process, on the other it makes demands on our moral judge- 4
ment. And this is what causes creative people such disquiet. Apart from the 5
few brief moments in the life of a genius when these conditions are met, it’s 6
the long intervening periods of infertility that test the awareness and provoke 7
unrequitable longings. Indeed, the distinguishing feature of the chosen few is 8
an unceasing and truly agonized sense of striving. 9
10
There follows the passage cited above, in which Mahler argues that what 1
matters is not the works of these few people but what they become through 2
restless striving and vitality. True creativity involves constant growth and the 3
exercise of all that is beautiful and good. No doubt aware that Alma will have 4
found it difficult to believe that in spite of his intense championship of the 5
masterpieces of the past, he regarded these and his own works merely as by- 6
products of a process of development leading to higher things, he then goes on 7
to underline this point: 8
9
What we leave behind, no matter what it may be, is merely a husk, an outer 20
shell. Die Meistersinger, the Choral Symphony, Faust – all these are nothing but 1
discarded wrappings. In essence, our bodies are also no more than that! Now I 2
am not saying that the act of creativity is pointless. Mankind needs it in order 3
to grow, to rejoice, for that too is an expression of well-being and potency.21 4
5
For Mahler, the ideas of Fechner and Lotze guaranteed that his life as a creative 6
artist was not in vain – ‘O believe, you were not born in vain, you have not 7
lived and suffered in vain’ are among the lines that he added to Klopstock’s 8
poem in his Second Symphony. Even if his own works had a limited life – he 9
once said that they would last around fifty years, after which they would give 30
way to something different and new, for this was the way of the world – one 1
crucial aspect of them could never be lost: the restless, incessant and painful 2
struggle imposed on higher men and women. It was this that was truly 3
immortal. And it was Fechner who insisted that souls did not ‘merge’ with one 4
another in the afterlife. Rather, the soul’s energy continued to live on after 5
death in a personal, individual way even if the people who were still alive were 6
unable to identify the previous soul’s ‘body’. 7
It is impossible not to be reminded here of Goethe’s lines from Faust II, ‘He 8
who strives on and lives to strive / Can earn redemption still’, lines that Mahler 9
set to music in his own Eighth Symphony. And it is Goethe who inevitably 40
comes to mind when we read the opening of Mahler’s letter to Alma of June 41R
402 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 1909, in which he uses the mysterious term ‘entelechy’, quoting it in inverted

2 commas and claiming that it dies when productive energy ceases to flow and
3 that it then needs a new body to be reborn. In our chapter on Mahler’s reading
4 matter, we already mentioned Goethe’s towering importance for him. Like Jean
5 Paul and Dostoevsky, Goethe held an unassailable position in his literary
6 firmament, but, unlike them, he was also a thinker and a philosopher of the
7 first order. And in the case of neither Goethe nor Mahler can their metaphysics
8 be tied down to Christianity, for all that there are manifold links between
9 them, links that are clearer in Goethe’s case only because he was brought up in
10 a culture that was more marked by Christianity.
1 Immediately before the lines quoted at the beginning of the last paragraph
2 are two others, ‘This noble spirit saved alive / Has foiled the Devil’s will!’, sung
3 by Angels who, according to the accompanying stage direction, ‘hover in the
4 upper atmosphere, carrying FAUST’s immortal part’. The ‘Paralipomena’ to
5 Faust II includes an earlier version of this stage direction: ‘Choir of Angels,
6 carrying Faust’s entelechy’. Derived from the Greek and meaning ‘having a goal
7 or perfection within itself ’, the term was coined by Aristotle to describe a
8 formal principle necessary to guide a living organism along the path of self-
9 development. According to Aristotle, all who are capable of achieving anything
20 already contain within them the potential to do so. For Aristotle, entelechy was
1 ultimately synonymous with energy and with both the movement towards
2 perfection and the state of perfection itself. This idea was later taken up by
3 Leibniz, who expanded the no less Greek concept of the monad (from monas,
4 meaning ‘unit’) to that of entelechy. Initially it was the spiritual forces, or souls,
5 that derived from the first monad, then incorporeal beings to which all
6 phenomena can ultimately be traced back. Even as late as the nineteenth
7 century, writers were still arguing that the representatives of monadism could
8 be distinguished from the atomists by dint of the fact that monads were
9 regarded as animate entities with spiritual properties, whereas atoms were
30 inanimate. To put it at its simplest, the atomists were physicians, whereas the
1 monadists were metaphysicians.
2 Goethe was familiar with the writings of both Aristotle and Leibniz and
3 frequently used the term entelechy, often emphasizing it, especially in his
4 conversations with Johann Peter Eckermann and in the stage direction cited
5 above. But to the annoyance of his many commentators, his attempts to
6 explain the term are frustratingly terse, a terseness all the more regrettable,
7 given the weight and complexity of the idea in his writings. As a result, many
8 of today’s Goethe scholars are of the view that it was simply a synonym for
9 ‘soul’. After all, it matters little for the meaning of the end of the work whether
40 it is Faust’s entelechy, the part of him that is immortal, or his soul that the
41R Angels carry off to Heaven. But Goethe also unthinkingly equated entelechy
and monad in a way that was particularly bold – whether this is epistemolog- 1
ically permissible is another question that need not detain us here. In one of 2
his conversations with Eckermann, he returned to the question of entelechy, 3
stating quite openly that ‘Leibniz had similar thoughts about independent 4
beings, and indeed what we term an entelecheia he called a monad.’22 5
In other words, Goethe equated the terms entelechy and monad, which he 6
also regarded as synonymous with the soul that strives to bring to perfection 7
all that is enshrined within it. His concept of entelechy is also the basis of his 8
– and Mahler’s – concept of immortality, his visionary belief that the soul lives 9
on and returns after death. Evidence of this comes from a letter that Goethe 10
wrote to his old friend, the composer Carl Friedrich Zelter, in the course of a 1
correspondence lasting thirty-three years. When Zelter suddenly lost his son 2
in March 1827, Goethe sent him his condolences in a brief but significant letter 3
that could have been written by Mahler himself: 4
5
The circle of persons with whom I come most in contact seems to me like a 6
roll of Sibylline leaves, which, being consumed by the flames of life, vanish, 7
one after the other, into the air, thus making those that are left more precious, 8
from moment to moment. Let us work, until we, in our turn, either before or 9
after one another, are summoned by the Spirit of the Universe to return into 20
ether. And may the Eternally-Living not deny us new activities, like those in 1
which we have already been put to the test! Should He, father-like, add to 2
these the remembrance and after-feeling of the rectitude and virtue we 3
desired and achieved even in this world, we should assuredly but plunge all 4
the more eagerly in amongst the wheels of this world’s machinery. 5
The Entelechean Monad must preserve itself only in restless activity; if it 6
becomes its other nature, it can never, throughout Eternity, be in need of 7
occupation.23 8
9
Here, too, we find the same ideas on entelechy and the ‘restless striving and 30
vitality’ that Mahler refers to in his letter to Alma, the similarities even 1
extending to verbal parallels. Mahler’s thinking was clearly coloured by 2
Goethe’s ideas. Indeed, the latter’s conversations with Eckermann, which are 3
the source of much of what we know about his concept of entelechy, were 4
Mahler’s vade mecum. A further passage in Eckermann attests to the distance 5
between Goethe’s view of the subject and Christian teaching. Goethe was crit- 6
ical of the German writer on aesthetics, Karl Ernst Schubarth, for muddying 7
the waters of Christianity with philosophical concepts, arguing that the 8
Christian religion was a powerful entity in its own right and that it did not 9
need the support of philosophy. Nor did philosophy need religion to prove 40
doctrines such as that of immortality: 41R
404 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Man should believe in immortality; he has a right to this belief; it corre-

2 sponds with the wants of his nature, and he may believe in the promises of
3 religion. But if the philosopher tries to deduce the immortality of the soul
4 from a legend [i.e. from Christian religion], that is very weak and inefficient.
5 To me, the eternal existence of my soul is proved from my idea of activity; if
6 I work on incessantly till my death, nature is bound to give me another form
7 of existence when the present one can no longer sustain my spirit.24
8
9 Mahler says much the same in his letter to Alma: ‘When productive energy
10 ceases to flow, its “entelechy” dies with it, i.e. it needs a new body to be reborn.’
1 Of course, Aristotle, Leibniz and Goethe would all have protested at Mahler’s
2 phrase about the death of entelechy as this is precisely what it does not do. But
3 the concord between these various writers is otherwise complete, and there
4 seems little doubt that Mahler was in total agreement with Eckermann, who,
5 on noting down Goethe’s thoughts, exclaimed enthusiastically: ‘My heart, at
6 these words, beat with admiration and love. “Never,” thought I, “was a doctrine
7 spoken more inciting to noble minds than this. For who will not work and act
8 indefatigably to the end of his days, when he finds therein the pledge of an
9 eternal life?’ Ultimately, Goethe even argued for the ennoblement of ‘higher’
20 individuals – the ‘men of genius’ referred to in Mahler’s letter: ‘I doubt not of
1 our immortality, for nature cannot dispense with the entelecheia. But we are
2 not all, in like manner, immortal; and he would manifest himself in future as
3 a great entelecheia, must be one now.’25
4 Readers who are inclined to dismiss these ideas of Goethe’s as too periph-
5 eral to his thinking to be of any importance to Mahler’s conceptual world may
6 care to consider a far more detailed text that has hitherto been largely ignored
7 by writers on Mahler because the composer himself does not refer to it. But it
8 is mentioned by Bruno Walter, who knew more about Mahler’s conceptual
9 world than any other contemporary observer, including even Siegfried
30 Lipiner:
1
2 The sun in the sky of his spiritual world was Goethe. He had a remarkable
3 knowledge of his work, and, thanks to a unique memory, would quote
4 endlessly from it. He was a constant reader of Goethe’s conversations with
5 Eckermann and others, and Goethe’s discussion of immortality with Falk was
6 one of the foundations of his intellectual life.26
7
8 In spite of the brevity of Walter’s remark, the reference to Johann Daniel Falk
9 is worth looking at in greater detail. True, scholars have called into question
40 the authenticity of Goethe’s conversations with Falk, a writer and social worker
41R who lived in Weimar and who is now best remembered as the author of the
German Christmas carol ‘O du fröhliche, O du selige, gnadenbringende 1

Weihnachtszeit’. But such doubts are irrelevant to Mahler, for he did not share 2
them. The conversation that Goethe conducted with Falk on 25 January 1813 3
– the day on which Christoph Martin Wieland was buried in Weimar – consti- 4
tutes his most detailed non-poetic statement on the subject of immortality, and 5
even though he does not use the word ‘entelechy’, he expatiated on the ideas 6
that he later expounded to Eckermann and Zelter. Wieland’s death led Goethe 7
to think that there could never be any question of the destruction of such lofty 8
spiritual forces in nature, for nature never squandered its capital in that way. 9
Appealing to Leibniz, he then expounded his belief that there exist in nature 10
ultimate elements of all creatures, which he called souls or, rather, monads, just 1
as he was to do later. But only important monads that were suited to more than 2
an insignificant existence deserved to be called souls: 3
4
The moment of death, which for that very reason can very well be called an 5
act of dissolution, is the one at which the principal ruling monad releases all 6
previous subordinates from their loyal service. . . . But all monads are by their 7
very nature so imperishable that they cannot cease their activities at the 8
moment of dissolution but continue to be active even at that moment. In this 9
way they merely depart from their former relationship with the world in 20
order to enter a new relationship without further ado. During this change, all 1
depends on how powerful is the intention contained in this or that monad. 2
3
And, convinced that such a powerful intention was at work in both himself 4
and in Wieland – and Mahler himself shared this belief – Goethe went on: 5
6
As soon as we realize that this state of the world is eternal, then in much the 7
same way we can accept that monads have no other aim than forever to share 8
in the delights of the gods as forces that blissfully play their own part in 9
creation. The evolving nature of Creation is entrusted to them. Whether they 30
are invited to do so or not, they come of their own accord, passing along 1
every road, descending from every mountain, arising from every sea and 2
falling from every star. Who can stop them? I am certain that just as you see 3
me here, so I have already been here a thousand times before and hope that 4
I shall return here a thousand times in the future.27 5
6
This, then, was the one fixed point in Mahler’s spiritual existence, a point that 7
allows us to explain almost everything else in his life. 8
Writers on Goethe are now agreed that his oft-cited reference to redemption 9
at the end of Faust has little to do with redemption in the Christian sense 40
of the term. In his fair copy of the play, Goethe even put quotation marks 41R
406 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 round the lines ‘He who strives on and lives to strive / Can earn redemption
2 still.’ According to Albrecht Schöne in his critical edition of Faust, ‘it would
3 be wrong to interpret these lines in the sense of a Christian doctrine of
4 redemption. . . . The theology of the Cross did not find its way into
5 the poem of Faust.’28 Another recent writer, Jochen Schmidt, makes a similar
6 point:
7
8 Goethe helps himself to the Christian tradition with the same poetic freedom
9 and with the same non-committal attitude to questions of philosophy as he
10 does in the Classical Walpurgis Night, where he draws on the Greek tradi-
1 tion. In this last-named scene he stages Greek myth, while in the final scene
2 it is Christian myth – and that is all. It is clear, not least from remarks by
3 Goethe himself, that he adopted a mythological attitude to the Catholic
4 veneration of the Virgin that is so important for the final section of Faust
5 and that he did so in a non-polemical manner, distancing himself from the
6 material in a way that is typical of the artist but not of the believer.29
7
8 In a second important letter to Alma from the summer of 1909, Mahler offers
9 his own interpretation of the final scene of Faust. It is an altogether exceptional
20 piece of exegesis, written without any knowledge of existing commentaries or
1 secondary literature, by which he in any case set little store. And yet it hits the
2 mark with its intuitive and remarkably sensitive understanding. Above all,
3 Mahler recognizes very clearly that the central idea in this final scene is love:
4 not Christian love, be it agape or caritas, but Eros – and not the earthly Eros of
5 Mephistopheles but the ‘eternal womanly’, the Eros that guides us upwards by
6 stages to ever greater perfection.30 In his letter Mahler, using quotation marks,
7 turns himself into Goethe’s mouthpiece:
8
9 ‘Eternal Femininity has carried us forward. We have arrived, we are at rest, we
30 are in possession of that which on earth we could only desire or strive for.
1 Christians speak of “eternal bliss”, and for the sake of my allegory I have made
2 use of this beautiful, sufficiently mythological concept – and the one most
3 accessible to this era of world history.’31
4
5 In short, Mahler saw very clearly that this final scene in Goethe’s vast drama
6 was not grounded in the Christian religion. And if he set these lines to music
7 in his Eighth Symphony, he did not do so in the spirit of Christianity. Mahler
8 had come to Goethe through the natural philosophy of the Romantics and
9 through his reading of Fechner and Lotze, and it was Goethe who had now
40 shown him that it was possible to believe in the immortality of the soul and in
41R redemption without being a Christian. The events that unfold in the final
scene of Faust, which, set in a mountain ravine, describes the ascent of a soul 1
that has been saved, rest on the idea of apokatastasis panton, an idea advanced 2
by the third-century Christian theologian Origen and quickly rejected by 3
Church orthodoxy. The concept is explained by Albrecht Schöne as a ‘living, 4
conciliatory return to God, embracing everything that once emanated from 5
Him but which had grown estranged, losing its way and becoming lost, even 6
the devils in hell’.32 For a time Goethe thought of including Mephisto in the 7
process of grace. It is a process that Mahler himself expressed in the fourth 8
movement of his Second Symphony, with its setting of words from Des Knaben 9
Wunderhorn: ‘I am from God and would go back to God! / Dear God will give 10
me a light, / Will light me to blissful everlasting life!’ 1
There is no doubt that Mahler’s beliefs were coloured by Christianity, just as 2
he was initially touched as a child by the Jewish faith, but, his conversion 3
notwithstanding, he moved away from both. He was no Ahasuerian Jew 4
unable to escape from his faith, but nor was he a Christian or Catholic mystic, 5
as Alma would have us believe. Like the later Goethe, he was inspired by 6
Catholic mysticism, not as a believer but as an artist. Drawing on his reading 7
of Fechner and Lotze and of Jean Paul and Dostoevsky, he had built up a belief 8
in the immortality of the soul and in the importance of restless striving and 9
creativity, a faith that then acquired an indestructible coherency through his 20
acquaintance with Goethe’s work. In this context it is impossible to overesti- 1
mate the role played by Siegfried Lipiner, who was known as a Goethe expert 2
in Vienna’s intellectual circles and who in 1894 wrote his doctorate on 3
‘Homunculus: A Study on Faust and Goethe’s Philosophy’. Ultimately, too, the 4
world of Friedrich Rückert’s ideas acquired considerable importance. In one of 5
the Kindertotenlieder that Mahler set, there are four lines that read: ‘They have 6
merely gone on ahead of us / And will not ask to come home again. / We shall 7
overtake them on those hills / In the sunshine, the day is beautiful.’33 Here we 8
find a poetic echo of the congruence between Fechner and Rückert, two 9
writers who knew one another, even if their contacts remained distant. 30
At the end of Mahler’s life, a decisive role was played by Eduard von 1
Hartmann’s book The Meaning of Life, to which we shall return in the context 2
of the composer’s final weeks. 3
If Mahler used the word ‘God’, he did so very infrequently, and yet even on 4
those occasions he meant something rather different from the Jewish or 5
Christian God. What he meant was the supreme force and invisible creative 6
power that he tried to explain to Ernst Decsey through his crude comparison 7
with a motor car. It was this force that he found at a higher stage of reflection 8
in the final scene of Faust, a scene from which ‘God’ is famously absent. In one 9
of the earliest letters that Mahler wrote to Alma, even before they were 40
married, it is clear that the word ‘God’ can be used for this force but that such 41R
408 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 a name is not necessary. It is also clear from the language he uses that faith is
2 not bound to ecclesiastical doctrines:
3
4 I believe you feel just as I do: we are fulfilled and united by a power that is
5 beyond and above us. It will be our holy duty tacitly to respect that power.
6 When at such a moment I speak the name of God out loud, the omnipotent
7 sense of your love and of mine will make you realize that this is a power that
8 prevails over both of us and hence holds us in its grasp as one.34
9
10 Today’s Mahlerians have unfortunately largely lost sight of Richard
1 Specht’s splendid book on the composer, which was first published in 1913. It
2 is devoted for the most part to an analysis of his works, and only forty or so
3 pages are concerned with Mahler as a person. And yet these pages are among
4 the finest characterizations of the composer and as such are worthy of taking
5 their place alongside the reminiscences of Bruno Walter and Alfred Roller.
6 Specht was not a close friend of Mahler but he had known him since 1895,
7 when he was introduced to him in Hamburg. Specht includes a brief but
8 impressive section on Mahler’s view of the world consisting for the most part
9 of his own obiter dicta. If Specht describes the composer as a ‘pantheist’, this
20 term need not detain us here. Of greater importance in the present context is
1 Specht’s account of a lunch that he had with Mahler at his Hamburg apartment
2 in 1895:
3
4 I do not know how it happened or what event in the dim and distant future
5 we were talking about, but I allowed myself to make some stupidly frivolous
6 comment: ‘That doesn’t interest me,’ I said; ‘I’ll be well gone by then; and even
7 if I’ve come back, I shan’t know anything about my former life.’ A loud crash
8 suddenly made us all start. Mahler had struck the table, causing the glasses to
9 jump. ‘How can someone like you say anything as thoughtless as that?’ he
30 screamed. ‘We shall all return. The whole of existence has meaning only
1 because of this certainty. It’s a matter of complete indifference whether we
2 recall an earlier stage of our existence at a later point of our return. What
3 matters is not the individual and his memory and contentment but only the
4 great movement towards perfection and the purification that increases with
5 each incarnation. That is why I have to lead an ethical life in order to spare
6 my ego, if it returns, a part of the journey and make its existence easier for it.
7 That is my moral duty, regardless of whether my later self is aware of it or not
8 and whether or not it will thank me for it.’35
9
40
41R
1
2
25 3
4
5
6
The Sixth Symphony 7
8
9
10
1
2
3
uneasy as he set off for Essen on 20 May 1906 to 4
M AHLER WAS DISTINCTLY
prepare for the first performance of his Sixth Symphony. It was clear to
him that the work once again placed extreme demands on its interpreters and
5
6
listeners, even if those demands were different from those posed by its prede- 7
cessor. From a purely superficial standpoint, the work is extraordinarily 8
conventional: it has only four – classically ordered – movements, it has neither 9
a chorus nor vocal soloists and, horribile dictu, it includes a repeat in its opening 20
movement indicated at the end of its exposition (at figure 14) by a repeat sign. 1
Mahler had only once before included such a repeat in a symphony. And yet the 2
apparent conventionality is deceptive. He was also worried about the Essen 3
Orchestra, for he knew that it was not as good as the Gürzenich Orchestra in 4
nearby Cologne with which he had worked on his Fifth Symphony in October 5
1904. Begun during the summer of 1903 and completed in May 1905, the Sixth 6
is scored for such vast resources that the Utrecht Orchestra had to be brought 7
in to supplement the local forces. Mahler had earlier written to his friend 8
Willem Mengelberg to ask whether the Utrecht players were competent, and 9
Mengelberg had been able to reassure him. As a result the organizers were able 30
to boast that the performance, which took place within the framework of the 1
annual festival held by the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, would feature 2
110 orchestral players, a boast that dismayed Mahler by perpetuating the belief 3
that he wrote only works of the most monstrous dimensions – the sobriquet of 4
the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ that was later pinned to the Eighth Symphony 5
merely marked the low point of this development. But the initial rehearsals left 6
him pleasantly surprised and encouraged him to describe the orchestra in a 7
letter to Alma as ‘splendid’ – one of his favourite epithets. 8
Conversely, Mahler’s comments on his new work are few and monosyllabic 9
and effectively summed up in the word ‘riddle’. In the autumn of 1904, for 40
example, by which date the symphony was largely finished, he wrote to 41R
410 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Richard Specht: ‘My Sixth will pose riddles that only a generation that has
2 absorbed and digested my first five symphonies may hope to solve.’1 As if to
3 compensate, Alma evidently felt called upon to offer a biographical interpret-
4 ation of the symphony, most successfully in the case of the opening move-
5 ment’s second subject, first heard at figure 8 (bars 77–9), after the implacably
6 propulsive march rhythm of the earlier section has first died away. According
7 to her reminiscences of her husband, Mahler came to her in Maiernigg in the
8 summer of 1904 and claimed that he had captured her in this theme.2 Even the
9 most honourable writers have been convinced by this claim, with the result
10 that the ‘Alma theme’ now haunts the corridors of Mahler scholarship. Only
1 Adorno remained sceptical, finding in the theme an intentional triviality.
2 Certainly, Alma would not have been proud of this portrait if she had listened
3 to it closely, for the soaring line in the first violins strikes a somewhat ostenta-
4 tious pose, confronting the listener and figuratively placing its hands on its
5 hips in a gesture of smug complacency, suggesting a counterpart to the main
6 theme of Strauss’s Don Juan. Alma also claims that an arrhythmic passage in
7 the third movement describes Mahler’s little daughters tottering over the sand.
8 Quite apart from the fact that Mahler’s younger daughter was only a month old
9 at this date and therefore incapable of walking at all, such an interpretation
20 reduces the work to the level of a Sinfonia domestica. It is simply impossible to
1 say any longer what may have been in Mahler’s mind when he made these
2 remarks, assuming that he made them at all.
3 More credible – not least because it is confirmed by another source – is the
4 claim that Mahler seemed particularly upset by the rehearsals and perform-
5 ance of his Sixth Symphony. Following the final rehearsal in Essen, Alma and
6 a number of Mahler’s friends went to see him in his dressing room, where they
7 found him pacing up and down, beside himself with grief, and sobbing and
8 wringing his hands. Oskar Fried, Ossip Gabrilovich and the Düsseldorf
9 conductor Julius Buths had no idea what to say. Then Strauss entered the room
30 in high spirits, noticed nothing and left again in the same ebullient mood.
1 Bruno Walter reports that Mahler was in fact depressed by the dismissive
2 remark of a famous musician – although he does not name names, it is Strauss
3 to whom he was referring and who, with his usual disarming honesty, had
4 announced after the final rehearsal that the symphony as a whole and espe-
5 cially its final movement were over-instrumented. Klaus Pringsheim reports
6 that Mahler subsequently fretted over the question why, after only a few
7 rehearsals, Strauss was always able to make his works sound good, whereas he
8 himself was invariably profoundly dissatisfied with whatever he had managed
9 to achieve.3
40 There is a further aspect of the Sixth Symphony that is unusual: on no other
41R occasion did Mahler reveal such uncertainty about the order of its movements.
THE SIXTH SYMPHONY 411
Should the Scherzo be in second or third position and, as such, should it come 1
before or after the Andante? Even in the autograph score, Mahler reversed the 2
order of the movements and abandoned what is now their usual sequence of 3
the Scherzo followed by the Andante, a sequence, be it added, that also makes 4
much greater sense. It is believed that at both the first performance in Essen 5
and the local première in Munich, the Andante was played in second position, 6
although the programmes for the concert and the reports of the various critics 7
do not always agree on this point.4 The reason for Mahler’s uncertainty is easy 8
to see, for the propulsive rhythm of the beginning of the Scherzo is very similar 9
to the opening of the first movement, and so Mahler was no doubt afraid that 10
listeners would turn to each other and whisper: ‘Look! He’s repeating himself!’ 1
But all other arguments favoured the definitive order. 2
Mahler’s sense of turmoil at the first performance of the work seems to have 3
been unique, but it is bound up with the term ‘Tragic’ that was applied to the 4
symphony when he conducted its first performance in Vienna in January 1907. 5
It is a term that is still occasionally found even if it has never found general 6
acceptance. It is also one which, as Bruno Walter confirms, Mahler himself 7
used, although he must have known that even in his own day it had lost its 8
sombre aura and that, much as today, it can be used for every routine idiocy. 9
In 1886 the Wagnerian Felix Draeseke had called his Third Symphony his 20
‘Tragica’ and by his own admission had sought to give expression to 1
Beethoven’s tragic view of the world, a view that had found only inadequate 2
expression in Beethoven’s Third, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies. Reverting to 3
purely instrumental forces, Draeseke had attempted to realize this aim using 4
Wagner’s extended orchestral language. That Mahler had no wish to write a 5
‘Tragic Symphony’ in the spirit of the age is already clear from the pomposity 6
of the first movement’s main theme. It is as if he were trying to say that if the 7
official world of culture wanted a ‘tragic’ symphonic theme, then this would be 8
it. A rhetorical, emotionally charged language is then employed to imply the 9
entry of the hero or heroes of the Second and Third Symphonies into some hall 30
of fame or other. In short, it is figurative music, implying an alternative ‘what 1
if?’ of the kind that had long been Mahler’s guiding principle. The final move- 2
ment reveals that the nickname is not entirely unjustified, for otherwise 3
Mahler would neither have used it himself nor sanctioned its usage. But first 4
we need to cast a more detailed glance at the first three movements of the 5
symphony. 6
That the entire work, with the exception of the intermezzo-like Andante, is 7
based on a march rhythm that had been ‘kneaded through and through’ is 8
clear from the interrelationship between the first and final movements: the first 9
begins with this march, while the last one ends with the final twitchings of this 40
rhythm in the timpani. But no one before Mahler would have dared to suggest 41R
412 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 that a march rhythm could also leave its mark on a Scherzo. The Sixth
2 Symphony offers alarming proof that this is indeed possible. Mahler’s marches
3 are the best. His longest and most magnificent orchestral song is undoubtedly
4 ‘Revelge’ of 1899, a song in which the implacable rhythm of the Sixth
5 Symphony is already clearly prefigured. For the Andante, conversely, it is the
6 fourth of the Kindertotenlieder that provided the model. Neither song is
7 quoted directly, but in the case of the second of them, there is more than just
8 an atmospheric echo. The link between the movements, which is considerably
9 stronger than in the previous symphony, is created above all by the march-like
10 character of ‘Revelge’ and, more specifically, by a formula that could hardly be
1 conceived along simpler and at the same time more enigmatic lines. It is first
2 found just before figure 7 in the opening movement and consists of a fortissimo
3 major chord for three trumpets in F that fades away to a pianissimo minor
4 chord in the same key to the accompaniment of the march rhythm in the
5 timpani and a roll on the side drum. For all its primitive qualities, this shift
6 from major to minor served Mahler in good stead and was used to work some
7 of his greatest melodic miracles. But never did he use it as fruitfully as here.
8 What can be achieved through two simple chords is altogether incredible, as
9 Mahler the constructivist uses the simplest of materials to create towering
20 edifices of sound, skyscrapers made, as it were, of mud bricks.
1 As we have already noted, the Scherzo achieves the rare feat of combining a
2 traditional ländler with a march or, to put it another way, it allows a march to
3 develop out of a ländler before the march is turned back into the ländler. We
4 have previously observed Mahler’s tendency to rob the Scherzo of its tradi-
5 tional stolidity and complacency and to turn it into something far more eerie
6 and unsettling. And here he takes that process a stage further: suffice it to
7 listen to the howling horns with their descending appoggiatura at figure 46
8 near the beginning of the movement – it sounds as if the players are being
9 tortured. The shrieks of delight associated with the usual type of scherzo have
30 been transformed into the sounds of physical anguish. The Andante stresses its
1 intermezzo-like character to such an extent that it too begins to sound sinister.
2 It is unrelated rhythmically and motivically to any of the previous or later
3 movements but sings itself out, while having none of the intimacy of the Fifth
4 Symphony’s Adagietto. By evoking the atmosphere of the Kindertotenlieder, it
5 comes close to what Adorno called the mystic cell of Mahler’s symphonies
6 inasmuch as the Fourth, Fifth, Eighth and Ninth Symphonies all contain clear
7 allusions to these songs. This Andante cannot offer assurance, still less can it
8 afford its listeners any comfort. Rather, the anguished outburst of the section
9 starting at figure 100 – one of the greatest moments in the whole of Mahler’s
40 output – is an expression of unfathomable grief. The movement as a whole
41R cannot staunch the emotions adumbrated in the first two movements and
taken to their furthest extreme in the fourth and final movement but can 1
merely offer its listeners a chance to catch their breath before that conclusion 2
is reached. 3
The whole symphony, and especially its final movement, has something of a 4
retraction about it, a retraction of all the ‘positive’ final movements before and 5
since. Such a retraction is comparable to the one planned by Adrian 6
Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus when his favourite 7
nephew, Nepomuk Schneidewein, is snatched from him by the Devil. In turn, 8
this would have been a retraction of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony and, more 9
especially, its final movement, which famously embraces the whole of 10
humanity. This fourth movement is one of the longest that Mahler ever wrote, 1
a length that seems strangely at odds with the apparently classical formal 2
balance of its three predecessors. It is also at odds with the ‘positive’ and ‘affir- 3
mative’ endings found in practically all other symphonies. (As we have seen, 4
these terms can be used only with quotation marks round them.) Mathias 5
Hansen’s formulation is undeniably apt: ‘In the Sixth Symphony the joking 6
stops, and it does so, moreover, with a decisiveness that may well go beyond all 7
that can be depicted in art and even all that is capable of artistic expression.’5 8
Here Mahler leaves behind him the world of ‘as if ’. This final movement 9
threatens to annihilate all that has gone before it not only through its sheer 20
length but also through the brutality of its sonorities. Even the cowbells, which 1
in the opening movement still sounded like oases of peace in the midst of a 2
confused world dominated by march rhythms, suggesting the final sounds of 3
civilization that the hiker hears as he climbs higher up the mountain slope, 4
now sound suddenly lost, like quotations from another, better world. And yet, 5
as we have seen, Mahler succeeds, by dint of his supreme formal artistry, in 6
forging a link between this final movement and the first two. The opening 7
movement’s march had suggested that things might take a turn for the worse, 8
but nothing could have prepared us for just how bad things become. The final 9
movement progresses towards its end, unstoppably, and the instrumentation 30
on its own makes the point: never has a bass tuba sounded more primeval and 1
aggressive than in the Sixth Symphony’s final movement. 2
And then there are the hammer blows. It is believed that Mahler originally 3
thought of having five such blows, but he then reduced this number to three, 4
only for the third of them to be struck out. The question is whether we come 5
any closer to Mahler’s intentions by reinstating this blow in bar 783, shortly 6
before the end of the work. (Among modern editors, Hans Ferdinand Redlich 7
reintroduced it in his Eulenburg edition of the score.) Even in his own day, 8
Mahler’s use of a hammer in his orchestra encouraged stupid jokes and carica- 9
tures, contemporaries evidently failing to understand that a composer could 40
be so deadly serious. Mahler was keen for the instrument not to produce a 41R
414 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 metallic sound. Rather, it should resemble an axe striking at the very root of
2 life itself. Alma was her usual unhelpful self when, adopting a biographical
3 note, she related it all to her husband. According to her, Mahler claimed that
4 the three hammer blows were the three blows of fate that strike the hero, the
5 third of which fells him like a tree.6 For Alma, this hero was, of course, Mahler
6 himself. But doubts remain. Whereas the term ‘hero’ is unquestionably appro-
7 priate in the case of the Second and Third Symphonies, it misses the point of
8 the Sixth. It is inconceivable that Mahler could ever have offered this as an
9 interpretation of the work. At best, it would have been a prop for those
10 listeners who were otherwise slow on the uptake.
1 It is clear beyond peradventure that the final movement of the Sixth deals
2 with questions of finality, death and destruction and that it holds out no
3 promise or prospect of any improvement, no sense of comfort or consolation.
4 This being so, it is difficult to understand why Mahler described the third
5 hammer blow as the decisive one, for in that case he would not have removed
6 it. And when Alma then goes on to claim that these three blows befell Mahler
7 himself, the third one of which struck him down, she can sustain this argument
8 only by basing it on the theory that music can anticipate real life. If artists depict
9 something terrible that affects them, then, according to Alma, they do so either
20 after the event, as Rückert did when he wrote his Kindertotenlieder following
1 the deaths of his own children, or because, as figures of genius, they possess a
2 Cassandra-like gift to foresee the future. In other words, Mahler anticipated the
3 death of his elder daughter in his Kindertotenlieder, while in his Sixth
4 Symphony he foresaw the three blows of fate that Alma glossed as the death of
5 his daughter, the diagnosis of his heart disease and her affair with Walter
6 Gropius. But her theory demonstrates only that she had no real concept of the
7 nature of artistic creativity. She could simply not conceive of the fact that her
8 husband could write such a final movement at a time when he was at the height
9 of his career as a conductor, administrator and opera reformer, and his music,
30 although not universally admired, was finding a responsive audience and when,
1 married to the most beautiful woman in Vienna, he had fathered two beautiful,
2 healthy girls. So she interpreted his ability to compose such a supreme expres-
3 sion of negativity, at a time when everything about his outward life was
4 supremely positive, as a sin that must inevitably be punished. And yet, even if
5 we accept the inadequacy of Alma’s approach, a number of aspects of the
6 symphony remain puzzling. It ends with the minor-key element of the central
7 major-minor formula played fortissimo by the winds towards the start of the
8 symphony. This is then reduced to a pitiful pianissimo in the trumpets, followed
9 by a final rebellious reassertion of the timpani repeating the march rhythm one
40 last time and suggesting the convulsions of a body whose brain no longer gives
41R out any signals. And with a final pizzicato in the strings, it is all over.
Discussing Adrian Leverkühn’s own work of retraction, The Lamentation of 1

Doctor Faustus, in Thomas Mann’s novel Doktor Faustus, Serenus Zeitblom 2
notes that: 3
4
Here, toward the end, I find that the uttermost accents of sorrow are 5
achieved, that final despair is given expression, and – but I shall not say it, for 6
it would mean a violation of the work’s refusal to make any concessions, of its 7
pain, which is beyond all remedy, were one to say that, to its very last note, it 8
offers any other sort of consolation than what lies in expression itself, in 9
utterance – that is to say, in the fact that the creature has been given a voice 10
for its pain. No, to the very end, this dark tone poem permits no consolation, 1
reconciliation, transfiguration.7 2
3
As we know, Adorno helped Mann to write his novel, and although the 4
recently published correspondence between the two men contains no proof 5
that these passages in Doktor Faustus were inspired by Adorno’s knowledge of 6
Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, a connection is none the less conceivable. Michael 7
Gielen sees in the final movement the triumph of death as the logical culmina- 8
tion of the march rhythms that accompany the whole of the symphony.8 9
Adorno’s proposed reading of the end of the work comes in a radio lecture that 20
deserves to be quoted here: 1
2
In spite of the hammer blows, it would be futile to lie in wait in this final move- 3
ment for the man who is said to be felled by fate. The music’s commitment to 4
unbridled emotion is its journey to death, undiminished revenge on Utopia 5
exacted by the course of the world. Passages of open doubt retire behind others 6
evocative of dull brooding and seething and of a roaring that draws ever closer. 7
. . . The catastrophes coincide with the climaxes. Sometimes it sounds as if in 8
the moment of finite fire humanity might once again waken and the dead come 9
to life again. Happiness flares up on the very brink of horror.9 30
1
Superficially, at least, the Sixth is no ‘symphonia tragica’, but, as Mahler rightly 2
foresaw, it will no doubt always remains a ‘symphonia enigmatica’. 3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3 26
4
5
6
7 Opera Reform – Early Years of
8
9 Marriage – Mahler’s Compositional
10 Method
1
2
(1903–5)
3
4 Opera Reform
5
Were it not for Alfred Roller, we would have no proof that Mahler never said
6
‘Tradition is slovenliness’, even though this phrase – or its German equivalent,
7
‘Tradition ist Schlamperei’ – is regularly cited in writings on the composer. The
8
phrase must in any case seem strange coming from a composer as supportive
9
of intellectual and artistic traditions as Mahler, a man who was a lynchpin in the
20
development of music between two other composers no less aware than he was
1
of the tradition within which they were operating: Brahms and Schoenberg. But
2
Roller worked with Mahler on frequent occasions and insisted that what he
3
actually said was ‘What you theatre people call your tradition is mere conveni-
4
ence and slovenliness for you.’1 This is rather different. Without Roller, more-
5
over, the most fundamental shake-up of the operatic stage since the inception
6
of the genre three centuries earlier would never have taken place, a revolution
7
that involved the creation of the role of the opera director and of the modern
8
stage in general. It is no accident that these reforms were carried out in parallel
9
with similar developments in the spoken theatre, developments associated with
30
the names of Otto Brahm and Max Reinhardt and bound up with turn-of-the-
1
century ideas on theatrical reform, some of them positively utopian in char-
2
acter. Mahler and Roller were the first to seek to realize the theatrical visions of
3
men like Adolphe Appia and Edward Gordon Craig, visions which in turn can
4
be traced back to the idea of the total artwork formulated above all by Wagner
5
in his writings in the middle of the nineteenth century. If Mahler and Roller
6
were able to dispense this new wisdom in only what may be described as
7
homoeopathic doses, then this was because no other approach was possible in
8
a conservative court theatre at this period.
9
In two essays – Art and Revolution and The Artwork of the Future – that he
40
wrote in the turbulent months between the Dresden Uprising of May 1849 and
41R
OPERA REFORM – EARLY YEARS OF MARRIAGE 417
his flight to Zurich and decision to settle there later that year, Wagner 1
demanded the reunification of the principal elements that made up the total 2
artwork which he believed had flourished in classical Greece. Only when the 3
egoisms of particular individuals had destroyed the community spirit of clas- 4
sical tragedy and the polity of ancient Athens was the great artwork of antique 5
tragedy fragmented into its constituent parts. Rhetoric, sculpture, painting and 6
music abandoned the round dance that they had once performed in amity, 7
hence the development of opera, ballet and the spoken theatre as separate arts 8
in bourgeois society. Wagner hoped that what he called the ‘great revolution of 9
humankind’ would not only sweep away the social conditions that he abhorred 10
but also bring about a rebirth of the total work of art. Just as humankind would 1
one day be reunited in brotherly love, so the arts must necessarily be reunited 2
as well. The great synthesis of the arts would embrace all the different genres 3
and portray consummate human nature in all its immediacy. The dislocation 4
of the arts that was typical of the modern period was a reflection of the partic- 5
ularism and egoism that characterized society. There had originally been three 6
‘purely human’ art forms, dance, music and poetry. Until now, they had never 7
been united in opera but had simply coexisted under the aegis of a common 8
‘treaty’ (and we know from the Ring what Wagner thought about treaties). 9
These three arts must now be joined by the three visual arts, architecture, 20
sculpture and painting. For the ‘artwork of the future’, which was essentially 1
drama and, more especially, music drama, this meant that architecture must 2
provide the perfect theatre. The actor must now depict what sculpture and 3
painting had hitherto achieved in their portrayal of humankind. 4
It was these six arts that had formed the total artwork during the heyday of 5
ancient Greek art, but Wagner and his followers were not content with merely 6
reviving Greek tragedy. In spite of its dreary isolation, music had none the less 7
created the language of the orchestra, a magnificent new achievement 8
embodied in its finest form, Wagner believed, in the symphonies of Beethoven. 9
This achievement now had to be applied to the drama, which would lead to the 30
emergence of the music drama and to its finest expression in the works of 1
Wagner himself. To that extent these works could be described as ‘the artwork 2
of the future’. In short, the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk, was not only 3
what happened on the actual stage but also the whole of the building that was 4
intended to recreate the sense of community between stage and audience, 5
including a sense of community between the individual members of that audi- 6
ence. This also explains why the theatre that Wagner built in Bayreuth was 7
amphitheatrical in design, with no side boxes or tiers from which the ruler’s 8
subjects could see far less than the prince himself in his centrally situated box. 9
Another essential aspect of the total artwork was the involvement of the spec- 40
tators, who would be absorbed by the events on the stage, a point on which 41R
418 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Wagner’s idea remained very vague and one that he failed to realize even in
2 Bayreuth.
3 The Swiss theorist and stage designer Adolphe Appia was the first man of
4 the theatre to take up Wagner’s ideas and raise them to a level which in theory
5 at least went far beyond anything that Wagner had achieved at his first
6 Bayreuth Festival in 1876. However visionary Wagner may have seemed in his
7 earlier draft programmes, the realization of those visions fell far short of
8 the ideal in the inaugural Ring. He was too corrupted by the bad taste of
9 nineteenth-century scene painting to raise any objections to the set designs of
10 Joseph Hoffmann or to their execution by Max and Gotthold Brückner, for all
1 that the latter were among the most technically proficient scene painters of
2 their age. Wagner himself was no doubt aware they were irredeemably old-
3 fashioned and felt a general unease, prompting him to whisper to Malwida von
4 Meysenbug, a mutual friend of his and Nietzsche’s: ‘Don’t look too much! Just
5 listen instead!’ Such a comment hardly suggests the spirit of the total artwork.
6 At least in his designs Appia achieved what Wagner had dreamt of.
7 But on one essential point he differed radically from Wagner: for Appia, it
8 made no sense for the different branches of art to exist alongside one another
9 as equals. Rather, there had to be a hierarchy among them, with acting as the
20 most important, followed by the stage area, then light and, at the lower end of
1 the scale, painting. Everything comes together in what Appia in a pioneering
2 term described as the ‘mise en scène’. The art of the ‘mise en scène’ – literally,
3 the ‘placing on stage’ – was the art of developing in space what the dramatist
4 had developed in time. In the ‘word-tone-drama’ – the neologism was
5 Wagner’s, and it was Wagner’s works that Appia saw as the supreme expression
6 of that concept – the music governs all the other elements, ordering them
7 according to the demands of the action. It is the music that prescribes the
8 performer’s moves and in that way defines the stage area. This stage area
9 should have nothing more to do with reality in the sense of the sort of
30 crude naturalism propagated by the Meiningen school. Lighting and colour –
1 essentially light on its own – should create a sense of space, which should take
2 precedence over whatever actions were physically presented onstage. For
3 Appia, light was in the same relationship to the performance as the music was
4 to the score: it was the primary expressive element and as such was in stark
5 contrast to the symbol, which provided a sense of orientation by means of
6 mere allusion. Like music, light is able to express all that belongs to the inner-
7 most essence of a phenomenon, a point that Appia stressed in his writings,
8 which were published in the 1890s.
9 The second leading theatre reformer in turn-of-the-century Europe was
40 Edward Gordon Craig. Unlike Appia, he had a chance to put his ideas into
41R practice, even if only on a modest scale. It was effectively Craig who, with his
greater sense of reality, invented the role of the director, arguing that the true 1
task of the theatre was that of a stylized art form remote from any naturalism 2
and that a demiurge was needed to control every aspect of the staging. If there 3
were an artist who used actors, sets, costumes, lighting and movement in the 4
right way and who became a master of movement, line, colour, rhythm and 5
words, then the result would, he believed, be a new type of director who no 6
longer had anything in common with the traditional stage manager, who 7
merely indicated the actors’ entrances and exits. In many ways Craig was even 8
more radical than Appia for he finally found it disturbing to have a living 9
human being onstage and developed the idea of the actor as an ‘Über- 10
Marionette’ – the Nietzschean associations of the term were entirely typical of 1
the age’s enthusiasm for the champion of the Übermensch. Equally bold was 2
Craig’s concept of an adaptable stage area that could be rearranged for every 3
performance, the only constant being the audience and the space in which it 4
was accommodated. But the stage itself must be capable of permanent change, 5
with the result that it should be as empty as possible. For both Appia and 6
Craig, the art of the theatre was a creative art that existed independently of the 7
art of the dramatist and musician. This re-evaluation of traditional priorities is 8
no doubt one of the reasons why everyone involved in the theatre should find 9
such theories so attractive. 20
Whereas Appia formulated his ideas in the years leading up to the turn of 1
the century, Craig’s writings on the theatre date in part from the following 2
decade. In both cases, however, they were far ahead of their time and left few 3
discernible traces on the theatre of their own day. Not until the 1920s were 4
their ideas to find expression in the spoken theatre in the world of the German 5
Expressionists, while it was only in the 1950s and 1960s that Bayreuth and 6
music theatre in general finally took account of them. The only direct evidence 7
of their influence in the years around the turn of the century may be found in 8
the opera reforms of Mahler and Roller in Vienna. Roller had studied the avail- 9
able writings of both Appia and Craig, and although there is no actual proof of 30
the fact, it is generally assumed that Mahler was at least familiar with the ideas 1
of Appia. The work of both Appia and Craig was widely discussed in turn-of- 2
the-century Vienna, and when Hermann Bahr noted in 1905 that he had 3
detected Craig’s influence in Roller’s staging of Don Giovanni, then his obser- 4
vation was correct. When compared with the boldness of Appia’s designs, 5
Roller’s work seems distinctly timid, and yet when we compare it with what 6
was typical at this time not only in Bayreuth but during the whole of the nine- 7
teenth century, then Roller’s designs could be said to have an explosive force 8
mitigated only by the decorative style of the Vienna Secession. In this respect, 9
Roller achieved on the stage of the Vienna Court Opera what Klimt had 40
achieved in painting and Olbrich and Moser in the decorative arts. Roller was 41R
420 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 uniquely and astonishingly successful in giving Viennese audiences what they

2 demanded in terms of their need for visual gratification, while subtly reducing
3 the degree of naturalism in scene painting and allowing light, colour and air to
4 create a hitherto unprecedented impact. That there were no real protests
5 against his treatment of space and that he quickly came to be seen as the
6 leading set designer of his age is an indication of his ability to get the prescrip-
7 tion exactly right.
8 Only four years younger than Mahler, Roller was born in the Moravian city
9 of Brno in 1864. His father was a painter and graphic artist and had written
10 a successful textbook on the technique of etching. Roller moved to Vienna in
1 1884 to study law but soon switched to the visual arts and enrolled at the
2 Academy of Fine Arts. He went on to co-found the Secession and came to the
3 theatre through his encounter with Mahler. When Mahler left Vienna in 1907,
4 Roller’s interest in the Court Opera waned, and he ended his contract in 1909.
5 While in New York, Mahler tried in vain to prepare the ground for Roller in
6 the city, where he could have used his old comrade-in-arms. But Roller’s
7 impact on the history of the theatre was by no means over, for in 1911 he
8 designed the sets and costumes for the Dresden première of Strauss’s Der
9 Rosenkavalier. For the next three-quarters of a century his designs were
20 regarded as sacrosanct, leaving their mark on practically every other staging of
1 the work throughout Europe and beyond. Only in the last twenty to thirty
2 years have designers broken away from the weight of this tradition. Roller’s
3 work on Der Rosenkavalier brought him into contact with Hofmannsthal,
4 Strauss and Max Reinhardt and led to further collaborations, including Die
5 Frau ohne Schatten in Vienna in 1919 and the foundation of the Salzburg
6 Festival in 1920. Roller designed the costumes for Hofmannsthal’s Jedermann
7 in the Festival’s opening year and was also involved in the world première of
8 Hofmannsthal’s Salzburger Großes Welttheater two years later, as well as many
9 of the Festival’s productions of the operas of Mozart and Strauss that were
30 central to the Salzburg repertory during the years that followed, many of them
1 staged in collaboration with the director Lothar Wallerstein.
2 Perhaps the strangest commission that Roller received came in 1934, when he
3 was almost seventy and was asked to design the sets and costumes for Parsifal at
4 Bayreuth, an invitation ostensibly extended at the express request of Hitler. But
5 the familiar anecdote that tells how the young art student found only one cham-
6 pion when he was turned down by the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts and that
7 that champion was Alfred Roller belongs in the realm of myth. While we know
8 that Hitler arrived in Vienna with a letter of recommendation to Roller that he
9 had presumably obtained through private contacts, it seems that sheer timidity
40 discouraged him from calling on the professor. But we also know that Hitler was
41R so impressed by the stage productions of Mahler and Roller that even in later life
he continued to express his admiration for Mahler and for the latter’s under- 1
standing of Wagner. Although it was not until September 1907 that Hitler settled 2
in Vienna, he had already spent a few weeks in the city in May 1906 and attended 3
performances of Wagner’s Der fliegende Holländer and, on the 8th of the month, 4
Tristan und Isolde, a performance that we know from the Court Opera’s records 5
was conducted by Mahler.2 It was no doubt these memories that prompted Hitler 6
to extend the invitation to Roller in the 1930s. In his designs for Bayreuth, Roller 7
fell back on tried and tested models, but, even so, these were more impressive 8
than the nineteenth-century designs that still graced the stage of the fossilized 9
Bayreuth Festival, where they inevitably encountered resistance. Roller died 10
from tonsillar carcinoma in June 1935. 1
By the time that Mahler became director of the Vienna Court Opera, he 2
had long since learnt from bitter experience that production values were non- 3
existent, whether at the smallest of provincial theatres or at the Hamburg 4
Opera. With the help of all manner of assistants, he himself could see to the 5
musical preparation of the various works in the repertory. But who could help 6
him to sweep aside the fusty traditions of staging opera that had vexed him for 7
decades? Alma hit the nail on the head when she claimed that, however varied 8
her husband’s interests, he lacked any real understanding of the visual arts, a 9
lack that set him apart from most of the musicians of his age. This situation 20
changed only when Alma introduced him to two of the artists of the Secession, 1
Kolo Moser and Gustav Klimt, both of whom were keen to give him a helping 2
hand. But Mahler’s interest in the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk had long made 3
it clear to him that the success or failure of a production was determined not 4
by individual parameters such as the singers or orchestra or the lovingly 5
painted details of the stage sets but the overall impression, which meant that 6
the staging as a whole must be accorded the same degree of importance as the 7
other elements in the production. This emerges not least from the detailed 8
memorandum that he addressed to the chief comptroller when complaining 9
about the interference of the general administrator’s office in his work. He also 30
used the opportunity to spell out the rights and obligations of the director of 1
the Court Opera, indicating that within two years of taking up office Mahler 2
was already keen to assume overall responsibility and that he realized that all 3
the elements in a performance were interrelated. It was also clear to him that 4
the ‘décor’ needed to be improved: 5
6
In the theatre, unfortunately, purely musical successes are not successes at all. 7
And if the attractiveness (or indeed the sheer novelty) of the stage setting – 8
some detail that adds to the clarity, liveliness, harmoniousness of the décor or 9
to that elusive correlation between stage and music – if its only consequence 40
is that the performances are better attended, then the increased takings far 41R
422 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 outweigh the often quite insignificant cost of making the improvement. To

2 block this expenditure may seem a small saving but in truth it often means a
3 serious – but unfortunately not easily calculable – loss.3
4
5 And Mahler goes on to make an even more fundamental point:
6
7 If one aspect of this performance is affected by another and often by some-
8 thing seemingly irrelevant, then this is merely a reflection of the complex and
9 yet unified mechanism of the theatre and of the theatre administration,
10 which is in fact an organism grounded in the interplay of its parts. This
1 means that any interference in one of its parts affects all the others; that
2 nothing is a matter of indifference here; and that the standards by which we
3 can judge what is more or less important and more or less successful can be
4 judged and maintained only within the field of operation itself, through the
5 uninterrupted deployment of this machine.
6
7 Nowadays this must seem blindingly self-evident and common currency
8 among all the members of a company, but in Mahler’s day it was a completely
9 new and revolutionary approach to the phenomenon of the theatre. The whole
20 of the nineteenth century had demonstrated that parts of the whole could be
1 stressed only at the expense of that whole, even though this misplaced
2 emphasis did not preclude significant achievements on the part of singers or
3 actors or musicians. But it was almost certainly Mahler who first expressed this
4 standpoint in such emphatic terms.
5 Understandably Mahler sought a reliable and innovative colleague in the
6 area with which he was least familiar. Initially it was the artist Heinrich Lefler
7 whom he appointed head of scenic design. But Lefler did not meet all of
8 Mahler’s expectations, even if he represented an improvement on earlier stan-
9 dards, and so Mahler set about looking for a successor in the circles that he
30 now frequented. He must have been impressed by Roller’s designs for the
1 Secession’s headquarters in Vienna and especially by his fresco Nightfall, which
2 Roller created around Max Klinger’s vast sculpture in the Beethoven room.
3 Until then, Roller had not worked in the theatre, unless he had helped the
4 famous Viennese scene painters Carlo and Anton Brioschi, who worked
5 chiefly for the Court Opera. It is conceivable that he assisted them during his
6 youth in an attempt to earn some extra money, although there is no documen-
7 tary evidence that he did so. Alma reports that at her husband’s first meeting
8 with Roller, the latter had deliberately provoked Mahler by claiming that he
9 could bear to sit through a performance of Tristan und Isolde only by turning
40 his back on the stage. Mahler had apparently then asked him to explain what
41R the stage should look like if it was to warrant his attention. Roller had duly
obliged, extemporizing an explanation, at the end of which Mahler had turned 1

to Alma with the words: ‘That’s the man for me – I’ll engage him!’4 2
Shortly afterwards – probably in May 1902 – Mahler invited Roller to have 3
lunch with him, an occasion on which they were joined by Kolo Moser. The 4
declared aim of the meeting was to discuss their planned collaboration on 5
Tristan und Isolde. Mahler had already decided to invite Roller to design the 6
sets, the Court Opera’s resident designers, Lefler and Anton Brioschi, having 7
been informed that their services would not be required. According to Mahler, 8
they accepted this with a good grace, even though they did not know who was 9
to replace them. Roller served his apprenticeship with Carl Maria von Weber’s 10
Euryanthe, which was staged in January 1903 under Mahler’s direction. By 21 1
February 1903 their epoch-making production of Tristan und Isolde had been 2
unveiled. Now not even the most critical observers had further reason to turn 3
away from the stage and face the other way. Mahler was fortunate in terms of 4
his cast: Anna von Mildenburg sang Isolde, while her Tristan was Alma’s object 5
of desire, the strapping Danish tenor Erik Schmedes. The affable basso 6
profundo Richard Mayr sang Marke, and Brangäne was played by Hermine 7
Kittel. In keeping with contemporary practice, neither Mahler nor Roller was 8
named on the playbill, and yet it was as much to them, as to the singers, that 9
the performance owed its success. Above all, it was they who ushered in a new 20
era in staging opera, conscious, as they were, that so daring a work had never 1
previously been fully explored on the stage. Of the singers, it seems likely that 2
only Anna von Mildenburg’s volcanic Isolde came up to Mahler’s standards, 3
and yet Alma reports that Mildenburg fought long and hard against the new 4
sets, screaming that she would ‘tear up the footlights’ on the grounds that they 5
were inartistic. But Alma’s negative comments need to be treated with consid- 6
erable scepticism, motivated, as they were, not only by the jealousy between 7
two women but also by the feelings of jealousy of the art-loving amateur for 8
the truly great singing actress. 9
As with Der Rosenkavalier, so with Tristan und Isolde, Roller’s sets were to 30
remain influential for decades. His sets for the opening act, for example, were 1
on two levels, Isolde and Brangäne on floor level downstage, while Tristan and 2
Kurwenal were positioned on a raised deck to the rear of the stage that was 3
initially hidden from view by large red drapes. For the second act, Roller 4
designed a castle garden at night, with stone benches and low walls, a clearly 5
silhouetted black tree to the audience’s right and a starry sky at the beginning 6
turning to wan daylight at the end. In the third act the castle courtyard at 7
Kareol was open to the sea but was pervaded by a sense of decay. At its centre 8
was a vast white fortified tower that dominated the stage. Roller’s designs 9
for this and his later productions have for the most part survived and 40
were the most decorative and colourful stage designs since those of Karl 41R
424 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Friedrich Schinkel, a feast for the eyes even when reproduced on the
2 printed page.5
3 The reviews of the opening night give an idea of the overwhelming power
4 of the performance. Max Graf, who later turned against Mahler, described the
5 evening as a symphony in three movements. The opening act was red, the
6 second one purple (Roller’s designs are unclear on this point, though they
7 inevitably represent only a single stage in the planning process, not the end
8 result, which can be judged only in tandem with the lighting), and the third
9 one grey. Over the performance as a whole wafted the flag of the Secession,
10 while light and air made music alongside the Wagnerian orchestra, the basic
1 chords of each act massing together in the form of its basic colour and basic
2 light. What was so attractive about these designs, Graf continued, was their
3 ability ‘to vary the colour of a basic chord, spreading it out and changing it,
4 bringing something of the subtle Tristan chromaticisms to the world of the
5 decorative arts and creating musical impressions through the vibrations of
6 air and colour. This is the first time that the modern Impressionist arts of
7 painting have found their way on to the operatic stage.’ Graf rightly relates this
8 revolution to Wagner’s ideas on the Gesamtkunstwerk, his only qualification
9 being that Wagner might have been shocked by the designer’s evident high-
20 handedness.6 Another prominent Viennese critic, Gustav Schönaich, was
1 equally enthusiastic about the effects of light and colour but had reservations
2 about the excessive darkness which meant that the lovers were barely visible in
3 their second-act duet. It is clear from all the principal reviews that both on the
4 present occasion and in the case of all their other collaborations over the space
5 of a mere four years, Roller and Mahler succeeded in capturing the underlying
6 mood of every situation and, indeed, of the work as a whole, and turning it
7 into a symphony of colour, light and movement of unprecedented grandeur,
8 the constituent parts so deftly interwoven as to create an indissoluble fabric of
9 inextricable interrelationships.
30 The visual delights afforded by Roller’s designs should not mislead us into
1 thinking that the old-fashioned painted sets of Hoffmann, Brioschi and Lefler
2 had simply been replaced by newer and more attractive Secessionist sets, as if
3 Klimt had designed a frieze instead of Moritz von Schwind. Mahler and Roller
4 wanted more than that. The spirit of the Secession was also the spirit of the
5 Gesamtkunstwerk, a point clearly demonstrated by the very manner in which
6 Klinger’s Beethoven statue had been presented to the public. Nothing with any
7 claims to be regarded as art could exist in isolation: what mattered was the way
8 in which the arts harmonized with each other and belonged together. The
9 critics in general lacked the ability to see what was so revolutionary about this
40 process, Hermann Bahr alone demonstrating any real understanding in this
41R regard:
Thus, what is called the atmosphere of a dramatic scene is the result of the 1
scene; it does not exist until the scene creates it. And if, when the curtain 2
rises, it is already evident in the setting before we have been prepared for it 3
by the course of the drama, it cannot be effective. To begin with, Roller 4
perhaps did not really grasp this, but he came to feel that the ‘stylized’ décor, 5
the décor as an expression of an emotional atmosphere, must not appear until 6
the feelings of the audience have been brought by the events on stage to the 7
point where they actually demand to be reflected in the setting. This is the 8
key to his designs, which fulfil a double function. At first they operate simply 9
as a placard saying ‘Imagine Tristan’s ship, or Florestan’s dungeon.’ But then, 10
when the stage atmosphere begins to affect the audience, when they lose their 1
personal feelings and succumb to the dramatic transformation, they are no 2
longer felt as just any old ship or any old prison but as an image of what has 3
been heard: sounds become images.7 4
5
Bahr’s description of an emotional mood becoming the mood of the staging 6
captures the essential quality of Mahler’s and Roller’s reforms far more 7
succinctly than all the wordy accounts of the critics. As a spokesman of the 8
Young Vienna literary movement and its outright rejection of Naturalism, 9
Bahr was well placed to understand the central concepts of the age: ‘I – soul – 20
nerves – mood.’ Until then the young artists and intellectuals had taken little 1
interest in the antiquated goings-on at the Opera, but now they suddenly saw 2
a clear reflection of their own ideas and feelings on the stage of the venerable 3
Vienna Court Opera. It was no wonder that they were enthusiastic about this 4
development. The cult of Wagner that many of them had embraced had for the 5
most part been centred on Wagner’s music, music to whose overwhelming 6
power it was possible to submit at the piano in arrangements for two or four 7
hands – Arthur Schnitzler and Alma Schindler were two such adepts who 8
wallowed in the Master’s music in the privacy of their own music rooms. Until 9
then – as Roller had noted – the joys of Tristan und Isolde were best experi- 30
enced in the opera house with one’s back to the stage. But such attitudes were 1
no longer relevant. Even those listeners who laid claim to the most exquisite 2
and most modern tastes in art – and they included the supporters of the 3
Secession – could turn back to the stage with a sigh of relief and see there a 4
reflection of their own choice tastes and sentiments. The power of Mahler’s 5
conducting and the vocal artistry of the leading Wagner singers of their day (in 6
some respects Vienna’s Wagnerian ensemble under Mahler was superior to its 7
Bayreuth equivalent, even if there was a certain overlap) ensured that the baby 8
was not thrown out with the bathwater: vocal standards remained high. 9
By the end of his work on Tristan und Isolde, Mahler knew that he had 40
finally found the collaborator for whom he had been intuitively searching 41R
426 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 throughout the whole of his twenty galley years. It was not in his nature to
2 waste words or to indulge in fulsome praise, but by Mahler’s standards the
3 letter that he wrote to Roller between the first and second nights of the new
4 production is enthusiastic in the extreme:
5
6 My dear Herr Roller,
7 How you have put me to shame! For days I have been wondering how to
8 thank you for all the great and wonderful things for which the Opera House
9 and I owe you thanks. – And I have come to the conclusion that instead of
10 trying to put anything into words, I should simply remain silent. – I know we
1 are similar in one respect: in our completely unselfish devotion to art, even if
2 we approach it by different roads. And I was also fully aware that you would
3 not think me unappreciative or undiscerning if I did not try to put anything
4 into words about what you have achieved and what you have come to mean
5 to me.
6 And I should be very sad, as though it were some kind of farewell, over our
7 saying such things to each other now, were I not joyfully certain that our
8 collaboration hitherto is only a beginning and an indication of things to come.8
9
20 Mahler had changed the course of operatic direction. Heinrich Lefler was
1 pensioned off to a post at the Vienna Academy of Art, and within three
2 months of the first night of Tristan und Isolde Roller had been appointed
3 head of the scenery workshop at the Vienna Court Opera with effect from
4 1 June 1903.
5 Mahler’s success lent wings to his efforts. In Bayreuth in his youth he had
6 experienced for himself the miracles of the invisible orchestra. He knew that
7 he could not introduce this design to Vienna, where the breadth of the reper-
8 tory would in any case have made it absurd. But he arranged for the pit to be
9 lowered by 20 inches and at the same time to be extended to a total area of 635
30 square feet. (He had originally thought of lowering the pit by as much as five
1 feet.) It had always disturbed him that the musicians could be seen by the audi-
2 ence, and in 1903 he was additionally troubled by the fact that the lights on the
3 music stands detracted from the lighting effects that Roller was attempting to
4 achieve on the stage. In an interview that he gave to the Illustriertes Extrablatt
5 in September 1903, he stated that:
6
7 Putting the orchestra lower is important for a discreet orchestral sound and
8 important for the purposes of discreet lighting. I purposefully avoid the
9 words ‘lighting effects’. We do not need crude effects, we want to make the
40 light serve the theatre in all its grades, nuances and degrees of strength. To be
41R always out for powerful effects is inartistic. But the matter does not end with
the lighting; the whole of modern art has a part to play on the stage. Modern 1
art, I say, not the Secession. What matters is the conjunction of all the arts.9 2
3
In other words, Mahler did not want to be pinned down to the Secession alone: 4
the idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk manifestly lay behind all of his endeavours. 5
The next joint ventures between Roller and Mahler were initially eclipsed by 6
their achievement over Tristan und Isolde. Their work on Hugo Wolf ’s Der 7
Corregidor was overshadowed by the sad ending of the friendship between 8
Mahler and Wolf, who died in an asylum in February 1903. Like Verdi’s 9
Falstaff, it turned out to be far less spectacular than their Wagnerian collabor- 10
ation, and although Mahler himself conducted, we shall probably not go far 1
wrong in assuming that neither work was as close to his heart as Tristan 2
und Isolde. But this was certainly not the case with Fidelio, which opened on 3
7 October 1904. This was a work which Mahler rated as highly as Wagner’s 4
opus metaphysicum, the Ring and Don Giovanni, and had always been his pièce 5
de résistance, the work that he programmed or at least requested for guest 6
performances and for his debut appearances: it was a work with which he 7
knew he could unleash the greatest impact. Here, then, was an opportunity to 8
stage the piece under optimal conditions. And in this case he was able to play 9
a more active role as a director than in the relatively static Tristan und Isolde. 20
Not only does Fidelio contain a chorus, but he also had to work out credible 1
moves with singers, some of whom were more willing than others. Time and 2
time again he would jump up from the pit and climb up on to the stage, 3
rushing to and fro, physically repositioning singers who were generally a foot 4
taller and nearly five stone heavier, and demonstrating their relevant positions 5
and moves in the way that Wagner had done at Bayreuth, but now as part of a 6
completely different dimension within the overall action. We shall not go far 7
wrong in regarding Mahler as the conductor and director whom Wagner spent 8
his whole life hoping in vain to find as a collaborator. 9
In his set designs for Fidelio, Roller strove to achieve the greatest possible 30
degree of simplification and at the same time monumentalization. The prison 1
courtyard in Act One is one of his greatest designs.10 The castle walls in the 2
second and third acts of Tristan und Isolde likewise have a larger-than-life 3
quality to them and are overpoweringly grey in colour. The gate through 4
which the prisoners enter in Fidelio is part of a massive tower that seems to 5
disappear upwards into the infinity of space. Only in the top left-hand corner 6
of the stage, as seen from the audience’s point of view, is there a scrap of blue 7
sky that the prisoners can enjoy for the briefest of moments. It is clear from the 8
way in which Roller has depicted Leonore – not as the sketch for a costume 9
design but as a figure in a painting – that the moment presented here is the one 40
at which the character, completely dwarfed by the vastness of the wall, rushes 41R
428 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 into the courtyard with the words ‘Abscheulicher! Wo eilst du hin!’ The tradi-
2 tional solution to staging this opening act incorporated the exterior of Rocco’s
3 house into the prison courtyard, thereby obviating the need for a scene change
4 and allowing the Biedermeier-like atmosphere of the opening numbers to
5 unfold beneath these walls, but this was a solution that Mahler and Roller
6 rejected as inimical to the mood of oppression and horror that pervades the
7 rest of the act. Instead, they created an interior set for Rocco’s parlour, followed
8 by a change of scene to the prison courtyard. Mahler also cut Rocco’s Gold
9 Aria, arguing that it held up and trivialized the action. However much he
10 may have respected the composers he loved, he was never squeamish about
1 making changes whenever he thought that retouchings or cuts could enhance
2 the effect that the composer in question was trying to achieve, an attitude
3 diametrically opposed to today’s werktreu practices. Florestan’s underground
4 dungeon had previously been represented by a spacious cellar, but Roller
5 reduced its commodious expanse to the dark and confining space so oppres-
6 sively evoked in the orchestral introduction to this second act.
7 Equally unsatisfactory was the earlier attempt to bridge the gap between the
8 Dungeon Scene and the final scene outside the prison, where the light of
9 freedom contrasts with the blackness of the dungeon. In the past the change
20 was effected either by a lengthy scene change, during which the audience
1 remained seated in restless silence, or by a transformation as perfunctory as it
2 was awkward. In an older edition of the libretto, Roller discovered the stage
3 direction ‘On the rampart’ for this final scene and saw in it his opportunity to
4 bring out the contrast between extreme darkness on the one hand and extreme
5 brightness on the other. Although this required a break in the action while the
6 sets were noisily rebuilt, Mahler was unwilling to stand idly by in silence. Even
7 in Hamburg, he had had the revolutionary idea of performing the Leonore
8 Overture no. 3 at this point in the performance, an idea which is, however,
9 controversial as it clearly does not reflect Beethoven’s own intentions. The
30 Prisoners’ Chorus in the opening act likewise underwent a radical transforma-
1 tion. Today’s opera-goer will be familiar with a whole series of ways of staging
2 this difficult scene, including even the non-appearance of the chorus, many
3 directors rejecting what they regard as the tired cliché of the prisoners stag-
4 gering in as a picture of wretchedness. Such an image was in fact invented by
5 Mahler and Roller: until then, the chorus had entered as quickly as possible,
6 grouped themselves picturesquely round the stage in positions that afforded a
7 clear view of the conductor and performed their party piece with all the enthu-
8 siasm of a glee club determined to demonstrate its power and tonal beauty.
9 Only in the wake of Roller and Mahler did it become customary to have these
40 victims of tyranny grope their way, one by one, out of their cells, emaciated,
41R half blinded by the light and scarcely able to walk or stand.
For all that it nowadays seems like a cliché, this was a revolutionary idea at 1
the time. The critic of the city’s leading liberal newspaper, the Neue Freie 2
Presse, was Julius Korngold, the father of the child prodigy Erich Wolfgang. He 3
was overwhelmed by this scene and rightly observed that Roller’s sets were no 4
longer an autonomous element in the theatrical experience but had entered 5
into a symbolic relationship with the atmospheric elements of the action and 6
the music. Korngold was concerned only that there may have been too much 7
‘atmosphere’ for an opera ‘of the older kind’. Other newspapers, which had 8
never made any secret of their chauvinist, German nationalist and anti-Semitic 9
agenda, and who were against Mahler on principle and therefore also against 10
Roller, took exception to the ingenious Spanish costumes that the masterly 1
designer had created: 2
3
Beethoven’s music does not have a single glimmer of Spanish local colour. 4
It is unadulteratedly German, without any foreign ingredient. The Spaniards 5
strutting around on the stage really did not suit this German music but 6
destroyed the mood from the very beginning. The fact that Director Mahler, 7
in his ultranervous manner, believed it necessary to arrange Beethoven’s 8
music – which is not at all nervous but gloriously healthy – to suit his own 9
personal taste by introducing all manner of novel nuances to the chosen 20
tempo was of even less benefit to the overall impression.11 1
2
Not all of the new productions superintended by Mahler and Roller can be 3
described here, but one further example, at least, deserves to be mentioned: 4
their new production of Don Giovanni, which opened in December 1905, a 5
month after their staging of Così fan tutte had launched a Mozart cycle that 6
continued with Die Entführung aus dem Serail, Le nozze di Figaro and Die 7
Zauberflöte, and that was mounted to commemorate the Mozart sesquicenten- 8
ary in 1906. Roller’s designs, notably for the Ball Scene at the end of the opening 9
act, find him charting new territory in terms of stage machinery. Two or more 30
towers delimited the stage area to the right and left, forming a kind of portal. 1
These towers could be dressed and used in various ways but remained a 2
constant presence, allowing for rapid scene changes, none of which lasted more 3
than thirty seconds. They were also practicable, affording windows and 4
balconies at various levels, depending on the requirements of the scene in ques- 5
tion. They provided a continuum within which the scene could change, while 6
restricting the vast width of the Court Opera stage, which, suited to French 7
grand opera and the music dramas of Wagner, was less appropriate in the case 8
of the more human dimensions of Mozart’s operas. Roller alternated ingen- 9
iously between those scenes that took place downstage and others, such as the 40
Ball Scene at the end of the opening act, in which the whole depth of the stage 41R
430 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was used, allowing the onstage bands to be positioned on a balcony at the very
2 back. And Roller’s use of colour was even more intensely unbridled. The carpets
3 in Don Giovanni’s banqueting hall were red, contrasting with the gold of the
4 tableware, while black cypresses framed the outdoor scenes at night. And a blue
5 sky gazed down impassively on the graveyard where Don Giovanni insults the
6 dead Commendatore. Once again the company’s leading singers were pressed
7 into service: Friedrich Weidemann, a lyric baritone, was Don Giovanni; Donna
8 Anna was played by Anna von Mildenburg as a vengeful and unhinged fury;
9 and Marie Gutheil-Schoder, who had been a sensation as Carmen, provided a
10 more womanly, carefully crafted interpretation as Donna Elvira. And Mahler
1 himself conducted. Ludwig Hevesi, the leading authority on art in contempor-
2 ary Vienna, grasped what was new and unprecedented about Roller’s use of the
3 towers, which could be moved right downstage as far as the proscenium arch, a
4 solution that Mahler particularly liked because it meant that the audience could
5 be drawn further into the action, bringing the production closer to the basic
6 idea of a total work of art. According to Hevesi:
7
8 For simple scenes, it is enough to have two pairs of towers to the left and
9 right of the proscenium arch. For more complicated scenes more of them are
20 used, where necessary. One such example is the Ball Scene, with its three
1 orchestras and manifold entrances and exits. The towers are very simple,
2 practicable structures with apertures at first-floor level that can serve as the
3 windows of apartments and also as bays and balconies, sometimes decorated
4 with rugs or, when they serve no purpose, covered with curtains. The result
5 is an ideal structure, a kind of architectural passepartout creating an ideal
6 space. This space is exactly as wide and as deep as the individual need
7 requires it to be. In this way the stage cannot become a vast wasteland in
8 which an individual character makes grotesquely exaggerated gestures in an
9 instinctive desire to fill as much space as possible. As if as a by-product of this
30 device, this caricature of operatic acting is dealt the coup de grâce.12
1
2 Hevesi clearly saw that with his work on Don Giovanni Roller had evolved
3 from being simply an inspired stage designer and become an inspired archi-
4 tect, a creator of space who positively demanded a new way of handling people
5 within that space, and this was what Mahler provided in his detailed work with
6 the singers, work that developed naturally out of Roller’s designs.
7 Even if Roller’s lack of diplomacy later caused Mahler certain difficulties,
8 the latter always knew that he would never find a better collaborator for his
9 vision of how he believed operas should be staged, a point well illustrated by
40 his attempts to lure Roller to the Met. They remained in contact until Mahler’s
41R death. There is no surviving evidence that Mahler wrote to Roller at the end of
their work together, but no doubt it will have been enough for them to have 1
spoken to one another. Nine years after Mahler’s death, however, Roller 2
summed up his own view of their collaboration in an article published in a 3
special Mahler issue of the Musikblätter des Anbruch. Roller was a modest 4
man, and so his reminiscences are concerned entirely with Mahler and not 5
with his own role as a designer. Even so, he manages to distil the essence of 6
their work together: 7
8
He had the deepest contempt for all superficial ornamentation of the stage, 9
for all that was purely decorative, for every ornamental detail that did not 10
emerge with a sense of inner necessity from the overall conception of the 1
production, no matter how splendid and beguiling that detail may have been. 2
And it goes without saying that a man of his moral rectitude should indig- 3
nantly reject all forms of kitsch. The vision of the sets had to spring entirely 4
from the music, and it was by this that he judged their worth. If he was able 5
to establish that worth, then he gladly submitted to every material demand. 6
Once a scenic design was felt to be usable, he never hesitated to draw all the 7
necessary consequences from it in terms of the acting and the way the moves 8
were arranged. With his keen theatrical eye he was always able to identify in 9
advance all the decisive points in the action and clearly foresee all the advan- 20
tages and disadvantages that would follow if the concept were adopted. At the 1
same time he himself was so brilliantly gifted as an actor that he had no diffi- 2
culty in giving the singers the directions necessary for them to act out the 3
scene in the appropriate way. Above all, however, he treated this aspect of his 4
work on the production – the direction of the singers – in exactly the same 5
way as all the others. In other words, he pointed out the goal, which in the 6
case of the singers meant explaining in the individual rehearsals how the 7
most perfect means of understanding was to be found in the music, after 8
which they were given a free hand to create their roles on the stage on the 9
strength of their own inner resources.13 30
1
2
Early Years of Marriage
3
At this point we need to turn back the clock to December 1901 and to the 4
weeks leading up to Mahler’s marriage to Alma. Above and beyond his ban on 5
her activities as a composer, her diaries reveal how inwardly torn she was at 6
this time. It is unnecessary to use the psychoanalyst’s tools to read hidden 7
meanings into her jottings and dreams, some of which she even took over into 8
her memoirs, for those meanings are clear beyond peradventure. (Whereas her 9
diary entries are generally authentic records of the actual moment, her 40
memoirs and reminiscences of Mahler were written much later, albeit with the 41R
432 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 help of her diary. Mahler, of course, left no such intimate record of his activi-
2 ties.) Striking above all is the fact that Alma never for a moment succeeded in
3 establishing a partnership between equals – but how could such a relationship
4 have functioned, given the difference in their age and achievements? The
5 insinuations of her friends and the scepticism of her parents left their mark on
6 her. Was Mahler not too old for her? Too ill? Too Jewish? There is a distinct
7 eagerness to the way in which she records a comment allegedly made by
8 Mahler to his sister: ‘Can autumn chain spring to its side?’ Justine had
9 evidently passed on this expression, which Mahler had used in a letter to her.14
10 Alma, unsurprisingly, had mixed feelings. On the one hand she was ‘imbued
1 with the holiest feelings’ for Mahler,15 looking up to him, feeling that he was
2 her intellectual superior and sensing that he was right when he told her – in an
3 entirely positive spirit – that they would go together like fire and water. But
4 having to look up to him all the time was bound to lead in the longer term to
5 a psychological crick in the neck. As a result, Alma attempted to convince
6 herself that she should play the part of a mother caring for a poor and sickly
7 child: ‘I’m so afraid that his health will let him down – I can scarcely say. I can
8 just see him lying in a pool of blood.’16 Or was Alma trying to say that she
9 would like to see her future husband lying in a pool of blood? But she felt that
20 Mahler raised her aloft, whereas her dealings with the cynical Burckhard
1 merely increased her sense of frivolity. She was embarrassed by her ‘dirty jokes’
2 whenever Mahler was around, for she admired his deadly seriousness, and yet
3 she regarded him and his demands as highly restrictive: ‘Are you happier when
4 you live frivolously, unscrupulously, or when you acquire a beautiful, sublime
5 outlook on life? . . . Freer in the former case, happier. [In the latter case]
6 better – purer. Does that not hinder one’s path to freedom?’17 Self-reproaches
7 alternate with outbursts of defiance. In the last of the diary’s serial entries
8 (a number of later ones were destroyed, leaving only a fragmentary record)
9 Alma complains bitterly about the changed situation just seven weeks before
30 her marriage:
1
2 In the last few days everything has changed. He wants me different,
3 completely different. And that’s what I want as well. As long as I’m with him,
4 I can manage – but when I’m on my own, my other, vain self rises to the
5 surface and wants to be free. I let myself go. My eyes shine with frivolity – my
6 mouth utters lies, streams of lies. And he senses it, knows it. Only now do I
7 understand. I must rise to meet him. [For I live only in him.] . . . I must strive
8 to become a real person, let everything happen to me of its own accord.18
9
40 With these words Alma’s diary ends. But ‘rising to meet’ Mahler proved
41R unduly effortful for a young woman who until then had known only acclaim,
infatuation and enjoyment without needing to make any effort. She vacillated 1
between recalcitrance and the realization that Mahler was right in principle 2
when he encouraged her to abandon her frivolous ways – and by this he meant 3
not erotic licentiousness but the overhasty, superficial way in which she judged 4
art and her fellow humans, her grasshopper intellect and dilettantism, in short, 5
all that Mahler hated the most. If he belittled her old friends such as Burckhard, 6
Klimt and Zemlinsky, whom he came to value only at a later date, she no doubt 7
felt that there was a grain of truth in what he said, but she also bridled at his 8
criticisms because these people were important to her and she could see very 9
well that he was exaggerating, clearly out of jealousy. And his own heroes – 10
Lipiner and the latter’s circle – did not strike her as in any way superior, only 1
more Jewish, and that was something for which she did not particularly care. 2
Mahler was strict, too strict. Writing in her memoirs, Alma describes the 3
sudden change that overcame him shortly before their marriage: 4
5
He was full of suspicion and scented danger on every hand; and so a period 6
of martyrdom set in for me. Everything in me which had so far charmed him 7
became of a sudden suspect. My style of hairdressing, my clothes, my frank 8
way of speaking, everything, in fact, was interpreted as being directed against 9
him; I was altogether too worldly for him. Wrought upon by envious tongues 20
and by his so-called friends, he lived a life of torment and inflicted torments 1
a thousand times worse on me. Our lovely beginning had turned to gloom 2
and misery.19 3
4
We may also recall that Alma had been an extremely rebellious adolescent who 5
had behaved aggressively towards her stepfather and, precisely because her 6
own father had been taken away from her at such an early date, had sought 7
father figures in her life, including Burckhard, Klimt and Zemlinsky. Mahler 8
was another father figure whose age and infirmities were such that Alma risked 9
suffering another loss. Inner turmoil, infatuation and an overwrought sensu- 30
ality were combined with the need to lean on an older man but also with the 1
resolute desire not to let things get her down and with her insistence on 2
remaining the most beautiful woman in Vienna. The result was a dangerous 3
brew. As a result, Alma saw Mahler as a poor and sickly child whom she could 4
cradle in her lap like a Pietà. There is no contradiction here. Rather, they are 5
sides of one and the same coin. When she accuses him of jealousy, she admits 6
with equal candour that she is envious of his composing. When he emerged 7
from his composing hut in Maiernigg and, beaming with pleasure, told her 8
about his work, she wept with sheer jealousy. And the fact that she admitted as 9
much to him did not help the situation. In the autumn of 1902, she noted in 40
her diary: ‘I often feel as though my wings have been clipped. Gustav, why did 41R
434 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 you tie me to yourself – me, a soaring, glittering bird – when you’d be so much
2 better off with a grey, lumbering one!’20
3 And then there are Alma’s dreams. Their tone and bold imagery seem
4 authentic, rather than a belated attempt to rewrite history when she set about
5 editing her memoirs. Although she lived to be eighty-five, she was perma-
6 nently sickly during her marriage with Mahler. And whereas he made every
7 effort to suppress his major and minor ailments, she allowed herself the privi-
8 lege and pleasure of letting the whole world know how much she was suffering.
9 During one of her numerous periods of indisposition, she dreamt that Mahler
10 was coming towards her at the end of a long suite of rooms, identifiable by his
1 white face and black hair. This was in itself as terrifying as the appearance of
2 Nosferatu in Murnau’s film of the same name, but what made it even worse was
3 that each time Mahler passed through one of the doors, a double of Mahler
4 would step through the previous one. On another occasion Alma dreamt that
5 she had received a pile of valuable drawings from which she was allowed to
6 choose one. Mahler joined her and made holes in the drawings with the pen
7 that he used when composing. He then drew both his legs up to his stomach
8 and walked through the room like that. From every door miniature versions
9 of Mahler emerged and strutted around the room in exactly the same
20 fashion. Alma tried to take refuge in her own room, but these Mahlerian
1 Rumpelstiltskins poured out of that one too.
2 Their first child, Maria Anna, later known as ‘Putzi’, was born on 3 November
3 1902. She was called ‘Maria’ after Mahler’s mother, ‘Anna’ after Alma’s. It was a
4 breech delivery and correspondingly painful. Mahler had never been a father
5 before and did not know how to handle these complications, and when they
6 became critical, he started to pace the streets of the neighbourhood in a state of
7 extreme agitation. When he heard about the breech delivery, he laughed out
8 loud and exclaimed: ‘That’s my child. Showing the world straight off the part it
9 deserves!’21 Alma recovered only slowly from the birth, but there was another,
30 more serious problem: ‘I haven’t the right love for my child yet.’22 Her feelings
1 stemmed not from the fact that the child was Mahler’s and she had not yet
2 sorted out her relationship with him, but because in spite of everything she
3 loved him so much that there was no room for a child in their lives. Maria
4 died in childhood. Their second daughter, Anna Justine (‘Gucki’), suffered
5 badly as a result of the difficulties that Alma had with her daughters by Mahler.
6 Alma had more luck with Manon, her daughter by Walter Gropius, but she
7 too was snatched away at an early age. Another dream is worth mentioning in
8 the context of Alma’s pregnancy-induced depression and needs no further
9 commentary: ‘A large green snake leaps up inside me, I tear at its tail – it won’t
40 come out – I ring for the servant – she pulls violently on it – suddenly she has
41R the beast – it sinks down – in its mouth are all my internal organs – I am now
hollow and empty like the wreck of a ship.’23 We should probably not go far 1
wrong in assuming that the marital problems Alma later tried to stigmatize as 2
asceticism caused by Mahler’s abstinence were in some way connected with her 3
first pregnancy, after which she eviscerated herself and felt robbed of her sexual 4
organs and at the same time of her sensuality. 5
There was also the complication caused by Anna von Mildenburg – and 6
not only by her. Alma inevitably also heard the rumours about Mahler and 7
Selma Kurz and the soprano Margarete Michalek. In the case of Anna von 8
Mildenburg and Selma Kurz we are sufficiently well informed to be able to 9
confirm their veracity, only in that of Margarete Michalek is their accuracy 10
unclear. Even if Alma later consoled herself by claiming that they were no 1
more than rumours and that Mahler had been a virgin when he married her, 2
because he was afraid of women, she must have known better. Certainly, her 3
diaries tell a different story. Selma Kurz disappeared from Mahler’s life while 4
continuing to be one of the leading lights of the Vienna Opera, but Anna von 5
Mildenburg was temperamentally less inclined to step aside, and her brief fling 6
with Siegfried Lipiner seems very much to have been a substitute for what she 7
was prevented from having with Mahler: if Mahler himself was unavailable, 8
then she would at least make do with a man of lesser genius from her lover’s 9
immediate circle. Alma evidently preferred not to know all the details of 20
Mahler’s relations with Anna von Mildenburg but told the outside world that 1
Mahler had assured her that he had never been intimate with the soprano. 2
Even so, the scenes that the singer made, her somewhat suspicious friendliness 3
towards the young bride and her mortifying arrogance all left Alma feeling 4
uncomfortable, and, amateur composer that she was, she was undoubtedly 5
afraid that such a great artist represented a rival for Mahler’s affections. In an 6
attempt to placate Alma, Mahler seems to have made up all manner of tales, 7
claiming, for instance, that in a vain attempt to rekindle their old passion, the 8
singer had run around in the nude. Even after their marriage, the female 9
singers at the Court Opera continued to be a thorn in Alma’s flesh. She knew 30
very well that Mahler was so addicted to his work that he had no time to get to 1
know women outside the opera house, and it gave her pause for thought 2
that all the affairs he was rumoured to have had were with singers working 3
under him. 4
Even as late as January 1903 Alma was commenting on this situation in her 5
diary, her embittered and agitated entry leaving us in no doubt about the inner 6
turmoil that she was feeling: 7
8
Just returned from the Opera. Blocking rehearsal! Euryanthe! Nice rehearsal! 9
Gustav let that WHORE drink from his glass! I stand SO in dread of her that I 40
fear his coming home. When he is with Mildenburg or Weidt, his manner 41R
436 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 grows sweet and teasing, and he coos over them like a young love-bird – my
2 God, may he NEVER come home! May I no longer have to live with him! I’m
3 so upset, I can hardly write!24
4
5 ‘Weidt’ is the dramatic soprano Lucie Weidt. The ‘whore’ is presumably Anna
6 von Mildenburg. If Alma was consumed by jealousy towards female singers, it
7 was also because she blamed Mahler for the fact that she could no longer feel
8 that she herself was an artist. ‘Here I am no more than a housekeeper,’ she
9 complained from Maiernigg shortly after her wedding.25 And she continued to
10 be jealous of Anna von Mildenburg. The Mahlers’ apartment in Vienna had to
1 be redecorated each summer while the family was away on vacation. Mahler had
2 to return earlier than the rest of the family and during this time had to make do
3 with various temporary arrangements. In September 1903 Alma seems to have
4 voiced her concerns, prompting Mahler to reply with unusual forcefulness:
5 ‘What gave you the idea that Mildenburg was staying with me at the Hietzinger
6 Hof? Surely you know that she moved to Gumpendorfstrasse a year ago, over the
7 road from the Lipiners? So there really was no need to make a fuss! Hell’s bells
8 [Himmelherrgottkreuztausenddonnerundhagelsappermentnocheinmal]!’26
9 Only weeks before her marriage, Alma confided in her diary that Mahler’s
20 position at the Opera was a powerful attraction and that she found it hard to
1 distinguish between Mahler as a man and his influential post. But perhaps, she
2 mused, Zemlinsky, too, would one day rise to an equally high position and that
3 it might be more sensible to choose him instead:
4
5 I don’t know what to think, how to think – whether I love him or not –
6 whether I love the director of the Opera, the wonderful conductor – or the
7 man. . . . Whether, when I subtract the one, anything is left of the other. . . .
8 What if Alex were to become famous? . . . One question plagues me: whether
9 Mahler will inspire me to compose – whether he will support my artistic
30 striving – whether he will love me like Alex. Because he loves
1 me utterly.27
2
3 Alma was not being entirely honest here, for Zemlinsky – a man with a similar
4 outlook to Mahler – had been critical of Alma’s flightiness and of her super-
5 ficiality and lack of concentration. What Zemlinsky undoubtedly lacked was
6 Mahler’s paternal authority. He was invariably willing to place his affection
7 before criticism, whereas Mahler thought that he owed it to Alma to tell her
8 the truth, for all that he loved her deeply.
9 If there was anything that poisoned Alma’s relationship with Mahler more
40 than his refusal to allow her to write music, it was her uncertainty and even
41R hostility to his own compositions. It is clear from all that we have already noted
that it was not the composer who overwhelmed her but the director of the 1
Vienna Opera and the ‘wonderful’ conductor. The passage from which we 2
have just quoted also includes the following remarks: ‘And his art leaves me 3
cold, so dreadfully cold. In plain words: I don’t believe in him as a composer. 4
And I’m expected to bind my life to this man. . . . I felt nearer to him from a 5
distance than from near by.’28 This entry is dated 3 December 1901, only three 6
months before her marriage. In her reminiscences, too, Alma writes with 7
disarming honesty about her feelings: ‘I longed for music! Yes, for music . . . 8
that’s strange. Our house was mostly quiet when Gustav Mahler returned 9
home tired from the Opera. I longed for my own music because Gustav 10
Mahler’s music was initially alien to me and I drew close to it only through an 1
extreme effort of will.’29 In short, it was not emotion or love or enthusiasm that 2
drew Alma to her husband’s music but only an effort of will. Against such a 3
background, expectations must have been low. True, there were moments 4
when Alma felt or pretended to feel that she was moved by Mahler’s music, and 5
she may even have convinced herself that this was the case, notably in the 6
summer of 1902 when he dedicated his Rückert setting, ‘Liebst du um 7
Schönheit’, to her. And writing about the Eighth Symphony in her reminis- 8
cences, she noted that ‘The floods of this great music and this man passed 9
through my metaphysical body,’30 adding that during the first performance in 20
Munich she sat in her box almost swooning with excitement. 1
There is no reason to doubt that these remarks are not just as subjectively 2
honest as those that attest to Alma’s estrangement and frustration. Even as late 3
as 1905 her feelings towards Mahler were as ambivalent as ever: 4
5
But I can’t give him all of my love. Why can’t I? He was initially a stranger to 6
me – and in many respects he still is. That is also one of the reasons why I 7
cannot understand certain things about him – and when I can, that under- 8
standing drives me away from him. And yet there is so much here that is 9
positive! I know that I genuinely love him and – now – that I simply couldn’t 30
live without him. He has taken so much from me that his presence is now my 1
only support in life. I must now draw from the rest of my existence all that 2
my brief life has to offer.31 3
4
There can be no doubt that after three years of marriage Mahler’s libido was 5
beginning to wane. A note in Alma’s diary for the summer of 1905 refers 6
explicitly to this problem: 7
8
With Gustav I often don’t know what to say. Before he even opens his mouth, 9
I already know exactly what to expect. The past weeks have been tremen- 40
dously hot, and I haven’t felt like doing anything. Neither reading nor 41R
438 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 working, nor anything else for that matter. I long for a husband – for I have
2 NONE. . . . But I feel too lethargic . . . even for that.32
3
4 Herein lies the seed of the catastrophic marital crisis that visited the couple in
5 the summer of 1910. Even before that Alma had flirted with attractive young
6 artists. After all, she did not need to get worked up about his fondness for
7 singers. Within her libidinous mindset only artists had a role to play: Klimt,
8 Zemlinsky and the strapping tenor Erik Schmedes. During her marriage it was
9 svelt musicians such as Ossip Gabrilovich who fired her passion without ever
10 tempting her to be unfaithful. Infidelity only became an issue with the archi-
1 tect Walter Gropius who, like Gabrilovich, was slimly built but who, unlike
2 him, was Aryan. There is an alarming report by one of Mahler’s confidants, the
3 Swiss writer William Ritter, who attended the rehearsals for the Prague
4 première of the Seventh Symphony in 1908 and who reveals the yawning gulf
5 that existed between the couple at this time. Ritter is an incorruptible and
6 impartial witness who was deeply shaken by the eccentric attentiveness that
7 Mahler lavished on his wife at this time. During one of the final rehearsals he
8 sat her on her own at a table directly behind the conductor’s podium. At the
9 end of the rehearsal, he stepped down from the podium and went over to his
20 wife like a sleepwalker with a harrowing expression of sadness and almost
1 despondency, sat down beside her and whispered something in her ear,
2 consuming her with his intensity. As for Alma:
3
4 It was clear that she understood neither what was being said to her nor the
5 music she had just heard, which she knew was written entirely out of rever-
6 ence for her. . . . She forced a smile, . . . cast embarrassed looks to the left and
7 the right. She was aware that we were all watching! And it made her so
8 nervous, poor thing . . .! She felt not a jot of pity for the man of genius who,
9 prostrated and entirely absorbed in his work, was virtually dying of love at
30 her very feet.33
1
2 Their marriage got off to a very bad start, then, and even their honeymoon
3 failed to flatter Alma’s jaded palate inasmuch as it took the form of a business
4 trip to St Petersburg, where Mahler conducted three concerts with the
5 Mariinsky Theatre orchestra. None of his own works featured on the
6 programmes, which for the most part included pieces by Mozart, Beethoven,
7 Wagner and Tchaikovsky. During the journey there, moreover, Mahler
8 suffered from a debilitating headache, an old complaint made worse on this
9 occasion by the overheated compartment. On his arrival in St Petersburg he
40 then caught a chill and it was only with difficulty that he was able to drag
41R himself to the concert hall. He stood on the podium, pale and emaciated, his
ashen face uplifted, his lips slightly parted. This, at least, is Alma’s account. The 1
letters that Mahler himself wrote to his sister from St Petersburg sound rather 2
less dramatic, reporting, conversely, that it was Alma who was ill. This is one 3
of the few occasions when we can compare Alma’s detailed account with 4
Mahler’s own version of events, fuelling the suspicion that she was basically 5
fond of exaggerating. Alma loved her husband most of all when he was ill, for 6
then she could express without any inhibitions the overwhelming maternal 7
love that she never felt for her children but only for the men in her life, espe- 8
cially when those men were small and ailing Jews like Mahler and Franz 9
Werfel. Even though she herself never felt entirely well – for her, pregnancy 10
was a physical torment from the outset – she was convinced that ‘I knew once 1
and for all that it was my mission in life to move every stone from his path and 2
to live for him alone.’34 3
The couple’s daily lives groaned beneath the burden of these manifold hand- 4
icaps. Alma moved into Mahler’s apartment. It was rented accommodation in 5
a tenement block, but this was no ordinary tenement block. It had been built 6
by Otto Wagner for his own needs and was a large structure of modestly 7
modernist pretensions. Completed in 1891, it was situated in Vienna’s third 8
district at 5 Rennweg, only a few hundred yards from the Schwarzenbergplatz. 9
The property is now 2 Auenbruggergasse, a tiny street running off the 20
Rennweg towards the Strohgasse. Mahler lived on the fourth floor on the 1
right-hand side of the building as seen from the Rennweg. He and his sisters 2
had been living here since 19 February 1898. Emma married Eduard Rosé on 3
25 August 1898, and four years later Justine walked down the aisle with 4
Eduard’s brother Arnold. From then on the large and by no means unassuming 5
apartment was occupied by Mahler and Alma, who remained there until 6
7 October 1909, although they spent the two years between 1907 and their 7
definitive departure commuting between Vienna, New York and their summer 8
home at Toblach. The apartment had a rectangular ground plan. We know 9
from a sketch prepared by Alma that it was divided into a longer front part and 30
a shorter rear section in the form of a letter J.35 Five rooms overlooked the 1
street: Mahler’s bedroom and study, the dining room and shared living room 2
and Alma’s bedroom – from the outset, they slept in separate bedrooms. To the 3
rear of the apartment lay the nursery, kitchen, a store and the bathroom. To the 4
right of the main entrance was a maid’s room. As a bachelor, Mahler had occu- 5
pied the three large rooms overlooking the street and two of the smaller 6
rooms. Prior to the birth of their daughter Maria, the couple rented two addi- 7
tional rooms that had previously been occupied by an army officer, who is said 8
to have hated Mahler with such fury that he ordered his servant to turn up the 9
gramophone to full volume whenever Mahler was trying to work. These new 40
arrangements meant that the Mahlers now had three large rooms and two 41R
440 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 smaller ones, in addition to the bathroom, kitchen and servants’ quarters. It

2 was a spacious apartment believed to cover a surface area of 180 square
3 metres (nearly 2,000 square feet) and as such was large enough for the
4 Mahlers and their two children. Even Alma admitted to feeling comfortable
5 there.
6
7
Finances and Everyday Life
8
9 If we may believe Alma, Mahler’s finances were in a bad way when she married
10 him in spite of the fact that he had been earning a respectable income for some
1 time, beginning with the golden handshake that he had received when leaving
2 Budapest. In Hamburg, his income had been that of a principal conductor.
3 And in Vienna his salary was positively lavish by the standards of the time, not
4 least when we consider that it included pension arrangements not only for
5 Mahler himself as a civil servant for life but also for Alma in the event if his
6 dying before her, an arrangement that was to stand Alma in particularly good
7 stead. Specifically, Mahler’s financial situation was as follows. (As always,
8 comparisons with today’s prices remain problematical.)
9 When he arrived in Vienna in 1897, Mahler’s annual salary as a Kapellmeister
20 was 5,000 florins, or approximately 40,000 euros. On 8 October 1897 he became
1 director of the Vienna Court Opera on a basic salary of 6,000 florins supple-
2 mented by an extra 2,000 florins for his work as Kapellmeister and similar
3 amounts that he received by way of a travel and housing allowance, making a
4 total of 12,000 florins or 96,000 euros. It was agreed that he would receive a
5 pension of 3,000 florins and that this would be raised to 4,000 after ten years –
6 in the event, Mahler failed by just three days to remain in his post for ten years,
7 but he was none the less awarded the increase. But that was not all. Mahler’s basic
8 salary was increased after a number of years to 7,000 florins, making an annual
9 total of 13,000 florins, or 104,000 euros. Even by today’s standards this is a
30 respectable income, albeit considerably less than the sums that are nowadays
1 commanded by general music directors and by the artistic directors of interna-
2 tional orchestras, none of whom has to shoulder a workload comparable to
3 Mahler’s. The agreement terminating Mahler’s contract that was drawn up by
4 Prince Montenuovo and signed by Kaiser Franz Joseph was generous in the
5 extreme: he received a one-off payment of 10,000 florins (80,000 euros) and an
6 annual pension of 7,000 florins (56,000 euros). In the event of his death it was
7 agreed that his widow would receive an annual pension of 1,000 florins (8,000
8 euros). Although this last-named sum may strike us as small, it was more
9 generous than the average for the time. In general, then, Mahler was well paid,
40 although this does nothing to alter the fact that for years he had amassed
41R debts in caring for his whole family and that it was a long time before these
could be paid off in full. Moreover, the house at Maiernigg was not cheap to 1
build. These debts were certainly not due to the lavish lifestyle of an ascetic 2
like Mahler but, as we know from his recurrent complaints, to the inability of 3
all his brothers and sisters, including Justine, to manage their own finances. All 4
of them lived beyond their means, convinced that their brother would help 5
them out. We know from a postcard that Mahler sent to Alma in Maiernigg 6
during the summer of 1905 that she received 500 florins a month for household 7
expenses. By today’s standards 4,000 euros sounds a lot of money, but we 8
need to bear in mind that there were four mouths to feed as well as two 9
servants on the family’s payroll. None the less, these household expenses 10
accounted for nearly half of Mahler’s monthly income and presumably covered 1
all the usual expenses, including clothing, shoes and food. The Mahlers also had 2
to pay their own travelling expenses and a modest rent for their home in the 3
Rennweg. 4
It was more than merely Alma’s antipathy to Justine that led her to claim that 5
the latter’s profligacy had resulted in a mountain of debt that she estimated to 6
be 50,000 gold crowns, a sum so high that Mahler had still not paid it off at the 7
time of his wedding. Mahler’s own letters to Justine, enjoining her to be less 8
spendthrift, indicate that Alma was not wilfully slandering her sister-in-law, 9
for all that she blamed Justine exclusively for the entire family’s problems in 20
this regard. It is unclear whether Justine was herself constitutionally extrava- 1
gant or whether she simply found it easiest to give in to her siblings’ escalating 2
demands, but money was a constant theme throughout the years when Mahler 3
was the family’s only breadwinner. It would not be unduly cynical to say that 4
the situation improved only when Leopoldine died in 1889, when Otto 5
committed suicide in 1895 and when Emma and Justine married in 1898 and 6
1902 respectively. Only when Mahler himself married did he finally become 7
free of the financial obligations to his family, but the mountain of debt that he 8
had incurred continued to overshadow the early years of his marriage. 9
According to Alma it took five years to pay off all these debts. When she 30
confronted her sister-in-law, Justine is said to have remarked with a shrug of 1
her shoulders: ‘Well, if the worst had come to the worst, I would have gone 2
begging with him from door to door.’36 3
Mahler’s daily routine in Vienna followed the strictest of rituals. Unless he 4
had conducting commitments that took him out of the country, the summer 5
vacation might last from the middle of June to the end of August and was given 6
over to composition and, in parallel with it, physical and mental recuperation. 7
There was no time during the remaining months for creative work, for which 8
Mahler required ever greater peace and quiet and could ill afford to be 9
distracted by administrative chores or even by his work as a conductor and 40
stage director. None the less, he was able to combine his daily workload in 41R
442 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Vienna with the task of elaborating the short score that he had produced during
2 the summer months. (We shall have more to say about Mahler’s compositional
3 method in a later section of this chapter.) In 1902, for example, he returned
4 from his summer vacation in Maiernigg – his first with Alma – with the
5 completed Fifth Symphony. Even before his return to Vienna, he played it
6 through to Alma, the first time that he had done anything like this with her.
7 Back in Vienna, he devoted the winter months to the fair copy that could then
8 be submitted to the printer. Thanks to her above-average musical intelligence,
9 Alma was able to help in copying out and correcting the Fifth Symphony in
10 particular, and one has the feeling that she felt closest to Mahler in this
1 ancillary function.
2 For Mahler himself, extreme discipline was the order of the day. He would
3 get up at seven, have breakfast and then work at his desk on whichever
4 symphony was currently on the stocks. After barely ninety minutes, he would
5 leave for the Opera, where rehearsals, auditions and administrative chores
6 would occupy him all morning. Lunch had to be waiting for him when he
7 returned home at one. The journey on foot from the opera house to the
8 Rennweg took fifteen minutes. An attendant at the Opera would telephone his
9 apartment to announce that the director was on his way. Lunch was prepared,
20 and Mahler would ring when he arrived at the front door, so that the soup was
1 waiting for him on the table when he reached the fourth floor a few moments
2 later. Even the apartment door had to be open to save him from having to
3 fumble for his key. He would run through the apartment to the bathroom to
4 wash his hands before returning to the dining room. He would then have a
5 brief siesta for no more than half an hour. But soon even this short period of
6 rest was abandoned when Mahler began to feel that it was not conducive to a
7 healthy digestion. Instead he resorted to a brisk walk. During the summer
8 months this meant hiking through the mountains or along the shores of a lake,
9 but for the rest of the year he had to make do with walking four times round
30 the nearby Belvedere Gardens or, more prosaically, along the Ringstraße and
1 back. At five he would take high tea and at six would return to the opera house,
2 where performances generally began at seven, no difference being made
3 between a short work like Fidelio and a longer one such as Tristan und
4 Isolde. If Mahler was not conducting himself, he would watch part of the
5 performance or work in his office. Alma would collect him from the opera
6 house almost every day. If he was still working in his office, she would sit
7 in his box until he came to find her, and they would then go home together,
8 where a late and relatively frugal supper awaited them. As a result, Alma
9 never heard the end of several operas in the repertory. After supper, they
40 would sit for a while in their living room, talking, or Alma would read to her
41R husband.
Relations between Alma and Justine quickly cooled. They were simply too 1
different in terms of their respective backgrounds. Alma was undoubtedly 2
talented, a fêted beauty used to success, while Justine was an unattractive 3
woman who for years had sacrificed her own life to that of her siblings, with 4
no prospect of starting a family of her own. One has the feeling that Arnold 5
Rosé was the first man in her life. By the time that they married, she was thirty, 6
by contemporary standards an old maid with little chance of marrying. Her 7
idolatrous love of her brother was a further seed of discord and the source of 8
jealousy between the two women. The far more beautiful and lively Alma had 9
taken away from her the only man who really mattered in her life, a man 10
whom none could surpass. During his honeymoon trip to St Petersburg, 1
Mahler wrote to tell her that ‘I don’t notice any difference at all between now 2
and before! Isn’t that remarkable? Hopefully, you feel this too.’ Mahler meant 3
no harm by this remark, but it was an insensitive thing to write, as was a 4
later comment in another letter to Justine: ‘My health is splendid – marriage 5
seems to suit me very well.’37 By now Justine’s patience was at an end. Her own 6
health was by no means ‘splendid’, and there was no comparison between a 7
competent violinist like Arnold Rosé and her brother, a composer of genius. As 8
we have seen, the relationship between brother and sister had never been 9
incestuous but had become unhealthily interdependent following the loss of 20
their parents and their shared concern for their siblings. 1
For all his love for his sister, Mahler must have heaved a sigh of relief when 2
breaking free from Justine. But the same could not be said of her. Alma was a 3
rival for Mahler’s affections, the first to be taken seriously. Justine was deeply 4
hurt by the fact that her brother did not miss their old companionship, and 5
Alma no longer stood a chance. Whether or not it is true that Justine fainted 6
at the stage door in Vienna when opening one of the letters from St Petersburg 7
from which we have just quoted no longer matters. More revealing is the scene 8
between Mahler and his sister that Alma reports with evident glee even though 9
she did not witness it in person. Following a confrontation at the Court Opera, 30
Justine is said to have wrung her hands and exclaimed: ‘But, Gustav, after all, I 1
am flesh of your flesh.’ To which he replied: ‘Dirt of your dirt, you mean.’38 2
One might have thought that the long summer holidays would have given 3
the young couple an opportunity to enjoy each other’s company, but Mahler’s 4
increasingly inflexible work routine made this impossible. Between 1902 – their 5
first summer together as husband and wife – and the tragic events of 1907, 6
when their daughter Maria died on 12 July, the couple spent their vacations at 7
Maiernigg on the Wörthersee. Here Alma was soon obliged to adapt to Mahler’s 8
routine. Occasionally, tiresome news would arrive from the Court Opera in 9
Vienna, but in general Mahler concentrated on his compositional work to such 40
an extent that Alma saw little more of her husband than she did in Vienna. 41R
444 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 During the summer of 1893 Mahler and his sisters had discovered Steinbach
2 on the Attersee and by 1894 he had built a composing house here on the shore
3 of the lake, absolute seclusion being a sine qua non for his mornings spent
4 composing, for all that he otherwise valued convivial company. The Steinbach
5 idyll, however, was not idyllic enough, for Mahler had to live in a guest house,
6 and so it ended in the autumn of 1896. Although he was sorry to leave, the ex-
7 perience provided him with a model that he adopted from now until his death,
8 separating the building in which he worked from the holiday home where he
9 and his dependants lived. During the summer of 1897 Mahler had no holiday
10 home at all, and it remained lodged in his memory as a uniquely grim experi-
1 ence, involving him, as it did, in an odyssey that took him from Kitzbühel to
2 Vahrn, with a brief and prophetic visit to Toblach in the South Tyrol. Given his
3 likely commitments at the Vienna Opera, it was clear that such a summer could
4 not be repeated for, compositionally speaking, he produced almost nothing at
5 all. The following summer, when the family returned to Vahrn, was not much
6 better, nor was the summer of 1899, when they stayed at Alt-Aussee. With the
7 exception of a number of Wunderhorn settings, Mahler produced nothing here
8 either until the very end of his stay, when he was struck by his initial ideas for his
9 Fourth Symphony. But lack of concentration prevented him from elaborating
20 them. Where would he find a haven in which to develop his future plans?
1 Mahler had already returned to Vienna when Justine and Natalie Bauer-
2 Lechner set off in search of a new property in early August 1899. Their quest
3 took them to the Wörthersee, and here, as we have already had occasion to
4 observe, they stumbled upon Anna von Mildenburg and were introduced to
5 the architect Alfred Theuer, who quickly designed a comfortable but by no
6 means ostentatious villa. Mahler returned to Maiernigg from Vienna in mid-
7 August in order to inspect the place and see Theuer’s plans, which filled him
8 with enthusiasm. The next problem was to find a suitable plot of land. One
9 measuring 3,000 square metres (nearly 11,000 square feet) was found right
30 next to the lake beside the Villa Schwarzenfels, and Mahler proceeded to buy
1 it for 4,000 florins. Given his annual salary of 12,000 florins, this was already a
2 sizeable sum, and it did not include the cost of building a house on it. He
3 borrowed the money from Justine, suggesting that even as director of the
4 Vienna Court Opera he was not yet able to draw on unlimited resources. He
5 had repaid the debt by the summer of 1905. In the woodland higher up the
6 hillside was a further plot of land on which Mahler’s ‘study’, as he called it, was
7 to be built. It was surrounded by a fence in order to keep out visitors.
8 (Impressively situated, the place is now a museum.) Work on both properties
9 lasted a total of two years.
40 By the summer of 1900 the little house in the forest was finished, as always
41R a simple structure comprising a single room. Justine described it in a letter to
her sister Emma, who was by then living in Boston, where her husband had 1
found work as a cellist: ‘Gustav is in Paris, while I’ve been here in Maiernigg 2
for five days now. I feel very much at my ease here, G.’s little house in the forest 3
is like something out of a fairytale, as if it had been put there by magic, and the 4
villa itself promises to be exceptionally beautiful.’39 Even though the living 5
quarters were not yet finished, Mahler was able to work again just as he had 6
been used to in Steinbach, the first time for years that this had been possible. 7
Able to complete his Fourth Symphony, he wrote to his friend Nina Spiegler: 8
9
This summer, for me, has been so glorious that I feel myself really and truly 10
braced for the coming winter. 1
If I can keep this up in future – managing to get mental and physical 2
repose in the summer – then I shall be able to lead a human sort of life even 3
here in Vienna. . . . 4
In this coming winter I shall myself make the fair copy of my work; and 5
this will give me a foothold in all the stress of life, a foothold such as I have 6
needed particularly in these recent years. 7
One feels so utterly desolate when one has to survive without what is 8
sacred to one.40 9
20
By the summer of 1901 the Mahlers’ villa, too, was finished. A small and rela- 1
tively narrow structure, it none the less offered all the amenities that Mahler 2
needed and also had adequate space for his staff. Above all, he could be in his 3
composing house within ten minutes. Alma did not particularly care for the 4
villa. True, she liked the view, but the interior was furnished in a way she found 5
too ornate, too typical of the late nineteenth century and, above all, too anti- 6
Secessionist. Although she was able to remove some of its ornamental excesses, 7
the basic fittings remained the same, and Mahler, less sensitive to such super- 8
ficialities, was unable to invest any more money in the property. The house had 9
two large verandas, one of them open, the other one closed. The open one 30
went from the living room to Alma’s bedroom, whereas the closed one led 1
from the dining room to the guest room, which was very quickly converted 2
into a nursery, a development welcomed by Mahler, who did not like overnight 3
guests. On the first floor was Mahler’s bedroom, the large balcony of which 4
commanded the finest view of the lake. This room, with its large desk, also 5
doubled as a study during the times when he was not working in his 6
composing house. Adjoining it was a tiny closet with a washbasin. It was here 7
that Mahler washed and dressed. 8
In Maiernigg, too, there was a meticulous regime. During the summer 9
months Mahler got up between six and half past – earlier than he rose in winter. 40
But he could go to bed earlier as he did not have to stay up for performances at 41R
446 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the Court Opera and a late supper. As soon as he woke up, he told the cook to
2 make him his breakfast, which she had to take to his composing house. She was
3 instructed to return to the villa by a different route as Mahler did not want to
4 see her on his way up the hill. By then he was generally so completely immersed
5 in his music that he wanted at all costs to avoid a familiar face and obviate the
6 need to react to it. Breakfast consisted of coffee with warm milk (the hut’s only
7 luxury was a spirit stove to warm the milk), wholemeal bread, butter and
8 marmalade. By the time that Mahler arrived, the cook had already left, and he
9 was able to warm the milk himself, frequently burning his fingers on the
10 matches or the stove. Outside the house were a bench and a table where he took
1 breakfast. The hut contained a grand piano, a bookshelf featuring mainly works
2 by Goethe and Kant and a handful of scores, most of them by Bach. The hut had
3 no basement and because of the surrounding trees was quite dark inside. Alma
4 later thought that it was injurious to her husband’s health as it tended to be
5 damp and cold. Indeed, even Mahler himself is said to have admitted that the
6 building ruined his health, for all that it was here that he wrote the principal
7 works of his middle period, the happiest of the three periods, namely, his Fifth,
8 Sixth, Seventh and Eighth Symphonies. His statement is undoubtedly an exag-
9 geration, although it is equally clear that the hut’s location exacerbated his
20 tendency towards chronic angina.
1 He returned to the main building at midday and went to his room to
2 change – he wore only his oldest clothes for work. He would then go down to
3 the boathouse, where two small boats were kept. To the right and left of this
4 boathouse were bathing cabins, each with its own little jetty stretching out over
5 the lake. Experienced swimmer that he was, Mahler would dive into the water,
6 swim far out into the lake, then whistle for Alma to come out of the house and
7 wait for him by the bathing hut. He then swam back to the shore and lay in the
8 sun for a while, before jumping back into the water and repeating this whole
9 process until he felt ready for lunch. As before, the soup had to be waiting on
30 the table – Mahler hated sitting around doing nothing. To an outsider this may
1 have looked like a compulsive-neurotic disorder, but in fact it reflected
2 Mahler’s awareness of the constant need for meaningful activity.
3 The meal had to be frugal, non-fatty and unseasoned. Mahler spent much
4 of his life experimenting with his diet, without, however, reaching a definitive
5 solution. Max Burckhard was of the view that Mahler’s diet would give anyone
6 stomach trouble even if they had not previously been suffering from such a
7 complaint. As we have already noted, Mahler suffered from digestive problems
8 for most of his life, although they never amounted to anything particularly
9 serious (except the haemorrhoidal bleeding in February 1901) and were
40 certainly not the cause of his death. After the meal was over, Mahler would
41R sit and talk for half an hour, after which came the obligatory walk, which in
Mahler’s case was more of a run. Even with her earlier training as a cyclist, 1
Alma had difficulty keeping up with him. At this period Mahler was still in 2
excellent shape and would rush ahead, either leaving the villa directly or 3
rowing across the lake to the opposite shore and beginning his walk there. 4
Such walks could last three to four hours, and when Alma began to flag in the 5
midday heat, Mahler would take her in his arms and say ‘I love you’, giving her 6
renewed strength. He always carried around a notebook in order to keep a 7
record of any musical ideas that struck him during this time. He would then 8
step to one side of the path, leaving Alma to sit on the stump of a tree and 9
recover her breath. Meanwhile, Mahler would beat time in the air and then 10
continue to write in his notebook. On their return from their walk, Mahler 1
would generally dive into the lake again and then, donning his working 2
clothes, return to his composing house. He would finally come back down to 3
the villa and after a relatively early supper he and Alma would spend the 4
evening together, reading to one another or talking. The Mahlers were in bed 5
by ten. Eight hours later a new day began. If Mahler had made more progress 6
on his work than he had hoped for or if the daily routine had proved too tiring, 7
he would occasionally go away for two or three days at a time as a kind of 8
reward. Sometimes he set store by being on his own, but at other times he 9
would take Alma with him. She enjoyed these excursions most of all because 20
then she had her husband all to herself, undistracted by his work. 1
2
3
Mahler’s Compositional Method
4
It was a complex and varied process that led from the first musical idea noted 5
down during a walk to the printed score, and one, moreover, that often did not 6
end even with the printed score, for Mahler tinkered obsessively, never satis- 7
fied with what he had achieved but repeatedly persuaded by the first perform- 8
ances of his works to undertake further improvements. A few examples may 9
serve to illustrate this process. 30
Let us retrace our steps to the time of the Second Symphony.41 While he was 1
still working as a Kapellmeister in Leipzig, Mahler had decided that on 2
completing his First Symphony in 1888 he would write an even bigger piece. 3
The opening movement, to which he later gave the title ‘Todtenfeier’, was 4
begun in Leipzig. He continued to work on it back at home in Iglau during the 5
summer of 1888, completing the first draft on 8 August and the full score on 6
10 September. At the beginning of October he moved to Budapest as director 7
of the Royal Hungarian Opera but was prevented from making any further 8
progress on the symphony by his workload at the Opera, his worries about his 9
family and the intrigues that were fomented against him. But the opening 40
movement, itself unusually long, was finished, and in his despair at ever being 41R
448 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 able to complete the work, he decided for the time being to regard this opening
2 movement as a finished piece. Giving it the title ‘Todtenfeier’, he turned it in
3 this way into a kind of symphonic poem with programmatic aspirations. (He
4 had already done the same with his First Symphony. Although a programme
5 was not officially announced, it was initially trailed as a ‘symphonic poem’.) In
6 April 1891 Mahler became principal conductor of the Hamburg Opera, and it
7 was now that he felt emboldened to return to composition. Initially, however,
8 the summer months proved unproductive as a result of the upheaval of his
9 move to the city and his frequent changes of address. Only when he discovered
10 a refuge at Steinbach on the Attersee in the summer of 1893 did he find the
1 necessary concentration to write the middle movements of the Second
2 Symphony. The Scherzo is a fine example of Mahler’s tendency to use his own
3 existing songs as symphonic material, a feature that sets him apart from all the
4 other great symphonists. The Wunderhorn song ‘Des Antonius von Padua
5 Fischpredigt’ that forms the nucleus of the Scherzo was originally written for
6 voice and piano before being orchestrated and then incorporated into the
7 symphony. Mahler then set another Wunderhorn song, ‘Urlicht’, as the fourth
8 movement of the symphony. Although little more than a brief transition, it
9 none the less provides a necessary breathing space before the fifth and final
20 movement.
1 In an important passage in her recollections of Mahler, Natalie Bauer-
2 Lechner offers an insight into the process that led from song to symphonic
3 movement. She had asked him how this initially unplanned expansion and
4 transposition came about: ‘It’s a strange process! Without knowing at first
5 where it’s leading, you find yourself pushed further and further beyond the
6 bounds of the original form, where potentialities lie hidden within it like
7 the plant within the seed.’42 And Mahler expressed similar sentiments about
8 the second movement, the Andante moderato, the two main themes of which
9 occur in a sketch dating back to his time in Leipzig. If he had kept them, it was
30 no doubt in the belief that he would one day be able to make use of them:
1
2 ‘Here are two marvellous themes’, said Mahler, ‘that I picked up today from
3 the sketch for the Andante of my Second Symphony. With God’s help, I hope
4 to finish both it and the Scherzo while I’m here.’ When he has just been
5 composing, he often seems, for a while, as if he were still in another world;
6 and he confronts his own works as if they were completely foreign to him. ‘I
7 was always disturbed by those two little pieces of paper on which I had noted
8 the themes – it was in Leipzig, when I conducted the Pintos there. I see now
9 that they might well have bothered me. For the melody pours forth here in a
40 full, broad stream; one idea is interwoven with the other, constantly
41R branching out in an inexhaustible wealth of variations. And how choice and
delicate the end-product of this process of self-generation – if you could 1

follow its course right through, what a joy it would be to you! 2
‘And that’s the only way to create: in one grand sweep. It’s no use playing 3
around with some poor little scrap of a theme, varying it and writing fugues 4
on it – anything to make it last out a movement! I can’t stand the economical 5
way of going about things; everything must be overflowing, gushing forth 6
continually, if the work is to amount to anything.’43 7
8
It was very much during the late 1890s that Mahler’s contacts with Natalie 9
Bauer-Lechner were at their closest and that she was able to record some of his 10
most powerful statements on his own creative process. 1
Fortunately, Natalie was inquisitive, and time and time again she would ask 2
what Mahler felt when he was composing or immediately before starting to do 3
so. As a violinist, she knew what music was, but she had no idea what compos- 4
ition meant. And Mahler expressed himself with total candour in a way that 5
was never to be the case at a later date, when he became more reserved and 6
mistrustful. He went on to refer to his first two symphonies as instances of the 7
link between life and art, a link that is so difficult for us to grasp: 8
9
My two symphonies contain the inner aspect of my whole life; I have written 20
into them everything that I have experienced and endured – Truth and 1
Poetry in music. To understand these works properly would be to see my life 2
transparently revealed in them. Creativity and experience are so intimately 3
linked for me that, if my existence were simply to run on as peacefully as a 4
meadow brook, I don’t think that I would ever again be able to write anything 5
worthwhile.44 6
7
As for the question of inspiration, Mahler had little more to say on the subject 8
than all the other creative artists of the time, arguing only that there was some- 9
thing mystical about it: the artist creates something as if prompted to do so by 30
an alien force, so that, unconscious of what he is doing, he is later incapable of 1
understanding how it came about. He felt that he was like a blind hen finding 2
a diamond. It was this process of inspiration that persuaded him of the exis- 3
tence of a higher being and also forced him to recognize the sanctity of the 4
creative process. 5
As an example of how this process works in practice, Mahler himself cited 6
the example of a passage in the fourth movement of his First Symphony, a 7
passage that – following Adorno – we may describe as the definitive ‘break- 8
through’ in this work and that marks the transition from C major to the 9
symphony’s home key of D major. Any other composer at this period would 40
have modulated from C major to C sharp major and thence to D major, but 41R
450 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Mahler wanted this D major to sound as if it had arrived completely out of the
2 blue from another world. For a long time he resisted the idea of this freer and
3 bolder modulation, finding it too daring and unconventional. Only with reluc-
4 tance did he allow himself to be persuaded to adopt it, but when he did, he
5 realized that it was the one truly great passage in the symphony. If the circum-
6 stances were favourable, Mahler explained, the inspirational and compositional
7 process was unending, but it could also be a source of suffering for the
8 composer, a point that he vividly illustrated by reference to an incident that
9 occurred when he had wanted a certain movement to be in 4/4 time only for him
10 to be assailed by ideas in 3/4 time. Natalie Bauer-Lechner asked him what he
1 did with these uninvited guests. Mahler himself described them as ‘unborn
2 ideas’ that arise when conditions are right and form a kind of primeval
3 soup made up of ideas that cannot be used for the present. Far from being
4 lost, they return at a later date – sometimes years later – just when they happen
5 to be needed. This is what happened to him while he was working on
6 ‘Rheinlegendchen’: an idea that had occurred to him three years earlier and that
7 he had discarded at the time, evidently not even writing it down, suddenly came
8 to mind again and proved wonderfully well suited to the new song.45
9 The task of giving written form to these ideas was a complicated process for
20 Mahler, normally involving ten stages between the initial sketch and the printed
1 score. As we have already seen, the initial idea would be jotted down during
2 a walk and then transferred to music manuscript paper on Mahler’s return
3 home. On those rare occasions when no such paper was to hand, Mahler would
4 draw the lines himself. The next stage was the sketch. Sketches may look very
5 different, depending on the composer. Some composers produce their sketches
6 on only a single stave, while others use several staves. Mahler generally used
7 three, joined together with a brace.46 This system allowed him, however curso-
8 rily, to indicate important thematic developments. One of the preliminary
9 sketches for the opening movement of the Second Symphony, for example,
30 already includes its main four-bar theme, noted down in total isolation before
1 the start of the actual sketch and marked ‘main theme’. This theme was clearly
2 the starting point for Mahler’s work on the movement. In the finished move-
3 ment it appears only much later as the culmination of a lengthy and complex
4 development. But it was present in Mahler’s head from the very beginning.
5 The next, decisive stage with Mahler was the short score. At this point we
6 need to recall that there have always been composers who have omitted all the
7 earlier stages and launched straight into the full score. When working on
8 Weber’s Die drei Pintos, Mahler realized to his astonishment that Weber had
9 proceeded in this way. Max Reger was to do so at a later date. With Mahler, the
40 situation is far more complicated, for it encompasses every imaginable inter-
41R mediary stage. The short score is a detailed draft on – normally – three to five
staves arranged in the same order as the later full score. In other words, the 1
high woodwind and brass are at the top, followed by the lower brass instru- 2
ments, percussion and strings, with the violins above the violas, cellos and, 3
finally, the double basses. Mahler’s short scores were normally written on four 4
staves, winds, strings and basses each having a different stave. An additional 5
stave would be used in the case of a vocal line. In turn, the short score was the 6
starting point for the full score in which the musical material was fully worked 7
out for the first time. The next stage was the definitive autograph score that was 8
intended to be used by the printer or engraver. It was this final process where 9
Alma was able to help in the case of the Fifth Symphony. With Mahler, the 10
term ‘definitive’ is perhaps ill-advised, for he continued to revise his scores 1
even after their first performances. He would normally employ a professional 2
copyist to prepare the printer’s copy on the basis of his autograph – there were 3
several excellent copyists in Vienna. Mahler would then correct and revise this 4
printer’s copy, and it was this Stichvorlage that was sent to the publisher or 5
engraver. He would then receive back a set of proofs with which he was able to 6
tinker to his heart’s content. He often used these proofs when conducting the 7
work’s first performance as the full score had not always appeared in time. 8
(The orchestral parts could be produced without the printer’s copy of the full 9
score.) The full score was then engraved on the basis of the corrected proofs, 20
although for Mahler this was by no means the end of the matter, for the 1
rehearsals and the first performance constituted the true baptism of fire for 2
the new work. He conducted the first performances of all his first eight 3
symphonies, the only exceptions being partial performances of individual 4
movements, which he was willing to entrust to other conductors such as Felix 5
Weingartner in the case of the Third Symphony. Only the Ninth Symphony 6
and Das Lied von der Erde were posthumously premièred by Bruno Walter in 7
Vienna and Munich respectively. 8
If Mahler was persuaded to alter a printed score, it was not because he was 9
unsure about the work’s formal design, the only exception to this general rule 30
being the repeat sign that he added to the opening movement of the First 1
Symphony. And he rarely altered the pitch of a note, for on matters such as this 2
he never suffered any self-doubts. Conversely, he long remained uncertain 3
about the instrumentation of his works, and it was this uncertainty that led to 4
most of the often substantial changes that he undertook once he had heard the 5
work in rehearsal and in performance. Using a razor blade he would scratch 6
out individual notes and even whole lines, their replacements sometimes being 7
entered on loose sheets of paper or indicated by means of corrections gener- 8
ally in blue crayon. At the time of the Second Symphony he was still a young 9
and unknown composer with few chances of having his works performed, and 40
at this stage in his career he suffered unspeakably for he evidently lacked the 41R
452 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 instrumentational imagination of other composers such as Richard Strauss.

2 Once, when he was working on the Scherzo of his Second Symphony, he
3 complained to Natalie Bauer-Lechner:
4
5 If only I could hear it myself and finally take account of the rehearsal in order
6 to see if I were barking up the wrong tree and whether something that strikes
7 me as profound and significant were also profound and significant for others.
8 Because if I cannot produce the same process in others – even if it is only in
9 those few individuals on which any artist has to rely – and if I cannot
10 summon up the same ideas as those that created my work inside me, I have
1 created it in vain.
2 How much I lose through not being able to try out my things in live
3 performance! How much I could learn from that! It would be so important
4 to me, as my way of treating the orchestra is particularly individual. For
5 example, when scoring I perhaps over-emphasize certain things for fear that
6 they might become lost, or sound too weak.47
7
8 It took a long time for Mahler to master this fear, which was responsible for
9 his tendency to over-instrument certain passages in the works of his early
20 and middle periods, although he would invariably revise these passages once
1 he had heard them in performance. But the same fear also prompted the
2 numerous performance markings that litter his scores, all of which have a
3 single purpose: to ensure that the composer’s wishes were clear even to the
4 back desks of each section, so that nothing was lost and nothing came out
5 wrongly. (Mahler knew orchestral players like the back of his hand.)
6 No other composer burdened his performers with so many instructions and
7 requests. With today’s top orchestras much of this advice is redundant, but
8 during Mahler’s own lifetime it was painfully necessary, so low were contem-
9 porary standards. ‘Plaintive’, ‘singing’, ‘with a broad bowstroke’, ‘standing out’,
30 ‘muted’, ‘change the bow frequently’, ‘keep the triplets flowing’ and ‘dying away’
1 are all instructions to the players and conductor that go far beyond the tradi-
2 tional tempo and performance markings such as the addition or removal of
3 mutes. Other instructions are purely technical: ‘The cymbals should hang
4 freely and be struck with sponge-headed drumsticks’ is an instruction that was
5 necessary because drumsticks normally had wooden heads at this time. In the
6 case of the brass instruments, the most frequent instruction is ‘bells raised’,
7 meaning that the sound should be directed upwards, rather than downwards
8 or straight ahead, ensuring that the passages in question were not only appre-
9 ciably louder but also much clearer. Nowadays few leading orchestras follow
40 this instruction as the brass players are confident of achieving the impact
41R intended by Mahler without the need for such additional effects. Nor was
Mahler at all squeamish when it came to advising his fellow conductors. At the 1
start of the second movement of the Fifth Symphony, for example, we find the 2
word ‘ritenuto’ over a single note – a dotted minim. In other words, the note 3
must be held back. A similar marking occurs in the fourth bar of the same 4
movement. Normally such markings apply to a passage that is at least a whole 5
bar in length. To apply the marking to a single note – for the very next note is 6
marked ‘a tempo’ – is odd, for no listener will be able to register it. And yet not 7
even this was sufficient for Mahler, who added an asterisk over the notes in 8
question and provided an explanation at the foot of the page: ‘Note for the 9
conductor. The sense of this rit. is, in both cases, a short pause, in order to 10
drive toward the following chord with great force. The figure itself must be 1
played in quick tempo.’ In short, it is eminently possible to find in these works 2
evidence to support the contemptuous term ‘Kapellmeister music’ that has 3
often been applied to them: only a Kapellmeister could harbour such mistrust 4
of his musicians and fellow conductors. 5
These markings were not the expression of a neurotic desire to control his 6
performers or, if they were, then only in part. Mahler knew that the ultimate 7
goal of any performance is clarity, and it was for the sake of this clarity that he 8
sometimes over-instrumented his works, whether at the piano or at his desk. 9
But he was no less willing to reduce the instrumentation if this served the same 20
end. And he was proud that on this point he had no rivals: 1
2
The area in which I believe I am ahead of the composers of the present and 3
past when it comes to instrumentation is one that can be summed up in the 4
word ‘clarity’. I demand that everything should strike the ear just as it 5
resounded in my own inner ear, and it is in order to meet this demand that I 6
attempt to exploit all the resources at my disposal, right down to the very last 7
of them. Each instrument should be used only at the right place in the score 8
and only in the way that is most characteristic of it. Indeed, I even go so far 9
as to insist that the violins perform cantabile passages and others requiring 30
the greatest momentum on the E string, while the more sonorous notes and 1
those associated with pain are played on the G string. [In general it was left 2
to conductors and violinists to decide which strings to use.] I never use the 3
middle strings to express passion as they do not sound right. These strings 4
are far better suited to quiet passages that are veiled and mysterious. In such 5
matters it is not a question of imagining some ideal that reality does not 6
reflect.48 7
8
And Mahler went on to explain that all the laborious and detailed effort 9
that this work cost him would be worth it if the outcome allowed the piece in 40
question to withstand the ravages of time. In his earliest works, he concluded, 41R
454 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 he had had insufficient knowledge and skill and so he had needed to

2 re-instrument them.
3 This explains why some of Mahler’s symphonies were repeatedly reprinted.
4 A closer look at the changes that the different versions contain reveals that
5 their principal aim was a reduction in what might be termed the ambient
6 noise.49 By unleashing vast tonal resources, Mahler inevitably produced a level
7 of sound that flew in the face of his ideal of clarity and that was in fact incom-
8 patible with it. Mahler spent his whole life struggling to achieve this balance,
9 and the fact that in his Ninth Symphony, the Adagio from the Tenth and Das
10 Lied von der Erde there is a definite tendency towards leaner textures suggests
1 he had realized that the problem admitted of no solution. An example from the
2 final movement of the Sixth Symphony may serve to illustrate this point, for
3 the proofs contain one deletion after another. Sometimes it is the timpani and
4 cymbals that are cut, on other occasions the triangle. Elsewhere the melodic
5 line is no longer doubled by the trumpet, or else it is the side drum that is
6 removed. Above all Mahler adopts a much more economical approach to the
7 percussion and brass, the instruments that contribute the most to the sheer
8 volume of the music. If new instruments are added, it is ones that produce far
9 gentler sonorities such as the celesta and glockenspiel. Mahler clearly realized
20 that it was possible to have too much of a good thing. The corresponding
1 passages were not suddenly reduced from a thunderous roar to the gentlest
2 of whispers, for they remain thunderbolts, but the effect now emerges
3 more clearly and is not submerged in sheer noise. As Mahler observed,
4 ‘Composition demands the strictest self-criticism. The proportions, structure,
5 climaxes and so on must not be sacrificed to some thing of beauty. Everything
6 must be there in its rightful place, in an organic relationship with the whole
7 and in a harmonious relationship to all its parts.’50
8 It remains to cast a brief glance at the publishing history of one of Mahler’s
9 major works: the Fifth Symphony may serve to illustrate the process in
30 general.51 In the whole history of music Mahler must surely be unique for the
1 fact that the current critical edition of his works, which is being published
2 under the aegis of the International Gustav Mahler Society of Vienna, is a
3 collaborative venture on the part of no fewer than five different publishers, all
4 of them eminent names in the world of music publishing: Bote & Bock, C. F.
5 Peters, Schott, Universal Edition and Josef Weinberger. It is clear from this that
6 Mahler’s relations with his publishers were as complex and tempestuous as any
7 love affair. His first four symphonies were published by two Viennese firms,
8 Weinberger and Doblinger. The conductor Gustav Brecher, who was briefly
9 employed at the Vienna Court Opera under Mahler before becoming principal
40 conductor in Leipzig, was friendly with both Bruno Walter and Henri
41R Hinrichsen, who was then running C. F. Peters in Leipzig, a considerably larger
publisher than either Weinberger or Doblinger. Dissatisfied as always, Mahler 1

parted company with Weinberger and was looking for a new home for his 2
works. There is a certain lack of clarity concerning the contractual situation 3
between Mahler on the one hand and, on the other, the publishing houses of 4
Weinberger and Doblinger and the printing house of Eberle, which was run by 5
Josef Stritzko. Eberle had engraved the First, Third and Fourth Symphonies as 6
well as Das klagende Lied, and all had been distributed by Weinberger and 7
Doblinger. 8
A surviving letter from Mahler to his legal adviser Emil Freund indicates 9
that when he received an initial approach from Peters in July 1903 he felt obli- 10
gated to Stritzko.52 He asked Freund how he should respond to Peters’s request 1
to publish his Fifth Symphony. Should he ask Stritzko whether he was willing 2
to pay as much as Peters? Legally speaking, Mahler was not tied to a particular 3
publisher at this period and could pick and choose whom he wanted. He 4
demanded 10,000 florins, a considerable sum of money when we recall that his 5
annual salary as director of the Court Opera was 12,000 florins. But this sum 6
also included all future royalties. It is impossible to say what these figures 7
represent in today’s terms, but it might suggest that an opera director who was 8
also a composer and who was earning 100,000 euros a year would be able to 9
sell his new symphony to a publisher for 80,000 euros. Hinrichsen was initially 20
surprised at the size of Mahler’s demand, and when the latter asked for 15,000 1
florins for his Sixth Symphony, the two men failed to agree and Mahler took 2
his business to the firm of Christian Friedrich Kahnt. Had Mahler gone too 3
far? Certainly not, for at more or less the same time Hinrichsen was prepared 4
to pay Strauss 20,000 florins for his Sinfonia domestica. And yet not even this 5
was enough for Strauss who, as the most astute of businessmen, demanded, 6
and got, around 24,000 florins from Bote & Bock. And what possible compar- 7
ison is there between a meretricious piece like the Sinfonia domestica and 8
Mahler’s Fifth? Yet it has to be admitted that at the time in question Strauss’s 9
work represented the better deal, achieving far more performances than 30
Mahler’s Fifth. Today the situation is reversed. 1
Be that as it may, Hinrichsen accepted Mahler’s demands, however exorbi- 2
tant he felt them to be, and in return acquired the rights to publish and 3
distribute the Fifth Symphony, while Mahler retained the performing rights. 4
The publisher’s income was based chiefly on hire fees for the orchestral parts 5
and the sale of conducting scores and, in the case of individuals wanting to 6
study the work at home, piano reductions. (These were the days before 7
symphonies started to appear on gramophone records.) The first performance 8
of the Fifth Symphony under Mahler in Cologne on 18 October 1904 proved 9
only a modest success, with the result that neither then nor later were the 40
publisher’s hopes fulfilled. (It was on the occasion of the Cologne première that 41R
456 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Hinrichsen first met his new composer.) It says much for the publisher that he
2 was not deterred by this lack of success but expressed extreme interest in the
3 Sixth Symphony, and it was only Mahler’s own much-inflated demand that
4 drove him away. Even as late as 1910 Hinrichsen reckoned that Mahler’s Fifth
5 Symphony had still not paid its way. During the six years since its first
6 performance, it had been heard fewer than twenty times in all, in spite of
7 which Hinrichsen was prepared – astonishingly – to consider a revised version
8 of the score incorporating Mahler’s many retouchings and to shoulder the
9 burden of these costs. (Following Mahler’s death, Hinrichsen remembered
10 things differently and claimed that the composer had been willing to pay for
1 the corrections himself.) In the run-up to the first performance, Mahler played
2 through the symphony with his Viennese orchestra and even at this stage
3 undertook several far-reaching changes. Others were made in the wake of the
4 first performance. It needs to be remembered that the conducting score
5 required 250 plates, the orchestral parts no fewer than 525 – and this for a
6 symphony lasting barely seventy minutes. In short, considerable expense was
7 involved. In the summer of 1910, moreover, Mahler declared that the old
8 version of his Fifth Symphony should not be performed any longer as it was
9 badly instrumented, and so he set about revising the score, a task that he
20 completed early in 1911. But he died before the revised version could be
1 published. The conductor Georg Göhler then set about attempting to produce
2 such a version and received Mahler’s own autograph copy from Alma, a copy
3 that contained all the composer’s changes. But for reasons of cost, Peters
4 agreed to publish only the revised orchestral parts, leaving conductors to
5 incorporate the necessary changes into the full score, which Peters even
6 reprinted in the old edition. It was not until some years later that the
7 conducting score and the miniature study score were aligned with the new
8 parts.
9 The result of all these changes – and it is an accurate reflection of Mahler’s
30 working method – is that over the years the publishing house of Peters has
1 brought out no fewer than seven versions of the Fifth Symphony: i) the study
2 score that appeared in September 1904 and that may be regarded as the first
3 version of the symphony; ii) the conducting score of November 1904 that
4 contains numerous changes vis-à-vis its predecessor; iii) the conducting score
5 that includes Mahler’s changes of 1910–11 and that was published in
6 November 1919 as a ‘New Edition’; iv) the study score that appeared in April
7 1920 and that contains a further set of corrections, while also perpetuating
8 errors that are the result of various misreadings; v) Erwin Ratz’s critical edition
9 of the first version of the score, which appeared in 1964 as part of the complete
40 edition of Mahler’s works and which has now been taken over by Peters’s West
41R German branch in Frankfurt am Main; vi) the corrected version of this edition
that was superintended by Karl Heinz Füssl in 1989; and vii) Reinhold Kubik’s 1
new edition that was published as part of the complete critical edition in 2002. 2
It is difficult to imagine a more complicated situation than this, and yet it 3
merely reflects Mahler’s attempts to achieve his ultimate goal of ever greater 4
perfection. 5
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41R
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3 27
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7 The Seventh Symphony
8
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4 F IT HAD not been for its final movement, Mahler’s Seventh Symphony might
5
6
I have been the firm favourite among audiences and performers of his music.
He wrote it during two particularly happy summers in Maiernigg in 1904 and
7 1905, but by 1908 it had still not been performed, and so he turned to the
8 impresario Emil Gutmann to ask whether the work could be given as part of a
9 tour. Omitting to mention the cowbells and glockenspiel, he explained that it
20 was scored for modest forces, the only unusual instruments being the guitar
1 and mandolin in the fourth movement. ‘It is my best work,’ he concluded, ‘and
2 preponderantly cheerful in character.’1 The idea of making the work the main
3 draw on a tour came to nothing, and the symphony was finally premièred in
4 Prague on 19 September 1908. Mahler’s young supporters turned out in force
5 and included Otto Klemperer, Bruno Walter and Artur Bodanzky, although,
6 contrary to Alma’s claim, Alban Berg was not among them. Mahler was in the
7 best of spirits and continued to make corrections to the orchestral parts
8 throughout the rehearsals. But the performance proved no more than a succès
9 d’estime. Echoing his remarks to Emil Gutmann, Mahler wrote to Henri
30 Hinrichsen, the head of Peters, to explain that ‘the work is predominantly
1 cheerful and humorous in character’.2 But such a description is difficult to
2 square with the heading of the symphony’s second and fourth movements,
3 ‘Nachtmusik I’ and ‘Nachtmusik II’. Night is not traditionally a time of humour
4 and cheerfulness, except possibly in the smoky atmosphere of a bar, and there
5 is certainly no hint of such an atmosphere in the case of the present move-
6 ments, both of which are nocturnes in the late eighteenth-century tradition.
7 First found in the serenades of the period, such forms were then taken over
8 into the piano pieces of composers like John Field and Frédéric Chopin, pieces
9 sicklied over with the pale cast of melancholy. In using the term, Mahler
40 will have thought of Mozart’s Eine kleine Nachtmusik but also of Robert
41R Schumann’s four Nachtstücke op. 23. In turn, the expression will have been
THE SEVENTH SYMPHONY 459
associated in the minds of both Schumann and Mahler with the Nachtstücke of 1
E. T. A. Hoffmann. It is unclear whether Mahler was familiar at this date with 2
Claude Debussy’s Nocturnes, which he later conducted on two occasions, but 3
they have little in common with his own ‘Nachtmusiken’. 4
The second ‘Nachtmusik’ is serene in the spirit of a traditional serenade, 5
although there is no denying that the two solo instruments, the guitar and 6
mandolin, recall the popular Viennese idiom of Schrammelmusik and bring an 7
element of inappropriate drollery to the movement as a whole, quite apart 8
from the fact that the balance between these two plucked instruments and the 9
rest of the orchestra is scarcely ever correct in the concert hall – perhaps only 10
on a CD is it possible to hear the effect that Mahler intended. The first 1
‘Nachtmusik’ has something of a funeral march about it, and although Alma 2
argued that when her husband wrote this movement, ‘he was beset by 3
Eichendorff-ish visions – murmuring springs and German romanticism’,3 we 4
are reminded of an early Wunderhorn song like ‘Der Schildwache Nachtlied’ 5
rather than of Joseph von Eichendorff. Moreover, if we accept Michael Gielen’s 6
idea that the Seventh Symphony was written from the inside outwards, it is the 7
Scherzo which, framed by the two ‘Nachtmusiken’, is central to the work, 8
whose outermost shell is provided by its opening movement and rondo finale. 9
We know that the two ‘Nachtmusiken’ were written in 1904 and that the two 20
outer movements date from 1905. Unfortunately, we have no idea when the 1
central Scherzo was composed. If it was the first of the five movements to be 2
completed, Gielen’s hypothesis would receive confirmation, and yet the 3
hypothesis remains convincing whatever the true facts of the matter. A closer 4
look at this central movement reveals nothing cheerful or humorous but 5
only eeriness and ghostliness. The performance marking is ‘Schattenhaft’ 6
(‘Shadowy’), and ghostlike figures flit past like shadows in the muted or pizzi- 7
cato strings over timpani and horns. Here Mahler recalls the third movement 8
of his Second Symphony, and his explanation on that occasion could easily be 9
adapted and applied to this later Scherzo: it is as if the listener has arrived 30
outside a house in which a ball is taking place and can see the dancing couples 1
through the window without being able to hear the music to which they are 2
dancing. It is hard to think of Eichendorff ’s splashing fountains here, and even 3
the two framing ‘Nachtmusiken’ are worlds removed from the mood of the 4
poet’s Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts. Even so, the reference to Eichendorff 5
is not entirely wide of the mark, whether it stems from Mahler himself or from 6
his wife. It is not, however, Aus dem Leben eines Taugenichts or Ahnung und 7
Gegenwart that spring to mind here but a poem such as ‘Zwielicht’ (‘Twilight’): 8
9
Dämmrung will die Flügel spreiten, 40
Schaurig rühren sich die Bäume, 41R
460 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Wolken ziehn wie schwere Träume –

2 Was will dieses Graun bedeuten?
3 Hast ein Reh du lieb vor andern,
4 Laß es nicht alleine grasen,
5 Jäger ziehn im Wald und blasen,
6 Stimmen hin und wieder wandern.
7
8 [And twilight soon will spread its wings. The ghostly trees bestir themselves,
9 and clouds drift past like heavy dreams – who’ll rede the riddle of this dread?
10 The deer you love above the rest should not be left to graze alone, for
1 huntsmen’s horns are all around, and voices wander to and fro.]
2
3 Schumann provided a wonderful setting of these lines, and Mahler was
4 responding to them, too, in the Scherzo of his Seventh Symphony. And even if
5 we may hear a serenade in the second ‘Nachtmusik’, it is no balmy summer
6 night of the kind evoked by Carl Spitzweg: no strolling players have been
7 invited by a young gentleman to perform at the foot of a lofty gable window.
8 Rather, it is the sort of serenade that Eichendorff had in mind when he ended
9 his poem ‘Nachts’ (‘At Night’) with the lines: ‘Mein irres Singen hier / Ist wie
20 ein Rufen nur aus Träumen’ (‘My wild-toned song is but a cry that comes from
1 the world of dreams’).
2 If we work our way outwards from the core of the symphony, then the
3 humorous and cheerful aspects of the work grow remarkably diffuse, but we
4 need to remind ourselves of Mahler’s comment on the first three movements
5 of his Fourth Symphony to the effect that we are dealing there with the
6 cheerful serenity of a higher world, a serenity that for us has something eerie
7 and frightening about it. These middle movements of the Seventh Symphony
8 bring us back to Jean Paul’s definition of humour. In other words, these osten-
9 sible nocturnal idylls are not played out in provincial towns of the Biedermeier
30 era but are set in landscapes that remind us, rather, of Arnold Böcklin’s more
1 sombre paintings such as The Ride of Death and Ruin by the Sea, while the
2 figures that flit past and peer out from behind the houses are those of James
3 Ensor rather than Spitzweg. The alternative title of Song of the Night that has
4 sometimes been adopted by concert promoters and record producers has not
5 caught on and not brought the work the popularity that they and Mahler
6 hoped for. Even today the Seventh Symphony remains Mahler’s least popular
7 symphony, a claim that would be confirmed by any performance statistics.
8 Even more puzzling than the middle movements are the outer movements.
9 Marked ‘Slow – Allegro’, the first movement begins with what sounds
40 suspiciously like a slow march played pianissimo by the full orchestra, from
41R which a melody on the tenor horn breaks free, effortful and threatening,
stretching itself until its very bones seem to crack. Various musical characters 1
encroach on each other’s territory, before becoming intertwined. Bright and 2
darker colours alternate in a demonstration of the composer’s supreme skill as 3
an orchestrator, producing a chiaroscuro effect that is abruptly displaced by 4
a furious, quicker march that develops a sense of tremendous forward 5
momentum. The movement’s manifold layers place extreme demands on 6
orchestras and conductors alike, giving the impression that in terms of the 7
multiple perspectives that it throws on our world of experience and emotion 8
Mahler wanted to include everything that he normally distributes over an 9
entire symphony. The movement culminates at bar 317 with a B major Adagio 10
of overwhelming beauty that owes its effectiveness to swirling arpeggios in the 1
harps and strings, suggesting the vision of a starry sky. We are no longer 2
concerned with a hero’s sufferings or happiness but with something higher and 3
greater. Alma would have been better advised to describe this theme as the 4
‘Alma theme’, but few people would have believed her. 5
Mahlerians in general continue to have difficulty with the rondo-finale, and 6
there are few movements in his output that have given rise to greater contro- 7
versy. Indeed, the resultant debate, which can be only briefly examined here, 8
has overshadowed the critical and practical reception of the piece in general. 9
The movement begins and ends in C major. Although unusual in Mahler’s 20
output, this would not in itself be bad if the movement’s overall character were 1
not a kind of Über-major, expressing an excessive and explosive positivity in the 2
form of a brilliant pyrotechnical display of all that is true and beautiful and 3
good, accompanied by cymbals and bass drum as if the Janissaries’ march from 4
Die Entführung aus dem Serail had been instrumented by Strauss. The key of C 5
major inevitably recalls Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, and there is 6
indeed a hidden quotation from the opera. (Other commentators have even 7
discovered a quotation from Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow.) There is a feeling 8
here of strapping health and unbridled joviality that is hard to square with the 9
mood of the final movement of the Sixth Symphony of only a short time earlier. 30
As an indication of the extreme range of interpretative possibilities, it is 1
enough to cite only two. Writing in 1913, Richard Specht heard ‘a cheerful and 2
sunnily light-hearted joyousness in every note of this thunderous C major’.4 3
This view was echoed by Paul Bekker, who belonged to the same generation as 4
Specht and who, like him, took his hero at face value. His analysis of all of 5
Mahler’s symphonies was published in 1921 and remains a monumental 6
example of a writer’s ability to immerse himself wholly in a composer’s works. 7
He describes the final movement of the Seventh Symphony as a ‘revelation of 8
life transformed into music’, while in the final moments, ‘sun and earth, creator 9
and creature, the divine and the earthly resound at one and the same time in 40
a single great chord’.5 A wholly different response is that of Adorno, a writer 41R
462 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 who can normally be relied on to strike a note of impassioned enthusiasm.

2 Even as a young music critic in Frankfurt, he already had misgivings about
3 this movement, and in his monograph on Mahler he offers a summation of
4 those objections that is shocking in its negativity. Noting an egregious dispro-
5 portion between the movement’s resplendent form and its distinctly thin
6 content, he bases his argument on the relentlessness of its diatonic harmonies,
7 claiming that such sustained diatonicism inevitably results in a sense of
8 monotony:
9
10 Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His voice cracks, like Nietzsche’s, when he
1 proclaims values, speaks from mere conviction, when he himself puts into
2 practice the abhorrent notion of overcoming on which the thematic analyses
3 capitalize, and makes music as if joy were already in the world. His vainly
4 jubilant movements unmask jubilation, his subjective incapacity for the
5 happy end denounces itself.6
6
7 Present-day interpretations of the Seventh Symphony are no longer satisfied
8 with these two extreme positions and wonder whether a composer who had
9 just completed the nihilistic finale of the Sixth Symphony could suddenly have
20 written so stridently and tritely life-enhancing a work. If we accept this incon-
1 gruity, we must conclude that the final movement of the Seventh Symphony
2 cannot be taken seriously and that it is an ‘ironic and in places even frivolous’
3 movement, to quote Mathias Hansen.7 Perhaps, then, the movement repre-
4 sents the recantation of a recantation. Or, alternatively, was Mahler trying
5 to say that the final movement of his Sixth Symphony is one possible
6 answer to life’s questions and that the equivalent movement of the Seventh is
7 another answer? If we add them together and divide them by two, is the result
8 the sum total of our artistic responses to the ultimate problems of humanity?
9 The question is unanswerable. At the start of the Seventh Symphony, the
30 listener appears to set foot on firm ground, but this is undermined by the
1 shadows of the night, and at the end, our night vision finely attuned, we
2 are blinded by a dazzling sun and deafened by the battery of noise unleashed
3 by the brass and percussion. Eichendorff ’s poem ‘Twilight’ ends with the
4 words:
5
6 Hast du einen Freund hienieden,
7 Trau ihm nicht zu dieser Stunde,
8 Freundlich wohl mit Aug und Munde,
9 Sinnt er Krieg im tückschen Frieden.
40 Was heut müde gehet unter,
41R Hebt sich morgen neugeboren.
Manches bleibt in Nacht verloren – 1

Hüte dich, bleib wach und munter!8 2
3
[If you have a friend on earth, do not trust him at this hour: words and 4
glances feign his friendship. The peace is sham: he thinks of war. Whatever 5
dies today, enfeebled, will rise newborn tomorrow. Much is lost at night – 6
beware, be watchful and alert!] 7
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7 The Administrator – Contemporaries –
8
9
Signs of Crisis
10 (1905–7)
1
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4 The Administrator
5
If we wish to gain an overall view of Mahler’s administrative responsibilities as
6
director of the Vienna Court Opera, we need to take a step back before exam-
7
ining the final phase of his work for the company, a phase overshadowed by
8
manifold problems.
9
Alma’s claim that her husband had complete control over the Vienna Court
20
Opera and was given a totally free hand by Kaiser Franz Joseph and his deputy
1
comptroller, Prince Alfred Montenuovo, is difficult to sustain.1 Above all, the
2
impression that Mahler was allowed to do as he pleased by the general admin-
3
istrator of all the imperial and royal theatres is misleading. We may recall that
4
at the time of Mahler’s appointment the general administrator was Baron Josef
5
von Bezecny, who was well disposed to the conductor, as also was Eduard
6
Wlassack, the director of the chancellery and, as such, a far more important
7
figure in terms of the day-to-day running of the theatre. Bezecny left office in
8
February 1898 and was replaced by Baron August Plappart von Leenheer, who
9
two years later was still being listed as interim director. With his appointment
30
Mahler’s situation changed, even if the change revealed itself only gradually.
1
Wlassack, conversely, remained in office until May 1903. The post of general
2
administrator was not a full-time appointment (Bezecny was also the director
3
of a local bank) but an honorary position whose duties were largely performed
4
by subordinate officials, and yet it was certainly enough to put a spanner in
5
Mahler’s works. The first confrontation between Plappart and his director
6
concerned the latter’s terms of service, including his rights and duties. Mahler
7
had spent his galley years in various German opera houses and unlike Plappart
8
he knew the depths to which such institutions could sink. As a result he was
9
keen to maintain his right to decide on all important matters and not have
40
to consult the general administrator’s office on questions relating to the
41R
THE ADMINISTRATOR – CONTEMPORARIES – SIGNS OF CRISIS 465
appointment and dismissal of singers and orchestral players. Under the terms 1
of his service agreement, he was supposed to consult Plappart on all questions 2
relating to leave of absence, including the periods when he himself was away 3
on tour, in some cases conducting his own works – and it was this that proved 4
particularly divisive and contentious. 5
An argument arose soon after Plappart’s appointment that indicates the 6
extent to which the balance of power was very different from the one described 7
by Alma. At the end of 1898 Mahler tried to defend himself against a number 8
of articles that had attacked him and his running of the opera house and that 9
had appeared in various local papers whose anti-Semitism varied only in 10
terms of its virulence. He was convinced that the attacks were due to indiscre- 1
tions on the part of an individual member of the orchestra, most of whose 2
players were hostile to him. He even thought that with the help of a grapholo- 3
gist he had managed to identify the culprit and wanted the general adminis- 4
trator’s office to pay for the graphologist’s report and institute proceedings 5
against the person in question. Plappart sent Mahler packing and left him to 6
pick up the bill. 7
Writers on Mahler have tended to describe Plappart as bureaucratic and 8
narrow-minded, and there is no doubt that from the standpoint of Mahler 9
and his friends this was true. But we do not know enough about him to say 20
whether or not this assessment is fair. None the less, we may conclude that he 1
had little interest in opera and was anxious only to ensure that a director who 2
was regarded as stubborn was not given any unnecessary leeway and to avoid 3
any form of conflict that might compromise his own position. Whether 4
Plappart was anti-Semitic like many members of the Austrian aristocracy is 5
uncertain, but it cannot be ruled out. The philo-Semites among the Austrian 6
nobility must have been the exception. Fortunately, however, there was 7
someone in this hierarchy who was well-disposed to Mahler and to whom he 8
could – and did – turn in times of conflict, and that was Prince Montenuovo. 9
Montenuovo was second only to the senior comptroller, Prince Rudolf von 30
und zu Liechtenstein, who remained in office from 1896 to 1908, in other 1
words, for the whole of the period that Mahler held the post of director. And 2
yet in spite of the fact that all the documents relating to Mahler bear 3
Liechtenstein’s signature, it seems to have been Montenuovo who was charged 4
with the task of dealing with all matters appertaining to the opera. Bruno 5
Walter recalled that Mahler’s reports were submitted not to the general admin- 6
istrator’s office in the Bräunerstraße, barely five minutes on foot from the 7
Court Opera, but to Montenuovo in the Hofburg. Liechtenstein and 8
Montenuovo were the general administrator’s immediate superiors. It was to 9
them that the director deferred. They were also the final court of appeal before 40
the Kaiser, although the latter had no great interest in the opera, preferring the 41R
466 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Burgtheater and in particular its actresses, a point well illustrated by his long
2 and touching and much-ridiculed liaison with the Burgtheater actress
3 Katharina Schratt. And yet Franz Joseph may have sensed that Mahler was in
4 a different league from the director of the Burgtheater at this period. Paul
5 Schlenther had succeeded Alma’s admirer, Max Burckhard, in 1898 and
6 remained in office until 1910.
7 A number of anecdotes attest to the fact that Mahler resisted interference in
8 his strict regime. On one occasion he is said to have been told to engage a
9 particular soprano because she enjoyed the patronage of some aristocrat or
10 other. Mahler duly auditioned the woman but refused to engage her because he
1 did not think she was good enough. When it was borne in upon him that the
2 Kaiser explicitly wanted this appointment, Mahler is said to have replied: ‘All
3 right, but I shall then add a note to the playbill, “Frau X, at the express desire of
4 His Majesty the Kaiser”.’ (According to a different version of the story, he is said
5 to have retorted: ‘I’m waiting for the Kaiser’s orders to engage the lady.’)
6 Mahler’s strictness is attested above all by the instructions that latecomers
7 should not be admitted once the performance had started, the only exceptions
8 being the boxes and the areas set aside for standing room. In November 1897 the
9 Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung published a satire under the heading of
20 ‘Regulations for Patrons of the Court Opera’, according to which a cannon would
1 be fired at the Arsenal at five o’clock in the afternoon, advising patrons that it was
2 time to get ready for the opera. Moreover, on the day before the performance
3 opera-goers had to inform their landlords of their intention of attending the
4 opera, so that they could be urged to leave the building in good time. In order to
5 avoid lengthy waits at the cloakrooms, all patrons would be issued with a stan-
6 dard opera cape at cost price. These capes could be removed with a single clasp
7 and already bore the number of the cloakroom ticket emblazoned on their back.2
8 But let us return to Prince Montenuovo, of whom Bruno Walter provides a
9 striking portrait in his autobiography:
30
1 Emperor Franz Joseph’s Lord Steward, a grandson of the Austrian Princess
2 Marie Louise whose second husband, after Napoleon, had been Baron
3 Neipperg – Italianized into Montenuovo – was an elegant silver-haired man
4 of medium height, his face adorned by a grey moustache and beard. He was
5 cold and self-assured, rather dryly bureaucratic, but thoroughly reliable, and
6 unshakable in his convictions. He deserved high praise for having resisted for
7 ten years the intrigues and hostilities directed against Mahler. Men and
8 women of high society, some of them even in the entourage of archdukes,
9 were trying to gain his ear in their efforts to dethrone Mahler. And Mahler
40 did not make things easy for Montenuovo either, though his heart was glad-
41R dened by the Prince’s sincere esteem, by the sympathy under his dry manner.3
The rest of Mahler’s administrative staff comprised his chancellery-appointed 1

and devoted secretary Alois Przistaupinsky and the latter’s assistants 2
Ferdinand Graf, Carl Sageder, Alois Hartmann and Robert Kompass. To these 3
names we may add those of the stage manager August Stoll and the chorus 4
conductor Hubert Wondra, who also performed administrative tasks but on 5
whom Mahler could not rely unconditionally, and the Court Opera’s clerk, 6
Carl Hasslinger, who dealt with minor day-to-day matters and who was a 7
genuine jack of all trades for Mahler. (It was Hasslinger who would telephone 8
to report that Mahler was on his way home for lunch.) This, then, was the 9
motley crew who were brought into contact with Mahler by the latter’s role as 10
administrator: his personal factotum, his loyal secretary, his less than loyal 1
chorus conductor, the bureaucratic and inartistic general administrator, the 2
dry but supportive deputy comptroller and, at the very top, a relatively ignor- 3
ant but tolerant Kaiser. Ranged against him was the press, which was largely 4
hostile to him at the start of his appointment. Large sections were still hostile 5
to him at the end. 6
Mahler initially made enemies by sweeping away ingrained operatic routine 7
and inartistic bureaucratic practices and above all by his policy towards 8
singers. (His arguments with the Vienna Philharmonic come under a separate 9
heading.) An anti-Semitic caricature from a Viennese newspaper shows this 20
very clearly.4 In front of the Court Opera is a scarecrow with Mahler’s badly 1
drawn features, frightening away a flock of birds on whose backs it is possible 2
to make out the names of prominent singers, including Reichmann, Naval, 3
Renard and Forster, all of whom were allegedly driven away by Mahler. The 4
caption beneath the caricature reads: ‘Jew Mahler as a scarecrow driving away 5
our finest singers!’ And at the top is a second caption that reads: ‘Reichmann 6
too is going!’ Theodor Reichmann was the famous baritone who had sung 7
Amfortas in the first performances of Parsifal in Bayreuth in 1882. It is impos- 8
sible to date the caricature, for according to the surviving records Reichmann 9
remained a member of the Court Opera until his death in 1903. Perhaps it 30
dates from a time when differences between the director and the baritone 1
came to public attention. Reichmann was well known as a supreme exponent 2
of bel canto – Bruno Walter, too, held him in high regard. By 1897, when 3
Mahler joined the company, Reichmann was already past his best, but it was 4
no doubt his lack of charisma onstage that Mahler found the most disap- 5
pointing. Mahler was never squeamish about speaking his mind when he felt 6
that a local favourite had passed his peak and that it was time for him to go. 7
Moreover, not every type of voice was equally well represented when Mahler 8
came to Vienna in 1897. A number of the names that appear in the caricature 9
point to genuine conflicts, and the dismissal of these singers inevitably led a 40
section of the press to attack Mahler, even though such dismissals might have 41R
468 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 been accepted as necessary or meaningful by any other director. And as the

2 caricature indicates, Mahler’s Jewishness was a further bone of contention. If
3 he dismissed a non-Jewish singer, it was argued that Jewish hatred of non-Jews
4 played a part in that decision. If he had signed up more Jewish singers, he
5 would have been criticized for this, too, though in the event only Selma Kurz
6 fell into this category.
7 Fortunately for Mahler, nearly all the singers he engaged proved a success,
8 and it is clear that his enemies soon abandoned their attempts to attack his
9 policy towards singers, for, however much local audiences may have missed the
10 familiar faces, they were soon expressing their enthusiasm for their replace-
1 ments. Mahler was not really an expert on voices but had an ear for vocal poten-
2 tial and an eye for dramatic talent. His problem was simply that his enthusiasms
3 were frequently over-hasty and that on the strength of a single audition or guest
4 appearance he would engage new singers who were unable in the longer term
5 to meet the expectations that were placed in them. He was also volatile in his
6 sympathies and antipathies, a shortcoming that was repeatedly held against him
7 even by his friends and admirers. As such, it needs to be taken seriously. When
8 Bruno Walter arrived in Vienna, he had to go off in search of singers in the
9 provinces. He, too, admitted afterwards that a number of the decisions that
20 Mahler took were misguided, but gradually an ensemble emerged that had no
1 equal in Europe and that was particularly strong in the repertory that was
2 closest to Mahler’s own heart: Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner.
3
4
Contemporaries
5
6 ‘Mahler has often been reproached for performing very few new works,’ wrote
7 Paul Stefan in 1908. Stefan was an early Mahlerian, and his pamphlet, Mahler’s
8 Legacy, was in part a polemic against his idol’s successor in Vienna, Felix von
9 Weingartner.5 The reproach, he went on, was misguided, because at the
30 Vienna Court Opera nothing was as counterproductive as the failure of a new
1 work. If several new works all proved a fiasco, then the director would have
2 lost all credit in the eyes of his audiences and of the general administrator’s
3 office as well:
4
5 Audiences at the Court Opera are conservative in terms of their social back-
6 ground and taste and shy away from anything that is unusual, preferring
7 playfulness, memorable melodies and above all the most pointed dramatic
8 impact. But what is acceptable to the average listener is unlikely to satisfy the
9 most fastidious. The critics complain about the frivolousness of a new work
40 and spoil audiences’ enjoyment of it. No new work in recent years has
41R appealed in its entirety to the Vienna Court Opera.
Stefan went on to draw attention to the fate of two operas in particular: 1

Strauss’s Salome, which in spite of Mahler’s efforts was not staged at all, and 2
Pfitzner’s Die Rose vom Liebesgarten, which was mounted only with difficulty. 3
In short, Stefan was right: there is no sign that under Mahler’s stewardship 4
there were any local or international premières that won a lasting place for 5
themselves in the repertory. This, then, might be the only weak point in 6
Mahler’s administration. And yet it needs to be stressed that he did not take up 7
his new post with the stated intention of turning the Court Opera into a centre 8
of the avant-garde. Moreover, the years between 1897 and 1907 were oddly 9
lacking in important new works, for all that the period between 1890 and 1920 10
were in general a time of plenty. Franz Willnauer has observed, quite rightly, 1
that the true masterpieces of early twentieth-century opera – Strauss’s Elektra 2
and Der Rosenkavalier, Bartók’s Bluebeard’s Castle, Schreker’s Der ferne Klang, 3
Busoni’s Doktor Faust, Pfitzner’s Palestrina and Berg’s Wozzeck – had not been 4
written at the time that Mahler was director in Vienna.6 5
A glance at the performance statistics reveals a marked dearth of world 6
premières and first performances. The first local première superintended by 7
Mahler was Smetana’s Dalibor, which entered the repertory in October 1897 8
alongside The Bartered Bride, a work that Jahn had introduced to Court Opera 9
audiences the previous year. Mahler was always fond of Smetana’s music, 20
preferring it to that of Dvor̆ák, whom he largely ignored as an opera composer, 1
although Rusalka would surely have appealed to him. He had mixed feelings 2
about late Verdi – the Italian composer was still alive when Mahler assumed 3
office in 1897. If he ignored early and middle-period Verdi almost entirely, he 4
was merely reflecting the German tradition in general. He once told Natalie 5
Bauer-Lechner that Verdi had some wonderful ideas but that he tended to 6
scatter them at random and string them together in no particular order. Only 7
in his later works could he control his wealth of ideas and use them economi- 8
cally. In this regard Mahler had no hesitation in comparing Verdi with Albert 9
Lortzing.7 30
Remarkably, however, Mahler failed to follow up this insight into the later 1
Verdi by matching action to words. He twice conducted Aida, but there were 2
no performances of Don Carlo or Simon Boccanegra in Vienna under his direc- 3
torship. (It has to be admitted, however, that at this date neither work had been 4
recognized as the masterpiece that it is.) And in 1907 Zemlinsky conducted 5
Otello. Only in May 1904 did Mahler take any sustained interest in Verdi when 6
he and Roller collaborated on Falstaff. Of the thirteen performances in this 7
and the following two seasons, Mahler conducted only six, a clear sign that his 8
heart was not in it – it is apparent from his possessiveness towards Così fan 9
tutte that he did not willingly relinquish works to which he felt any attachment. 40
His neglect of Verdi is perhaps his greatest sin of omission, and yet anyone 41R
470 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 whose guiding stars were Gluck, Beethoven and Wagner and who shared
2 Wagner’s contempt for ‘foreign dross’ could not be expected to place Verdi’s
3 works on the same high level. But if Mahler maintained a kind of respectful
4 distance towards Verdi, he felt nothing but scorn for the verismo school and
5 for Puccini in particular. During his visit to Lemberg in early April 1903 he
6 took the opportunity to see Tosca at the local theatre and was impressed by the
7 standard of the performance as such:
8
9 But the work itself! Act I: a Papal procession, accompanied by an inter-
10 minable ding-dong of bells (which had to be specially imported from Italy).
1 In Act 2 a torture scene with hideous screams, after which a man is stabbed
2 to death with a sharp-pointed bread-knife. Act 3: panoramic view from a
3 citadel over the city of Rome, to a gigantic bim-bam-bum with another bevy
4 of bells – and an execution by firing squad. Before the shooting started, I got
5 up and left. I need scarcely add that the score is a masterly sham; nowadays
6 every shoemaker’s apprentice is an orchestrator of genius.8
7
8 When La Bohème received its first performance at the Vienna Court Opera in
9 November 1903, Mahler unsurprisingly handed over the baton to Francesco
20 Spetrino, who was responsible for the company’s Italian repertory. (Later it was
1 Bruno Walter whom Mahler invited to assume responsibilities of this nature.)
2 In her memoirs Alma recalls that Puccini attended the final rehearsals and that
3 he and Mahler ‘had not a particle in common’. Mahler, moreover, could not
4 understand why his colleague ogled the royal box throughout the dress
5 rehearsal and demanded to be introduced to the archduchesses who were
6 sitting there.9
7 The real novelties were few and far between and nowadays create a
8 distinctly random impression: Siegfried Wagner’s Der Bärenhäuter, which was
9 no doubt mounted as a favour to Cosima Wagner; Anton Rubinstein’s The
30 Demon; Zemlinsky’s Es war einmal; Richard Strauss’s Feuersnot; Josef Forster’s
1 Der dot mon (Forster was a representative of German verismo and unrelated to
2 Josef Bohuslav Foerster); Pfitzner’s Die Rose vom Liebesgarten; and, the most
3 important new work of this period, Gustave Charpentier’s Louise, which was
4 staged in March 1903. Of these, only the works by Zemlinsky and Forster were
5 world premières. Louise – an unusual example of French verismo crossed with
6 Impressionism – had received its first performance in Paris in February 1900.
7 Mahler was sent a copy of the vocal score and was initially put off by the back-
8 ground of a work that is set in the attics of contemporary Paris. No doubt he
9 was unpleasantly reminded of the bohemian subject matter already explored
40 by Puccini, but when he took a closer look at the score, he was much more
41R enthusiastic, telling Alma that the work was both brilliant and dramatic. He
accepted Louise without further ado, and the work was put into rehearsal. As 1
was usually the case in Vienna at this time, it was double cast: the tenor lead of 2
Julien was shared by Leo Slezak and Fritz Schrödter, while Louise was taken by 3
Marie Gutheil-Schoder and Berta Foerster-Lauterer. Leopold Demuth played 4
Louise’s father in both casts. 5
Alma has left a lively account of the bohemian composer’s arrival in 6
Vienna to superintend the final rehearsals. According to her, Charpentier was 7
unsophisticated but affable, spitting on the floor and biting his fingernails, 8
something that she must have been used to from Mahler. He also flirted unin- 9
hibitedly with Alma, not that this prevented him from inviting a demi- 10
mondaine to join him in Mahler’s box. He immediately interfered in Mahler’s 1
production, having no time for the verismo staging that Mahler had in mind 2
but seeking to replace it with something almost surreal. In the event, Mahler 3
was so taken by Charpentier that he postponed the first night in order to allow 4
the French composer to take control of the production. ‘I was wrong,’ he 5
admitted. ‘After all, the composer must know best.’ Such an admission can by 6
no means be taken for granted with a director and conductor of Mahler’s 7
exceptional standing. For all that the work remains on the fringes of the 8
modern repertory, Louise was one of the few genuinely significant works that 9
received their local première in Vienna during Mahler’s decade of direction. 20
There were practically no real world premières during these years. A modest 1
admirer of Die Königin von Saba, Mahler conducted the elderly Karl 2
Goldmark’s Die Kriegsgefangene in 1899. A two-act work, it did not fill an 3
entire evening and had to be performed as part of a double bill with a ballet 4
but disappeared from the repertory after only a few months. Zemlinsky’s Es 5
war einmal was the next world première in January 1900. It, too, proved short- 6
lived and has only recently been rediscovered thanks to the medium of the 7
gramophone. Josef Forster’s Der dot mon, finally, was staged in February 1902. 8
And that was it: three world premières in the space of ten years. All were 9
conducted by Mahler himself, but none proved a lasting success. The end 30
result was disappointing, and, as we have observed, the choice of new works 1
limited. 2
Mahler enjoyed a close, if by no means unproblematic, relationship with two 3
contemporary composers: Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss. Pfitzner is the 4
Thersites of German musical history, although his political views tend rather 5
to cast him in the role of a latterday Knight of the Doleful Countenance.10 His 6
polemics against Busoni, Bekker and all the other iconoclasts whom he 7
accused of un-German activities were unfortunately seized on by the Nazis in 8
support of their own nefarious cultural agenda. In his autobiography, which he 9
wrote towards the end of his long life in the wake of the Second World War and 40
which was posthumously published as Impressions and Pictures from my Life, 41R
472 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Pfitzner recalled that he had never shied away from crude anti-Semitic attacks
2 whenever he sensed un-German thinking but that, adopting Karl Lueger’s
3 infamous motto, ‘I shall decide who is a Jew’, he was always ready to make
4 exceptions if he encountered ‘fundamentally German’ Jews. His recollections
5 of Mahler are marked by a mixture of gratitude and genuine emotion. A set of
6 photographs has survived showing them both smoking cigars with Max
7 Reinhardt in the garden of their host, Carl Moll. (These photographs were
8 presumably taken at the time of the first performances of Pfitzner’s Die Rose
9 vom Liebesgarten.) Pfitzner never forgot his debt of gratitude to Mahler for
10 staging his opera, and it is certainly striking that even at the time of the Third
1 Reich he refrained from making any derogatory remarks about the outlawed
2 Mahler, even though he could have scored highly with the authorities by doing
3 so. Indeed, his whole attitude to Mahler was marked by a typical ambivalence.
4 Like his great mentor Wagner, Pfitzner was incapable of admitting that Jews
5 might have any creative abilities of their own, and so he drew a careful distinc-
6 tion between Mahler the composer and Mahler the conductor with whom he
7 was friendly. The composer, he wrote, had always been honest from a subjec-
8 tive point of view, pouring his heart’s blood into his works. But, objectively
9 speaking, Mahler had been dishonest, being incapable of rising above his
20 Jewish nature. As a performer, conversely, he deserved the highest praise.
1 Pfitzner recalled how he had arrived in Vienna feeling completely intimidated
2 and put off by arrogant conductors who had hitherto treated him and his
3 works with contempt, assuming they had not ignored him altogether. But
4 Mahler, as famous as he was feared, had lavished the greatest care and atten-
5 tion on the music of a composer who, nine years his junior, was far from being
6 established. He had also responded positively to all of Pfitzner’s suggestions. As
7 a result, the production of Die Rose vom Liebesgarten was an abiding light in
8 its composer’s life, and in recalling this experience, Pfitzner repeated a phrase
9 that he had used on Mahler’s death: ‘In him there is love.’11
30 In fact, relations between Mahler and Pfitzner had started badly. Die Rose
1 vom Liebesgarten had received its first performance in Elberfeld in 1901, after
2 which Pfitzner had sent a copy of the score and libretto to Mahler but had met
3 with little response. Mahler travelled to Krefeld in June 1902 to prepare for the
4 first performance of his Third Symphony, and Pfitzner took the opportunity to
5 call on the Mahlers at their hotel. Alma was always sympathetic towards
6 Pfitzner, who, although not especially attractive to women, none the less had
7 the occasional success and was currently trying to seduce Alma, or so she
8 claims. In her memoirs she offers a highly dramatized account of Pfitzner’s
9 meeting with Mahler, on which she eavesdropped from an alcove in their hotel
40 room. Speaking in a thin, high voice, Pfitzner poured out his unhappiness as a
41R misunderstood artist who felt that a production of Die Rose vom Liebesgarten
in Vienna was his last chance. Mahler, he insisted, was the only artist who 1
could understand him. (Unfortunately we do not know what Pfitzner thought 2
of Mahler’s music at this period.) Mahler refused, coldly and tersely, arguing 3
that the libretto was bad and the symbolism incomprehensible. Nor were there 4
any singers in Vienna suitable for the main roles, an argument whose vacuity 5
was spectacularly exposed when the performances finally went ahead. In his 6
despair, Pfitzner slipped away towards the door, at which point Alma leapt out 7
of her hiding place and squeezed his hand to show how deeply she sympa- 8
thized with him – she had remembered Mahler’s comments about his own 9
beginnings as an unsuccessful composer. Perhaps the most remarkable aspect 10
of all was that Mahler was not angry with Alma for her show of solidarity. For 1
the present, however, the encounter produced no results. Then, in February 2
1904, Mahler was in Heidelberg for a performance of his Third Symphony and 3
discovered that Die Rose vom Liebesgarten was being performed at the local 4
theatre. Having made an effort to see the work onstage, he wrote to Alma to 5
report on it: 6
7
Yesterday I heard Die Rose vom Liebesgarten. The performance was very 8
good, and fully confirmed my opinion of the work when I read the score. It 9
brought me no new insights. My opinion of Pfitzner remains unchanged. A 20
strong sense of atmosphere and very interesting range of orchestral colours. 1
But too shapeless and vague. A perpetual jelly and primeval slime, constantly 2
calling for life but unable to gestate. It evolves only as far as the invertebrates; 3
vertebrates cannot follow. . . . The audience came with the best of intentions, 4
but in such a stifling atmosphere of smog and mysticism, the interest waned.12 5
6
It remains open to question whether Mahler’s initial impression, following his 7
read-through of the score, or his later impression after he had seen the work 8
onstage, was the right one. The present writer is not about to declare Die Rose 9
vom Liebesgarten one of the most significant operas from the turn of the 30
century. None the less, what we have here is a unique case of Mahler 1
completely revising his judgement. Bruno Walter, too, recalled that Mahler 2
had initially had a violent antipathy to the opera. Pfitzner no doubt thought 3
that if Mahler changed his mind, it was above all because of Alma’s enthusiasm 4
and Walter’s advocacy – Walter was one of the composer’s earliest admirers 5
and later gave the first performance of Palestrina in Munich. There are reasons 6
for thinking that Mahler would have been as enthusiastic about this last- 7
named work as Walter and the Mahlerian Thomas Mann. Alma and Walter 8
refused to back down. Time and again Alma would leave a copy of the score of 9
Die Rose vom Liebesgarten on Mahler’s piano in the hope that he would look at 40
it whenever he sat down at the instrument and played. Later, during the 41R
474 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 summer holidays, a copy of Pfitzner’s First String Quartet arrived at

2 Maiernigg, and after examining it at length, Mahler declared it a masterpiece.
3 It remains unclear, however, why he was suddenly fascinated by the opera, but
4 it is highly unlikely that he agreed to stage the work simply as a favour to Alma
5 and Bruno Walter. We must assume, rather, that the positive aspects of the
6 work, which emerge even from his negative-seeming letter to Alma, ultimately
7 carried greater weight and overshadowed all other considerations.
8 Mahler’s relations with Richard Strauss were both different and more
9 complex and are the subject of a detailed study by Herta Blaukopf. At least as
10 long as he was still writing symphonic poems, Strauss was the only composer
1 whom Mahler could see as a serious rival but also as a comrade in arms.13 It all
2 began in October 1887 when Strauss, an assistant conductor at the Munich
3 Opera, arrived in Leipzig to conduct his F minor Symphony. Mahler was
4 deputy Kapellmeister there – only four years older than Strauss, he was already
5 considerably higher up the career ladder than Strauss, who became director of
6 the Vienna State Opera only long after Mahler’s death. Conversely, Strauss
7 enjoyed far greater public recognition as a composer. It seems to have been a
8 mutual acquaintance, Max Steinitzer, who introduced these two aspiring
9 composers and conductors. In a letter to Hans von Bülow, who was the mentor
20 of and model for both men, Strauss spoke enthusiastically about Mahler,
1 whom he described as a ‘supremely intelligent musician and conductor’, but he
2 then committed the strategic error of commenting no less enthusiastically on
3 Mahler’s arrangement of Weber’s Die drei Pintos, the first act of which Mahler
4 had played to him on the piano. Bülow was sufficiently interested to obtain a
5 copy of the score but was so appalled by what he discovered there that,
6 adopting his typically caustic tone, he left Strauss in no doubt about his true
7 feelings on the matter. Shocked in turn, Strauss obsequiously back-pedalled:
8 the arrangement was indeed inept, a point he had unfortunately failed to note.
9 In spite of this there was frequent contact between Strauss and Mahler over
30 the coming years, including a number of meetings, no doubt in Munich too.
1 Their correspondence quickly assumed an increasingly intimate and friendly
2 tone. At this stage in their respective careers, Mahler was successful as a
3 conductor but felt misunderstood as a composer, whereas Strauss was moder-
4 ately successful as a conductor, albeit still only an assistant conductor in
5 Weimar at a time when Mahler was the principal conductor at the Hamburg
6 Opera. As a composer, however, Strauss had firmly established himself as the
7 head of a ‘Young German’ school thanks to works such as Don Juan and Tod
8 und Verklärung (Death and Transfiguration). Mahler was sceptical about the
9 symphonic poem as a genre and had little time for Franz Liszt, who had
40 created this particular genre and whom he dismissed as the manufacturer of
41R works both ‘specious and meretricious’.
Relations between the two men remained cordial in spite of their rivalries, 1
and Strauss even entered into negotiations with Pollini in Hamburg to take 2
over Mahler’s position as principal conductor, although in the event nothing 3
came of the move. And yet Mahler, at least, quickly realized that he and Strauss 4
were fundamentally different from one another, an insight that never left him. 5
Particularly instructive from this point of view is a letter that Mahler wrote to 6
Max Marschalk in December 1896. Marschalk had written an article on 7
Mahler and had then sent a copy of it to him. Mahler did not acknowledge it, 8
leading Marschalk to think that he had somehow upset the conductor. But 9
Mahler was in fact very pleased with the piece. Above all, he explained, he was 10
keen to stress the difference between himself and Strauss – and here we can 1
sense not only the envy that he felt for his successful colleague but also his lack 2
of willingness to conform to prevailing views about modern music: ‘Permit me 3
to differentiate myself throughout from Strauss – and to differentiate what you 4
write about me from what the shallow Corybants say about that – forgive the 5
harsh term – knight of industry! All the press’s utterances about him reveal his 6
knack of currying favour with his own kind.’14 7
Later in the same letter Mahler makes a number of derogatory remarks 8
about Also sprach Zarathustra. The term ‘knight of industry’ inevitably recalls 9
Adorno’s polemical assault on Strauss in 1964: ‘At a time when, musically too, 20
the German middle classes were demonstrating features of a Freudian anal 1
character, Strauss as a composer was revealing the gestures of an idealized 2
major industrialist. He does not need to save: the resources are extremely 3
lavish. He does not need to think of balancing the books but continues to 4
produce unconcerned by such considerations.’15 Even in his choice of words, 5
Adorno took over the view of Strauss adopted by the Second Viennese School, 6
specifically by his teacher Alban Berg, who had picked up these ideas from 7
Mahler via Schoenberg. It was Mahler who once and for all defined the differ- 8
ence between himself and Strauss by reference to the concept of a knight of 9
industry. But he was sufficiently objective to be able to acknowledge Strauss’s 30
abilities and above all to admit that Strauss was one of only a handful of 1
contemporaries willing to champion his – Mahler’s – own music. Josef 2
Bohuslav Foerster reports that while he was still in Hamburg, Mahler obtained 3
copies of every new work by Strauss, whom he regarded as his only real rival. 4
Unfortunately there are few surviving records of Mahler’s comments on his 5
colleague’s music. We know only that he regarded Salome, above all, as a 6
masterpiece and did everything he could to mount a production of it at the 7
Vienna Court Opera. He had got to know the work in May 1905 when Strauss 8
played through parts of it to him on the piano at the Strasbourg Music Festival. 9
Mahler doubted whether a work as scandalous as Salome would ever find a 40
place for itself in the repertory of Catholic countries, and yet he pursued the 41R
476 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 goal of mounting a production in Vienna with a resolve that shows he was not
2 lying when he described the opera as Strauss’s most important work.16 Much of
3 the correspondence between Mahler and Strauss is devoted to Salome. Mahler
4 began by asking Strauss to send him the libretto in order for him to submit it to
5 the censor’s office. He already had a cast in mind, and it would in fact have been
6 better than the one that had given the work’s first performance in Dresden in
7 December 1905. Strauss had agreed with Ernst von Schuch that Dresden would
8 be given priority, but a second production in Vienna would clearly have helped
9 to raise the work’s public profile. Erik Schmedes would have sung Herod, Anna
10 von Mildenburg Herodias and Friedrich Weidemann John the Baptist. Strauss
1 wanted Selma Kurz to sing Salome, but Mahler pointed out that however
2 vocally talented, she lacked the dramatic gifts for the role, and so he proposed
3 Elsa Bland, a young dramatic soprano from Vienna, who did indeed go on to
4 sing the part, but not under Mahler. In the event Mahler lost his battle with the
5 censor, who argued that the presentation of such perverse sensuality was
6 morally offensive. Mahler did everything in his power to reverse this decision.
7 Strauss was understandably surprised by this turn of events, for in Dresden
8 there had been no problems with the censor, which says much for the relative
9 permissiveness of Kaiser Wilhelm’s much-vilified Germany. By October 1905 it
20 seemed as if the difficulties in Vienna had been overcome, encouraging Mahler
1 to write to Strauss and, striking a triumphalist note, to explain that only a few
2 minor changes would have to be made to the libretto. He proposed ‘Bal Hanaan’
3 as an alternative to Jochanaan, the censor having taken exception to this name.
4 But then, on 31 October, Mahler received a detailed report from the court
5 censor, Emil Jettel von Ettenach, famously stating that ‘the depiction of events
6 that belong in the realm of sexual pathology’ was unsuited to the stage of the
7 Vienna Court Opera.17 It is to Strauss’s credit that he harboured no grudge
8 against Mahler for this debacle, although the tremendous success of the
9 Dresden première must have helped to cushion the blow. Moreover, he knew
30 that Mahler had done all he could to bring about the performance: even
1 Mahler’s powers had their limitations. Vienna got to know Salome in the
2 spring of 1907, when a visiting company from Breslau gave the local première.
3 The first home-grown production took place at the Kaiser-Jubiläums-Theater
4 in 1910, and the opera finally entered the Court Opera repertory in October
5 1918. Strauss wrote Mahler a letter of commiseration in March 1906: ‘For
6 heaven’s sake do not let Salome give rise to a question of confidence. We need
7 an artist of your determination, your genius and your outlook in such a posi-
8 tion too badly for you to put anything at stake on Salome’s account. In the end
9 we shall attain our ends without this!’18
40 The battle over Salome brought Mahler and Strauss closer together, and yet
41R to Mahler it also demonstrated beyond all doubt that the two men were worlds
apart as far as their aims and creative intentions were concerned. For Mahler 1
this was a problem that he could resolve only with a certain degree of dishon- 2
esty, for the closer he drew to Strauss as man and artist, the more clearly his 3
failings as a character became apparent, while at the same time he knew that 4
of all the famous conductors of his day, none was doing more for him than 5
Strauss. This is evident not from the correspondence that passed between the 6
two colleagues, but from Mahler’s letters to Alma. The differences between 7
them were already apparent at the time of the Viennese performances of 8
Feuersnot in late January 1902. This was the only Strauss opera that Mahler 9
ever conducted. In her memoirs, Alma gives a lively account of the Feuersnot 10
première, claiming that Strauss’s wife, Pauline, spent the whole evening 1
heaping abuse on her husband’s ‘shoddy work’, while her husband talked only 2
about money, calculating the royalties on his performances in Vienna and in 3
general carrying on ‘just like a commercial traveller’: ‘He had become an 4
unashamed materialist, weighing his own advantage at every turn, a gambler 5
on the stock exchange and an exploiter of the Opera. I saw Pfitzner and 6
Schoenberg standing as stylites on either side of him and he as the worldling 7
in between.’19 Of course, all of Alma’s accounts of Strauss and his wife are 8
vitriolic in tone. 9
Strauss did himself no favours when, all unsuspecting, he started to read 20
Alma’s memoirs after the Second World War. His marginal jottings consist of 1
a series of indignant exclamations, including ‘Unbelievable’ and ‘All lies’. And 2
he dismissed Alma with the words ‘The inferiority complexes of a dissolute 3
woman’. (The feeling was mutual.) But his anger was also directed posthu- 4
mously at Mahler, whom he accused of ingratitude. After all, he had done a 5
great deal to help his colleague, and although it was untrue to claim that he had 6
conducted the world première of the First Symphony in Weimar in June 1894, 7
he had certainly invited Mahler to conduct the first three movements of his 8
Second Symphony in Berlin in 1895 at one of his own concerts and had given 9
the Berlin première of the Fourth Symphony in 1901. 30
Nor did Strauss’s advocacy end with Mahler’s death. In August 1923, by 1
which date Mahler’s music had largely disappeared from concert programmes 2
all over the world, he included the First Symphony in a concert that he gave 3
with the Vienna Philharmonic at the Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires. One might 4
think that Alma’s animosity towards Strauss and his wife was a figment of a 5
dissolute woman’s imagination, but it was evidently shared by her husband. 6
Following the opening night of Feuersnot in 1902, Mahler spent a few days in 7
Semmering, recovering, and from there he wrote to Alma to describe the 8
impression that Strauss had left on him during the performance itself and at 9
the formal dinner afterwards. Picking up and confirming a dismissive 40
comment of Alma’s, he goes on: 41R
478 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Strauss has such a sobering influence; in his world one scarcely recognizes
2 oneself. If those are the fruits that hang from the tree, how can one love such
3 a tree? Your judgement hits the nail on the head. And I feel quite proud of you
4 for spontaneously arriving at such an assessment. Rather live in poverty and
5 walk the path of the enlightened than surrender oneself to Mammon, don’t
6 you agree? One day people will separate the wheat from the chaff – and when
7 his day has passed, my time will come.20
8
9 One of Mahler’s most famous remarks – ‘My time will come’ – is routinely
10 quoted out of context, and yet it makes sense only against the background of
1 his perception of himself as the polar opposite of Strauss. It does not need to
2 be stressed that when taken with a pinch of salt and with the exception of two
3 or three of Strauss’s operas, Mahler’s confidence has proved well founded.
4 Their rivalry has survived their deaths, and it is difficult to find a music lover
5 who holds both Mahler and Strauss in equal esteem. A choice has to be made
6 between them. During their lifetime, they continued to grow apart, although
7 only Mahler appears to have registered this fact. In early November 1905 we
8 find him writing from Berlin: ‘I had a very pleasant time with Strauss yesterday
9 evening, but one cannot entirely disregard his offhanded, self-important atti-
20 tude.’21 And this growing sense of remoteness also coloured Mahler’s otherwise
1 high opinion of Salome. In May 1906, when Mahler was in Essen, preparing
2 for the first performance of his Sixth Symphony, Alma wrote to him and let slip
3 a dismissive comment of the work. Although Mahler defended the opera in his
4 reply, there is no gainsaying the coolness of his response:
5
6 But now you underestimate the work, which really is a very significant one,
7 though ‘virtuosic’ in the negative sense, as you rightly discerned. Wagner is
8 something quite different. The further you develop in life, the more clearly
9 you will sense the difference between those few great, genuine figures and the
30 mere ‘virtuosos’. I’m happy to see how quickly you’re beginning to grasp such
1 things. There’s something cold about Strauss that has nothing to do with his
2 talent but with his character. You can sense it, and it repels you.22
3
4 It will not have been easy for Mahler to hide these views from Strauss, whom
5 he found not unsympathetic as a person, with the result that Strauss must have
6 been appalled when forty years later he read these remarks of Mahler’s, which
7 Alma published in her memoirs, something she should most certainly have
8 refrained from doing. The element of dishonesty that blighted his dealings
9 with Strauss must have weighed heavily on Mahler, who was always sensitive
40 on this point. Strauss, at all events, retained his sympathy for Mahler, and
41R although it is difficult to describe their relationship as one of true friendship,
there is no denying that he was genuinely shaken when he heard that Mahler 1
had died. 2
Curiously enough, it was to Strauss that Arnold Schoenberg appealed when 3
he wrote to the feared music critic of the New York Times, Olin Downes, in 4
December 1948. Downes had reviewed a performance of Mahler’s Seventh 5
Symphony under Dimitri Mitropoulos and, referring to the piece, had ended 6
his review with the words ‘Chacun à son goût’. His attitude was not untypical 7
of the arrogant condescension with which Mahler’s music was viewed in the 8
years after the Second World War, when it was by no means only former 9
National Socialist writers who felt that Mahler’s eclectic ‘Kapellmeister music’ 10
was a passing phenomenon that had had its day. This was a view that was 1
shared even by a doyen among critics such as Downes, who enjoyed a not 2
inconsiderable reputation among many readers in the Anglo-American world. 3
The elderly Schoenberg was furious with Downes for his sneering condescen- 4
sion and in this context cited Strauss, who, he claimed, had once expressed the 5
greatest respect for Mahler’s music. Schoenberg assumed that Downes had 6
once written dismissively about Mahler and was now reluctant to change his 7
mind. It is typical of Schoenberg’s sense of justice that he also complains about 8
a positive comment about his own music that Downes once made. Might not 9
the readers of both reviews suspect that anyone who could write as unfound- 20
edly about Mahler might be equally wrong about Schoenberg: ‘If you would 1
study the orchestral score you could not overlook the beauty of this writing. 2
Such beauty is only given to men who deserve it because of all their other 3
merits. You should not call me a mystic – though I am proud to be one – 4
because this statement is based on experience.’23 5
Much to Schoenberg’s surprise and annoyance, Downes published his letter 6
in the New York Times, together with a rejoinder of his own, obliging the 7
composer to react yet again. He was now furious at Downes for arguing that it 8
was simply a matter of ‘taste’, for to Schoenberg’s mind taste was by no means 9
free from negative associations. But he admitted that the review had annoyed 30
him not least because as a young man – between 1898 and 1908 – he had 1
thought the same about Mahler as Downes did now. Only in the wake of a 2
Pauline conversion had he become Mahler’s most ardent champion. He also 3
conceded that later, too, there had been a phase when he had been unwilling 4
to study or listen to Mahler’s music, so afraid was he that his old antipathy 5
might return. But after settling in Los Angeles he had heard a moderately 6
successful performance of the Second Symphony and had been both relieved 7
and pleased to discover that Mahler’s music had lost none of its power to 8
convince him.24 The only point worth mentioning here is his dating of the 9
period when he disliked Mahler’s music, for there is plenty of evidence that it 40
did not last until 1908. True, Alma records Schoenberg’s flippant answer to her 41R
480 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 question as to whether he was planning to attend the local première of

2 Mahler’s Fourth Symphony: ‘How can Mahler do anything with the Fourth
3 when he has already failed to do anything with the First?’25 But this remark
4 dates from 1902, and Schoenberg was notorious at this time for being an
5 aggressive disputant with a fondness for aphorisms and paradoxes.
6 It is clear from a letter that Schoenberg wrote to Mahler in December 1904
7 that the former’s conversion had already taken place by this time. His much later
8 attempt to date this change of attitude to Mahler’s departure for America makes
9 little sense, for he had been one of the group of supporters who had said goodbye
10 to their hero at the main station in Vienna. And his letter of 12 December 1904
1 was written under the immediate impact of the final rehearsal for the local
2 première of the Third Symphony, which had taken place at noon that same day.26
3 Like Saul on the road to Damascus, Schoenberg quite literally saw the light:
4
5 In order to speak of the unheard-of impression which your symphony made
6 on me, I cannot talk as one musician to another but I must speak as man to
7 man. For: I have seen your soul naked, stark naked. It lay before me like a
8 wild mysterious landscape with its horror-provoking shadows and ravines,
9 and, next to these, joyful charming sunny meadows, idyllic resting places. I
20 felt the symphony to be an experience of nature with its horror and evil and
1 its transfiguring, tranquillizing rainbows. . . . I felt they were battles about
2 illusions; I felt the grief of a disillusioned man, I saw good and evil forces
3 struggling with each other, I saw a man in torturing agitation seeking for
4 inner harmony; I could see it, a man, a drama, truth, most reckless truth. . . .
5 I had to let off steam, please forgive me, I do not have medium feelings, it is
6 either – or!27
7
8 Mahler will have had difficulties with an effusive outburst like this, for such
9 outpourings on the part of people he barely knew left him feeling uncomfort-
30 able. But from this time onwards Schoenberg and Zemlinsky were part of his
1 inner circle. He called them Eisele and Beisele, alluding to their Jewish descent,
2 although not in any malicious way. Alma, who was introduced to Schoenberg
3 by Zemlinsky, has left a whimsical account of a frugal supper that the two men
4 attended, an occasion when they went over to the piano to talk shop, egging
5 each other on with doctrinaire and deliberately provocative remarks until both
6 men left the flat, offended, swearing never to set foot in it again, while Mahler
7 for his part vowed never to invite them back. But within a matter of weeks,
8 Mahler, striking a note of disingenuousness, was asking: ‘What’s become of
9 Eisele and Beisele?’28
40 From now on the ‘Schoenberg circle’, as it later came to be known, was a
41R constant, close-knit group that was soon joined by Alban Berg, Anton Webern,
Egon Wellesz, Erwin Stein and Heinrich Jalowetz, all of whom had composi- 1
tion lessons with Schoenberg, in some cases at the recommendation of 2
Mahler’s boyhood friend, Guido Adler, who was now teaching musicology at 3
the University of Vienna. Mahler watched these young people develop with a 4
mixture of love and affection, and it is difficult to resist the impression that he 5
regarded them as his adopted sons. Early in 1907 Mahler put himself in the 6
firing line on their behalf on two separate occasions. On 8 February the Rosé 7
Quartet and members of the wind section of the Vienna Philharmonic gave 8
the first performance of Schoenberg’s First Chamber Symphony op. 9 in the 9
Musikvereinssaal. Alma reports that whole sections of the audience got up and 10
noisily left the hall during the performance, prompting Mahler to rise to his 1
feet and demand silence, a demand that was duly met. Schoenberg’s First 2
String Quartet op. 7 received its first performance three days before in the 3
Bösendorfersaal, again with the Rosé Quartet. On this occasion, too, the 4
performance threatened to descend to the level of a fiasco. One man stood up 5
in front and hissed Schoenberg each time he came forward to take a bow. ‘I 6
must have a good look at this fellow who’s hissing,’ Mahler is said to have 7
exclaimed as he confronted the man who was much larger than he was. The 8
man raised his arm to strike Mahler, but Mahler’s father-in-law, Carl Moll, tall 9
and powerfully built, intervened and drove the belligerent booer from the hall. 20
As he was leaving, the man cried out: ‘Needn’t get so excited – I hiss Mahler 1
too!’ There may be some truth in Alma’s claim that following the performance 2
of the Chamber Symphony, Mahler admitted to her: ‘I don’t understand his 3
music, but he’s young and perhaps he’s right. I am old and I dare say my ear is 4
not sensitive enough.’29 5
Many eyewitnesses, including Adorno, insist that of all Mahler’s adepts, it 6
was Anton Webern who was the most convincing interpreter of Mahler’s 7
music during the 1920s, although there is unfortunately no surviving evidence 8
to support this assertion. And yet he too initially had problems with Mahler. 9
Such problems are, of course, understandable when we recall that Webern’s 30
ideals were clarity, intelligibility and unambiguity, and that at the time when he 1
began to take an enthusiastic interest in Mahler’s music, Schoenberg’s pre- 2
atonal compositional ideal presupposed the greatest possible density of mater- 3
ial from which a complex work had to develop organically. Everything to 4
which the jeunes fauves of the Viennese musical scene aspired was at odds with 5
the vast, universalist novels of which Mahler dreamt. At least after the Gurre- 6
Lieder, Schoenberg was an aphorist when compared with the orotund rhetoric 7
of Mahler, while Webern went even further in this direction with the extreme 8
concision of his musical forms. Of all the members of this curious ‘school’, it 9
was Berg who came closest to Mahler with his Orchestral Pieces op. 6, and yet 40
even these three works last barely twenty minutes in all. To that extent, 41R
482 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Schoenberg was being entirely consistent when he was asked in an interview

2 in 1909 who his mentors were and named Bach and Mozart, followed by
3 Beethoven, Brahms and Wagner, rather than Mahler, whom he placed
4 alongside Strauss and Reger as his least important influence. There is no
5 contradiction here. Schoenberg loved Mahler as man and artist infinitely more
6 than Strauss and Reger, but as a teacher and as a source of direct inspiration
7 Mahler played only the most minor of roles. As Hanns Eisler put it in 1924,
8 Schoenberg created new material in order to write music in the unified, self-
9 contained tradition of the great classical composers. It was Schoenberg, Eisler
10 concluded, who was the true conservative: he had even created a revolution in
1 order to be reactionary.30 Here Eisler identifies the difference between
2 Schoenberg and Mahler, for Mahler created no new material but worked with
3 existing resources, while breaking down the self-contained world of the
4 classical composers and emancipating himself from them in order to describe
5 the volcanic craters that were heaving and seething inside him. To that extent
6 it is understandable that the younger generation of composers had reserva-
7 tions about Mahler and that they initially swore by Brahms, regarding the
8 musical language of late Romanticism as something to be superseded. Against
9 this background, Schoenberg’s later praise of ‘Brahms the progressive’ was
20 entirely logical, as was Zemlinsky’s devotion to Brahms.
1 Much the same was true of Webern. In a diary entry of 1902 he noted that
2 on working through Mahler’s Second Symphony at the piano he had found
3 much that struck him as studied and strange. In spite of this he regarded the
4 reviews of the recent performance of the Fourth Symphony as spiteful and
5 ridiculous, adding that Mahler was without doubt a brilliant conductor and a
6 serious and profound composer.31 In February 1905, some time after
7 Schoenberg’s Damascene conversion, Webern heard a repeat of Mahler’s
8 Wunderhorn and Rückert songs under the composer’s own direction. He
9 enjoyed the former but found the latter to be too sentimental – it is surprising
30 to find the rigorously independent Webern repeating a common Mahlerian
1 cliché. But the concert was notable above all for the fact that afterwards
2 Webern had an opportunity to meet the composer in person, and from then
3 on his enthusiasm for Mahler continued to grow.
4 Particularly relevant in this regard are the letters that Webern addressed to
5 Alban Berg at the time of the posthumous first performance of Das Lied von
6 der Erde in Munich on 20 November 1911 under the direction of Bruno
7 Walter. Webern was in Berlin, Berg in Vienna, but neither of them could
8 imagine missing the performance. ‘Tell me,’ Webern wrote to Berg, ‘is it
9 conceivable that we should not be there? For the first time since Mahler’s death
40 a new work by him! And we might be missing? Because of the eight-hour train
41R journey? Financially speaking, it’s possible, isn’t it? I mean, it won’t be easy, but
it’s possible. Presumably the same is true of you? We also have the time, I 1
certainly do.’ Webern read through the words of Das Lied von der Erde in a 2
state of feverish excitement, scarcely able to wait for the date of the actual 3
performance when he would be able to hear Mahler’s music: ‘For heaven’s sake, 4
what sort of music must it be?! I imagine I must be able to figure it out before 5
I hear it. – Man, can you hold out till then? I can’t!’ Webern and Berg were both 6
present when Mahler’s unprecedentedly original music was heard for the first 7
time, and even afterwards Webern found it difficult to calm down again: 8
9
As I’ve already told you, it’s like the whole of life or, rather, the whole of 10
experience passing by the soul of the dying man. The artwork makes things 1
more dense; actuality evaporates and only the idea remains; that is what these 2
songs are like. I could play this music for ever! Yes, now tell me, do you know 3
what it is that creates this impression both here and in the utterances of other 4
great people? Have you ever thought what happens when you hear this? What 5
is this indefinable element? . . . I often think, yes, should one be allowed to 6
hear this? Do we deserve to? But it is given to us to strive for ways of 7
deserving it! Thrust your hand into your heart, tear out the filth, arise, 8
‘Sursum corda’ says the Christian religion. This is how Mahler lived, 9
Schoenberg too. There is remorse, there is longing!32 20
1
Berg never struck such an ecstatic note as this, but if we may trust the account 2
of Adorno, who studied briefly with Berg, ‘Berg’s relationship to Mahler was 3
enthusiastic and without reservation, above all with regard to 4
the later works. We often played the four-hand arrangement of the second 5
‘Nachtmusik’ from the Seventh, as well as much else by Mahler.’33 There was 6
always a portrait of Mahler in Berg’s study. And Berg’s enthusiasm for Mahler 7
is no less clear from a letter that he wrote to his wife, Helene, in the autumn 8
of 1912: 9
30
I’ve just played through Mahler’s Ninth again. The first movement is the most 1
glorious he ever wrote. It expresses an extraordinary love of this earth, the 2
longing to live on it in peace, nature, to enjoy it completely, to the very depths 3
of one’s being, before death comes. 4
5
Berg then offers a brief analysis of this movement, an analysis which for all its 6
brevity is the most moving ever penned. It ends with a two-bar quotation in 7
which ‘this heart, most glorious of human hearts that ever beat, may expand, 8
ever wider, before it must stop beating for good’.34 And when Webern 9
conducted the Third Symphony in Vienna in May 1922, Berg was, of course, 40
present. They may as well all give up, he wrote to Helene after one of the 41R
484 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 rehearsals: he could hardly bear to remain in the hall, so powerful was the
2 music.35 Mahler was infinitely comforted by the thought of being revered by
3 this younger generation of composers who included among their number
4 some of the finest musicians of turn-of-the-century Vienna, for it acted as an
5 antidote to the dull aggression to which he was so often exposed by the
6 performances of his works; and it seems likely that he would have been
7 delighted by the way in which Berg’s career developed, for the Three Orchestral
8 Pieces and Wozzeck are both works in his own spirit. When Adorno first saw a
9 copy of the score of the March from the Three Orchestral Pieces, he could not
10 help exclaiming: ‘That must sound like playing Schoenberg’s Orchestral Pieces
1 and Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, all at the same time.’ And Adorno also recalled
2 Berg’s reaction: ‘I will never forget the look of pleasure this compliment –
3 dubious for any other cultured ear – induced. With a ferocity burying all
4 Johannine gentleness like an avalanche, he answered: “Right, then at last one
5 could hear what an eight-note brass chord really sounds like.” ’36
6 There is no finer expression of the feelings of respect and reverence that
7 these young musicians harboured for Mahler than the famous speech that
8 Schoenberg delivered in Prague in March 1912 and that he repeated in Berlin
9 and Vienna in the October and November of the same year. This speech is not
20 only touching testimony to the admiration that they all felt for Mahler, it is also
1 one of the most important texts on Mahler from the period before the First
2 World War, an importance that it retains not only on account of its many
3 detailed comments on Mahler’s style of conducting and his instrumentation
4 but also because it serves to refute the frequent charge of banality and senti-
5 mentality. Above all, it is a hymn to genius in general and in particular
6 expressed with all the passion that Schoenberg could muster at this period.
7 When Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony appeared in the autumn of 1911, only
8 a few months after Mahler’s death, it bore a dedication to Mahler.37 The first
9 edition went on:
30
1 The dedication was intended to give him some slight pleasure while he
2 was alive. And it wished to express admiration of his works, his immortal
3 compositions, and to testify that, while educated musicians pass them by with
4 exaggerated shrugs of the shoulders, and even with contempt, these works are
5 admired by somebody who also perhaps has some understanding. – Gustav
6 Mahler had to do without greater pleasures than this dedication would have
7 given him. This martyr, this saint had to leave us before he was able to do so
8 much for his works that he was able to hand them happily over to his friends.
9 – I would have been contented with giving him pleasure. But now that he
40 is dead I would like my book to bring me some esteem, so that no-one can
41R disregard me when I say: He was a truly great man.38
Schoenberg was present when Mahler was laid to rest, the musical reflex of his 1
shock and dismay being the sixth of his op. 19 Piano Pieces, a work that dies 2
away with the interval of a ninth in the bass beneath a sustained chord, without 3
ever achieving proper closure. 4
5
6
Signs of Crisis
7
To the outside world it seemed as if Mahler’s departure from the Vienna Court 8
Opera at the end of 1907 had taken all the parties by surprise and that it was in 9
the main a reaction to the increasingly virulent campaigns against him in a 10
section of the local press, precipitating a sudden turn of events. But there is a 1
simple and wholly plausible piece of evidence that refutes this theory. In 1906 – 2
the actual details are unclear, but it may have been during a train journey to 3
Essen at the end of May when Mahler conducted the first performance of his 4
Sixth Symphony in the city – a music journalist by the name of Bernhard 5
Scharlitt recorded a conversation with Mahler, the essential details of which he 6
published a week after Mahler’s death in the Neue Freie Presse. In the course of 7
the conversation Mahler told Scharlitt that he would be leaving the Court 8
Opera the following year – 1907 – because he had come to realize that the idea 9
of a repertory opera company flew in the face of the demands that any modern 20
director must make, demands before which even a genius like Wagner would 1
have been bound to capitulate when confronted by the constraints of the 2
industry. The principle of model performances that Mahler himself had upheld 3
was for the most part no longer tenable, with the result that a few outstanding 4
performances were undermined by others that fell far short of the ideal. Mahler 5
went on to propose the idea of a second theatre in Vienna specifically for 6
Mozart and Wagner that would operate during the summer months as a combi- 7
nation of a repertory opera company and a festival theatre, but such an idea, 8
Mahler concluded, echoing Wagner’s phrase about the ‘music of the future’, 9
would not be realized for a long time to come. He knew that when he left 30
Vienna in a year’s time he would have exceeded his term. Even the greatest 1
achievements were superseded. He wanted to leave at a time when the Viennese 2
could still appreciate what he had done for them as the director of their Opera.39 3
There is no reason to doubt Scharlitt’s account, for there is other evidence 4
that points in the same direction and indicates that by May 1906 at the latest 5
Mahler had already decided to resign from his post in Vienna. In short, his 6
decision was not prompted by the crises and upheavals of the traumatic year 7
of 1907. Mahler’s reasons for ending such a glorious reign are many and 8
various and can be understood only against the background of developments 9
that were already taking place when his star still seemed to be shining at its 40
brightest. 41R
486 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 A brief glance at the performance statistics for this period reveals some
2 remarkable findings. We may begin by recalling the astonishing number of 148
3 performances that Mahler conducted in Hamburg during the 1895–6 season:
4 if we discount the theatre holidays, he was conducting an opera every other
5 day. If he did not break this record in Vienna, it was because he now had other
6 commitments as the director of the opera, quite apart from his increasing
7 contribution to opera production. In spite of this he conducted 109 perform-
8 ances during his first full season in Vienna. We have already had occasion to
9 point out that today’s general music directors would conduct only about half
10 this number and would have none of Mahler’s other commitments. In no
1 subsequent season did Mahler conduct as many performances.
2 In 1899–1900 the total was ninety-six, although this season also saw him
3 conducting nine midday concerts with the Vienna Philharmonic, not including
4 all the attendant rehearsals. By the following season he was conducting only
5 fifty-five performances, and in 1901–2 the number was down to thirty-six, a
6 reduction due not least to the arrival of Bruno Walter, whom Mahler felt that he
7 could trust and who lightened the director’s load both practically and psycho-
8 logically. Moreover, Mahler’s engagement and marriage also brought about
9 changes to his private life. After that the figures pick up again, varying between
20 thirty-seven and sixty during subsequent seasons. The final season ended
1 prematurely with a performance of Fidelio on 15 October 1907, by which date
2 Mahler had conducted only five performances.40
3 This reduction in the number of Mahler’s engagements in Vienna can be
4 explained by the increase in the number of performances of his own works
5 that he conducted elsewhere, especially after the autumn of 1901. Indeed, this
6 development would ultimately lead not only to one of the basic conflicts that
7 prompted Mahler’s resignation but also to many of the attacks that were
8 launched against him by his enemies in the press. A few random dates and
9 facts may help to illustrate this point.
30 Mahler conducted the first performance of his Fourth Symphony in Munich
1 on 25 November 1901 and gave the Berlin première of the same work on 16
2 December 1901. On 9 June 1902 he superintended the first complete perform-
3 ance of his Third Symphony in Krefeld and on 23 January 1903 conducted a
4 performance of his Fourth Symphony in Wiesbaden. In the course of the next
5 twelve months he conducted his First Symphony in Lemberg on 2 April, his
6 Second Symphony in Basel on 15 June and his Third Symphony in Frankfurt
7 on 2 December. Between 22 and 25 October, moreover, he was in Amsterdam,
8 conducting three concerts that included the local premières of his First and
9 Third Symphonies. And not only were there the performances, there were
40 also the journeys there and back, journeys that Mahler always made by
41R train, generally at night in order to save time. He knew the railway timetable
backwards and derived considerable pleasure from working out the best 1
connections for Alma. By the years around 1900, trains in Central Europe had 2
increased in speed, and yet this did little to reduce the time that Mahler spent 3
away from Vienna. He would travel to the town or city where the concert was 4
to be held three or four days in advance in order to be able to find adequate 5
time for the rehearsals, something unavoidably necessary given the novelty of 6
the works and the demands that they placed on local forces, even in the case 7
of those as well disposed as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam. 8
Mahler allowed himself little time to relax, and the physical effort should not 9
be underestimated. He would often arrive back in Vienna in the early morning 10
after a poor night’s sleep on a hard bed in an overheated or freezing sleeper 1
compartment, after which he would quickly change and have breakfast before 2
rushing back to his office at the Court Opera. There were other occasions when 3
he would board the night train immediately after a performance in Vienna. 4
Even at this stage in his career, there were reports that he was wearing himself 5
out prematurely, and in the light of his increasingly numerous tours and mani- 6
fold other commitments, such reports cannot be dismissed out of hand: the 7
hectic nature of these tours coupled with his own health problems must have 8
contributed to his growing sense of exhaustion. Moreover, he often attended 9
performances of his works under other conductors, helping with the prepara- 20
tions and fortunately encountering colleagues willing to heed his advice. 1
But it was in 1906 and 1907 that Mahler’s foreign tours became most 2
frequent and disruptive. He conducted his Fifth Symphony in Antwerp on 3
5 March 1906, repeating the same programme in Amsterdam on the 8th and 4
remaining in the Dutch capital until the 10th for a performance of Das 5
klagende Lied. And on 27 May he conducted the first performance of his Sixth 6
Symphony in Essen. Normally his summer holidays were sacrosanct, but out 7
of his love of Mozart and as a favour to the organizer, Lilli Lehmann, he 8
conducted two performances of Le nozze di Figaro at the Salzburg Mozart 9
Festival – a forerunner of the Salzburg Festival – on 18 and 20 August. On 30
8 November he conducted the local première of the Sixth Symphony in 1
Munich and three days later was in Brno for his First. On 3 December he gave 2
the Third Symphony in Graz, returning to the town on the 23rd for a repeat 3
performance. The following year was no less busy. On 14 January he was in 4
Berlin for a performance of his Third Symphony and from there he travelled 5
to Frankfurt for a performance of the Fourth on the 18th. Two days later he 6
conducted the First in Linz. Between 19 March and 16 April he was in Italy, an 7
extended leave of absence that incurred the ire of Prince Montenuovo, more of 8
which in a moment. 9
If Mahler subjected himself to the hectic pace and exhausting rigours of 40
these foreign tours, it was not because of the relatively modest fees that they 41R
488 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 commanded. His financial situation had improved to such an extent that he no

2 longer needed to worry about providing for his family, although he must also
3 have been thinking about the time when he stepped down as director of the
4 Opera and would be drawing only a pension. Moreover, Mahler hated travel-
5 ling. So irritable was he that the slightest disturbances annoyed him: either the
6 temperature was too hot or too cold, or he was distracted by the conversation
7 of his fellow travellers in an adjoining compartment. The seats in the trains
8 were badly sprung and he generally abhorred hotels, with the result that,
9 surprisingly enough, he was always willing to stay with even vague acquain-
10 tances, preferring the concomitant lack of independence to the horrors of a
1 hotel room. First and foremost, it was his concern about his compositions that
2 drove him on.
3 Ida Dehmel, the wife of the poet Richard Dehmel whose poems were set by
4 a number of Mahler’s colleagues, including Strauss, Schoenberg and even
5 Reger, has left a diary account of a conversation that she had with Mahler in
6 mid-March 1905, when he was in Hamburg to conduct his Fifth Symphony, a
7 performance that proved extraordinarily successful. He then travelled with her
8 to Berlin and in the course of the journey told her how much he hated travel.
9 In that case, she asked, why was he always travelling? Was it because of his chil-
20 dren? She meant the children of his Muse, prompting Mahler to ask whether
1 she meant these or his real-life children. The answer, he explained, was both:
2 when he could no longer depend on his income as director of the Vienna
3 Opera (and this remark confirms that even in 1905 he was already thinking of
4 a time when he would no longer hold such a post), he would have to earn his
5 living as a conductor. But the second reason revolved around his children in a
6 figurative sense, a point well illustrated by his Fifth Symphony, which had
7 recently been performed in Prague and Berlin and in both cases had proved a
8 resounding failure. Mahler was referring to the performances under Leo Blech
9 in Prague in February 1905 and in Berlin under Nikisch the following March,
30 though he could also have mentioned the performance under Ernst von
1 Schuch in Dresden the previous January. Only when he himself conducted the
2 work, as he had done in Hamburg, was the outcome any different: ‘We musi-
3 cians are worse off than writers in that respect. Anyone can read a book, but a
4 musical score is a book with seven seals. Even the conductors who can deci-
5 pher it present it to the public soaked in their own interpretations. For that
6 reason there must be a tradition, and no one can create it but I.’41
7 To this reason we may add another one: as we have already noted, Mahler
8 needed to form an aural impression of the work that he had created at his desk.
9 Manifestly he was not one of those composers whose inner ear can conjure up
40 an exact idea of what the music will sound like in a performance, something
41R that is hardly surprising when we recall the power and at the same time the
subtlety of Mahler’s music. As a young conductor, Klaus Pringsheim – the twin 1

brother of Katia Mann – won for himself the right to be accepted into Mahler’s 2
inner circle. He was present, therefore, in Essen in May 1906 when the Sixth 3
Symphony was being rehearsed, and he later recalled how Mahler, in sheer 4
desperation, kept begging the trumpets to play louder, even though the result 5
sounded like a hellish and incoherent din in the empty rehearsal room. Only 6
when the players could blow no harder did the sound suddenly make musical 7
sense, something that even the professionals sitting in the hall had not thought 8
possible. Episodes such as these meant on the one hand that Mahler was forced 9
to litter his scores with performance markings and instructions to the musi- 10
cians and on the other that he had to discover through trial and error what the 1
music would sound like, something he could do only through performances 2
and more especially through rehearsals under his own direction. The passage 3
under discussion may illustrate this point. The fortissimo marking for the 4
trumpets would have suggested to any other conductor that he could be satis- 5
fied with a normal fortissimo at this point. But Mahler realized at the rehearsal 6
in Essen that this normal fortissimo was not enough and so he asked the musi- 7
cians to explore areas that at the time were evidently regarded by most listeners 8
and even by musicians as non-musical noise, and yet it was only now that he 9
achieved what he wanted. The passage in question was presumably at figure 20
158 in the final movement, where Mahler has added the note ‘Bells raised!’ to 1
the fortississimo marking in order to increase the dynamics yet further. 2
When necessary, Mahler could be ruthless with his scores and in theory he 3
granted this privilege to other conductors too. A significant example of this is 4
attested by the composer and musicologist Egon Wellesz, who was present at the 5
rehearsals for a performance of the Second Symphony in Vienna in 1907. This 6
was Mahler’s final concert in the city, not, as Wellesz claims, the last performance 7
of one of his works during Mahler’s own lifetime. At the words ‘O Tod, du 8
Allbezwinger’ in the final movement, the soprano line is supposed to emerge 9
radiantly from the orchestra, but although the soloist had a beautiful and expres- 30
sive voice, it was not very large or penetrating. The trombones that accompany 1
this passage are marked pianissimo, a marking as unusual as it is hard to achieve. 2
In spite of repeated attempts to get the balance right, Mahler still felt that his 3
intentions had not been realized. Finally he decided to strike out the trombones 4
and, adopting a solemn tone, exclaimed: ‘Hail to the conductor who in the future 5
will change my scores according to the acoustics of the concert hall.’42 And yet if 6
a conductor were to obey this injunction today, he would be universally 7
condemned. The anecdote is revealing, for it shows that Mahler’s supreme 8
demand for clarity did not shy away from even the most radical measures. 9
In short, there were very good reasons why Mahler took increasing pains 40
over the performance of his own works. The tremendous intensity that he 41R
490 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 initially brought to his job in Vienna and the enthusiasm and willpower that
2 he invested in his model productions should not blind us to the fact that his
3 own compositions were understandably more important to him than the most
4 successful performance of Fidelio. It is hard to avoid the impression that this
5 insight became increasingly clear to him as he grew older and he realized that
6 he had less and less time to complete the creative task that had been allotted to
7 him on earth, especially when he was increasingly distracted from that task by
8 the drudgery of his work at the Vienna Court Opera and by the parochial
9 intrigues that beset him. When he thought about the future of his works, feel-
10 ings of euphoric certainty in the spirit of ‘My time will come’ alternated with
1 moments of resignation. During his final months in Vienna, his old friend
2 from Hamburg, Josef Bohuslav Foerster, renewed contact with him and
3 recalled his delight at the prospect of seeing more of his friends in Vienna – at
4 this stage Mahler envisaged spending the winter months in New York and the
5 summer in Vienna and Maiernigg. But he was also depressed by the frequent
6 attacks in the Viennese press and as a result resigned about the future of his
7 works:
8
9 If I had no children, it would never occur to me to bother with publishing my
20 compositions. How long does a work survive? Fifty years? Then along come
1 other composers, another time, another taste, other works. What’s the use of
2 it? I need such vast resources, and who will take the trouble to rehearse my
3 works properly? And even if someone invests the enthusiasm and the time,
4 how can I be certain that he will understand my intentions? Better no
5 performance at all than a bad one.43
6
7 How differently things turned out! For fifty years Mahler’s works eked out a
8 pitiful existence on the fringes of the mainstream repertory until suddenly,
9 almost exactly fifty years after his death, they began to exercise an influence
30 which half a century later shows no signs of losing its impact.
1 If, in 1905, Mahler admitted to Ida Dehmel that he was neglecting his duties
2 as director of the Opera in order to devote himself to his own work as a
3 composer, then it is hard not to take seriously the criticisms of certain sections
4 of the Viennese public concerning his increasingly frequent absences from the
5 city. It was only Mahler’s egocentricity that prevented him from feeling guilty
6 on this score. Moreover, he had never showed any staying power in matters
7 unrelated to his music, and it is all too typical of his career as a conductor and
8 an administrator that he began with tremendous aplomb but all too soon
9 threw in the towel. He was a sprinter, not a long-distance runner, or perhaps it
40 would be more accurate to describe him as a long-distance runner who started
41R the race too quickly and failed to maintain his initial pace. Fatally, too, he
undertook a superhuman workload during his early years in Vienna, setting 1

standards that he was neither able nor ultimately willing to maintain and 2
thereby committing a tactical error that led to justified criticism. That this 3
criticism was cloaked in the mantle of anti-Semitism and pure Viennese 4
destructiveness is another story. 5
Eloquent evidence of this criticism comes in the form of a caricature that 6
appeared in Die Zeit on 20 January 1907 with the caption ‘A month with the 7
Director of the Vienna Court Opera’. The image is divided into four sections, 8
each one of which gives a different reason for the director’s absence: during the 9
first week he was away rehearsing his latest symphony with the combined – 10
and fictitious – orchestras of Kötzschenbroda, Langensalza and Apolda; 1
during the second week he was hunting down a new instrument capable of 2
producing hitherto untried sonorities; during the third week he was fully 3
occupied reading the proofs of his recently completely Ninth Symphony; and 4
he spent the fourth week in the administrative offices of the Court Opera, 5
recovering from his earlier exertions.44 Mahler knew very well that his increas- 6
ingly frequent absences opened him up to criticism, but at some stage this 7
became a matter of indifference to him, making it likely that his decision to 8
leave his post was taken as early as 1905. 9
20
1
The Netherlands as an Oasis of Calm
2
Between 1903 and 1909 Mahler visited the Netherlands on four separate occa- 3
sions, finding in its capital a haven of peace and in the circle of acquaintances 4
around Willem Mengelberg and Alphons Diepenbrock a degree of friendship 5
and love that he could not count on elsewhere. He had met Mengelberg at the 6
first performance of his Third Symphony in Krefeld in June 1902, when the 7
audience also included the two Dutch conductors Henri Viotta and Martin 8
Heuckeroth, who were active in The Hague and Arnheim respectively. 9
Diepenbrock was not present on this occasion but joined the group soon after- 30
wards. It was presumably Mengelberg who invited Mahler to conduct his own 1
works in the Netherlands.45 He had been born in Utrecht in 1871, though his 2
family came from the Rhineland. By 1895 he had succeeded Willem Kes as 3
principal conductor of the recently founded Amsterdam Concertgebouw 4
Orchestra, a post he retained until 1945, providing the orchestra with a rare 5
sense of continuity and turning it into the internationally acclaimed body of 6
players that it remains to this day. 7
Mengelberg was famous and, indeed, notorious for the meticulous prepar- 8
ation of his concert programmes, and there can be few other conductors whose 9
scores are so peppered with entries relating to the tiniest details, turning them 40
into multicoloured demonstrations of calligraphic mastery. On this point, too, 41R
492 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 he had much in common with Mahler, whose own scores were marked up in
2 much the same way. There were times when Mengelberg would drive his musi-
3 cians to distraction because he obliged them to spend up to half an hour
4 tuning their instruments and talked incessantly during the rehearsals, so
5 firmly convinced was he that all the important points could be communicated
6 verbally. Together with Bruno Walter, he was the leading Mahler conductor of
7 his generation, quite apart from which he also introduced Dutch audiences to
8 the latest trends in symphonic music in the form of works by Debussy, Reger,
9 Ravel, Stravinsky and Strauss. For a time he also conducted the Frankfurt
10 Museum Orchestra and, in the 1920s, the New York Philharmonic, a commit-
1 ment he apparently relinquished because of disagreements with Arturo
2 Toscanini, who was the orchestra’s other main conductor.
3 Mengelberg limited his activities to the concert hall and avoided the opera
4 house altogether. Between the wars he was one of the most prominent of all
5 European conductors, his emotional approach to the works that he conducted
6 inviting comparisons with Wilhelm Furtwängler. Mengelberg’s final years were
7 overshadowed by controversy, for he maintained his links with German
8 culture even after the Nazis had come to power and occupied the Netherlands.
9 He even conducted in Nazi Germany. He was accused of being a collaborator
20 and openly reviled by the many Dutch nationals who opposed the German
1 occupation, with the result that a man who for fifty years had been the
2 uncrowned king of his country’s musical life was banned from making any
3 further public appearances. He retired to Switzerland and died there,
4 consumed by resentment, in 1951, almost exactly forty years after Mahler’s
5 own death. It remains unclear how he dealt with the fact that the works of a
6 friend whom he had revered more than any other could not be performed in
7 Germany, but there is a surviving recording that suggests that at least in the as
8 yet independent Netherlands he retained his love of Mahler’s music, for on
9 11 September 1939 – a few days after the outbreak of the war – he made the
30 first complete recording of the Fourth Symphony, a release which in spite of its
1 highly subjective and by modern standards far from faithful interpretation
2 retains its special status among historic Mahler recordings: the fact that
3 Mengelberg had heard Mahler himself conduct this work means that his
4 recording undoubtedly contains much food for thought.
5 It was in Krefeld, therefore, in June 1902 that Mahler and his Dutch admirers
6 first came into contact with each other. Mengelberg invited him to conduct two
7 concerts with his Amsterdam orchestra in October 1903. The programmes
8 would include the First and Third Symphonies. Unknown to Mahler, Martin
9 Heuckeroth was currently planning to give the Dutch première of the Third
40 Symphony in Arnheim a week earlier. It says much for the spirit of friendship
41R that existed among these Dutch musicians that the rivalry caused no ill feeling,
and it is said that when Mahler arrived in Amsterdam, he greeted Heuckeroth 1

with the words: ‘So you’re Heuckeroth? I’ve heard it went very well. Where did 2
you find the courage?’46 Among the audience at the Amsterdam performance 3
of the Third Symphony was Alphons Diepenbrock, who was to become the 4
leading Mahlerian in the Netherlands after Mengelberg, albeit one whose views 5
could also be coloured by criticism. Still largely unknown outside his native 6
Holland, Diepenbrock was the first Dutch composer of international standing 7
after centuries of obscurity. Two years younger than Mahler, he had a degree in 8
classical languages and was qualified as a teacher. As a composer, he was largely 9
self-taught, but on completing his first major work, a monumental Mass, in 10
1891, he devoted himself for the most part to composition, while giving private 1
lessons in Latin and Greek in order to support his family. In his intellectual 2
voraciousness, which found expression in many reviews and essays on ques- 3
tions of philosophy, history, literature and religion, he had much in common 4
with Arrigo Boito, the late Verdi’s highly gifted librettist and a distinguished 5
composer in his own right. For the most part, Diepenbrock wrote vocal music 6
for the concert hall, setting himself the highest standards with his choice of 7
writers: Goethe, Hölderlin, Novalis and Nietzsche. His Novalis and Nietzsche 8
settings, especially his cantata Im großen Schweigen, are all of the highest 9
quality, their individual and instantly recognizable musical language springing 20
from an amalgam of Wagner’s orchestra and the influence of Strauss, Debussy 1
and Mahler. Unfortunately gramophone recordings in recent years have failed 2
to bring about a revival of Diepenbrock’s fortunes. 3
Diepenbrock was fascinated by Mahler from the very outset. In a profoundly 4
perceptive and keenly worded letter to one of his pupils he summed up his 5
impressions of the Amsterdam performance of the Third Symphony in October 6
1903: 7
8
Last week I was introduced to Gustav Mahler. This man has left a deep 9
impression on me. I heard his Third Symphony and admire it. The opening 30
movement contains much that is ugly, but at a second and third hearing, 1
when one knows what he is trying to say, it acquires a different aspect. 2
Mahler is very simple and does not pretend to be a celebrity but acts his 3
normal self. I have the greatest admiration for him. . . . Good-natured and 4
naïve, sometimes even childlike, he looks out at the world with fairytale eyes 5
from behind large crystal spectacles. He is modern in every respect. He 6
believes in the future, which left me feeling that I am no more than a grieving 7
‘Romantic’. I can tell you that his presence did me a world of good. I told him 8
as much in a short and fairly emphatic letter, telling him that his music seems 9
to possess the gift of ‘transforming people’ and of providing a sense of 40
‘catharsis’. That is no small achievement. 41R
494 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Diepenbrock then added a few perceptive comments on the differences

2 between Strauss and Mahler, arguing that the latter was almost entirely inno-
3 cent of the ‘neo-Prussian nickel-plating’ that characterized Strauss’s tone
4 poems. Strauss had a telephone line to heaven that employed the usual urban
5 networks, whereas Mahler’s connection was much more direct.47 By this date
6 in his career, Mahler was far more wary of getting close to people than he had
7 been in his youth, but he immediately felt a great fondness for both
8 Diepenbrock and Mengelberg, while noting that in any exchange of ideas he
9 could explore far greater depths with the former than with the more naïve
10 Mengelberg, who was scarcely an intellectual at all. Whenever Mahler was in
1 the Netherlands, he always ensured that Diepenbrock and his wife were invited
2 to all the meals that he attended. It was only logical, therefore, that
3 Diepenbrock should represent the Dutch Mahlerians at Mahler’s burial service
4 in Grinzing. But Mahler soon became friendly with Mengelberg too, and even
5 during his first visit to Amsterdam he was invited to stay privately with the
6 Mengelbergs. Such was his loathing of hotel accommodation that he invariably
7 accepted these and similar invitations in spite of a number of unfortunate
8 experiences in this regard. But with the Mengelbergs he was always happy:
9 they lived only a few minutes away from the Concertgebouw, and their apart-
20 ment was so large that Mahler’s need for peace and quiet could be respected.
1 On his final visit in October 1909, he wrote one of his whimsical entries in the
2 Mengelbergs’ guestbook: ‘Ich lob’ mir Hotel Mengelberg / das sicher ist der
3 Engel Werk, / damit ein armer Musikant / findt manches mal der Heimat
4 Land’ (‘I praise the Mengelberg Hotel that is undoubtedly the work of angels,
5 so that a poor musician may find much to remind him of home there’).
6 Mahler was first invited to Holland in the autumn of 1903 but was not
7 entirely enthusiastic at the prospect. One of his favourite novels was Max
8 Havelaar (1860), a work critical of Holland and her colonies, by Edward
9 Douwes Dekker, who wrote under the name of Multatuli, which in Latin
30 means ‘I have borne much’. An important Dutch contribution to world litera-
1 ture, the novel revolves around its hero, Max Havelaar, and his foil, the narrow-
2 minded Droogstoppel. Ever since Mahler and Alma had read the book, the
3 name Droogstoppel had been synonymous in their minds with aggressively
4 middle-class philistines in general. Mahler could not avoid detecting a certain
5 prosperous narrow-mindedness in Amsterdam too and unchivalrously placed
6 Mengelberg’s wife among their number. But such was his initial enthusiasm for
7 the country that he even considered settling in the Netherlands when he left
8 Vienna, a plan which, not entirely serious, was soon abandoned. No doubt the
9 Dutch countryside bordering on the North Sea failed to endear itself to a man
40 who was fond of the Austrian mountains and lakes above all else. Even so, his
41R visits to the museums of Amsterdam and his excursions to the North Sea,
which are documented in photographs, gave him considerable pleasure, and 1

he spoke enthusiastically of the wonderfully hazy light on the coast. 2
So successful were the performances of the First and Third Symphonies that 3
Mahler was back in Amsterdam by October 1904. He was particularly pleased 4
with the orchestra, whose Mahler tradition has been maintained to the present 5
day by Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly and Mariss Jansons. Dutch audi- 6
ences, conversely, were less unanimous in their praise, a point made by 7
Mengelberg himself, though Mahler’s letters make no mention of this. Clearly 8
it was enough for him to know that the orchestra was behind him, that an 9
important conductor was championing his cause and that critics and a section 10
of the public were willing to follow him – this meant infinitely more than he 1
had ever encountered in Berlin or even Vienna. Moreover, Mengelberg may 2
have been exaggerating in an attempt to highlight his own persistent efforts in 3
support of Mahler’s cause. In 1904 Mahler was able to combine his visit to the 4
Netherlands with the first performance of his Fifth Symphony with the 5
Gürzenich Orchestra in Cologne, whither he travelled on 12 October, only 6
days after his epoch-making production of Fidelio in Vienna. Alma was 7
prevented from accompanying him by one of her many illnesses. The Cologne 8
performance took place on 18 October 1904, and the very next day Mahler 9
continued his journey to Amsterdam, where he was warmly welcomed by his 20
new friends. As before, he stayed with the Mengelbergs, and on this occasion 1
he does not seem to have been unduly worried by Tilly Mengelberg’s boorish- 2
ness: ‘Such kind, unpretentious people,’ he described the couple in a note 3
to Alma.48 4
Elisabeth Diepenbrock’s diary entries for this period have survived and 5
leave us in no doubt about the depth of her understanding for Mahler. Fons, as 6
she called her husband, had an opportunity to play through his Te Deum to 7
Mahler, who was sufficiently impressed to recommend the work to his 8
colleague in Vienna, Franz Schalk, the conductor of the Gesellschaft der 9
Musikfreunde’s chorus. Mahler’s enthusiasm was never based on tactical 30
considerations or on the need to be polite, and so we may take his judgement 1
seriously, not that it helped, for Schalk returned the score, refusing to conduct 2
it but without giving any reason. As Mahler explained in a letter to his wife, the 3
programme for the first Amsterdam concert on 23 October was nothing if 4
not curious: 5
6
Just imagine, the programme for Sunday is as follows: 7
1. Symphony no. IV by G. Mahler 8
Interval 9
2. Symphony no. IV by G. Mahler 40
What do you think of that? 41R
496 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 They’re playing my work twice in a row – after the interval we start all over
2 again. I’ll be interested to see whether the audience will react more warmly
3 the second time.49
4
5 Mahler was not mistaken in his optimistic assessment, for on the day after the
6 concert we find him writing to Alma to report that the audience’s reaction had
7 been exactly as he had hoped. When compared with the ‘imbecilic’ audience
8 in Cologne, which had responded with remarkable reserve to his Fifth
9 Symphony, he felt that in spite of all its philistinism, his audience in
10 Amsterdam could offer him something that he could not find even in Vienna.
1 The audience’s enthusiasm increased after the interval, and since he was
2 pleased with the Dutch soloist, Alida Oldenboom-Lutkemann, a small and fat
3 soprano with a voice of bell-like purity, the end of the work recalled a painting
4 on a gold ground – exactly the sort of impression that he had envisaged. The
5 performance was considerably more successful than that of the Third
6 Symphony the previous year, when opinions had been divided. Two days later
7 Mahler conducted his Second Symphony. This, too, was repeated, although
8 not, of course, at the same concert but on the following evening. This repre-
9 sented a busy schedule, leaving Mahler with less time for socializing than in
20 1903. In spite of this he held a number of discussions with Diepenbrock that
1 went deeper than those he was able to have with Mengelberg, whose taste in
2 furnishings Mahler mocked. Mengelberg’s father restored churches and had
3 furnished his son’s apartment in a neo-Gothic style, which for the Secessionist-
4 minded Mahler, was exactly what Mengelberg deserved.
5 Mahler’s next visit to the Netherlands took place eighteen months later, in
6 March 1906, when he travelled directly from Vienna to Antwerp to conduct
7 his Fifth Symphony, a work that the Berlin Philharmonic had performed in the
8 town for spa guests in June 1905 under the now largely unknown conductor
9 August Scharrer. From Antwerp, Mahler travelled to Amsterdam for perform-
30 ances of his Fifth Symphony, the Kindertotenlieder and two other songs. The
1 soloist was the Dutch baritone Gerard Zalsman, who took over from the indis-
2 posed Friedrich Weidemann. As on his previous visits, Mahler was well satis-
3 fied with the performance and with the audience reaction. Two performances
4 of Mahler’s early cantata Das klagende Lied were planned for 10 and 11 March,
5 but for reasons that remain unclear Mahler was summoned back to Vienna on
6 ostensibly urgent business, leaving Mengelberg to take over the second
7 performance. Mahler had, however, prepared the orchestra and chorus, and so
8 the performance passed off without mishap. It is conceivable that he had to
9 return to sort out problems in the run-up to a new production of Le nozze di
40 Figaro and to resolve various disagreements that had arisen at the Court
41R Opera, where the undiplomatic Roller had designed costumes for the planned
Lohengrin that were too expensive and too heavy for the singers to wear. He 1
had also barred overweight chorus members from taking part in the perform- 2
ances. Mahler had to intervene. This was by no means the first time that 3
Roller’s brusqueness and arrogance had caused Mahler problems and got on 4
his nerves. Elisabeth Diepenbrock reports that the Kindertotenlieder were not 5
well received in Amsterdam and that after each song there was a rush for the 6
exits. Diepenbrock allegedly told Mahler afterwards: ‘I envy you your enemies.’ 7
But there is no mention of any of this in Mahler’s own letters from this period. 8
Even Diepenbrock initially had problems with the Fifth, although he later 9
came round. It is interesting that alone among Mahler’s contemporaries he 10
recognized that the Adagietto was a love song. 1
The close and cordial relations between Mahler and the Netherlands now 2
suffered their longest interruption, all plans for a return visit foundering on 3
various obstacles, not least of which was Mahler’s contract with New York, 4
which kept him away from Europe for long periods, especially during the 5
concert season. Not until October 1909 did Mahler and his Dutch friends meet 6
again for the fourth and final time. His visit to see Sigmund Freud in Leiden in 7
August 1910 took place amid great secrecy, and no one in Amsterdam knew 8
about it. Strangely enough, there had in the meantime been something of a 9
hiatus in Dutch interest in Mahler’s music, the only recorded performance 20
between January 1907 and October 1909 being the Fourth Symphony that the 1
largely inexperienced Diepenbrock conducted on 26 March 1908. Mengelberg 2
warned him not to undertake a piece that contains pitfalls for even experi- 3
enced conductors, but his advice went unheeded. It was in this context that 4
Mengelberg remarked that Amsterdam audiences were not unequivocal in 5
their support of Mahler. This may also explain why Mengelberg did not wish 6
to link his name and reputation to Mahler’s music to the exclusion of all else 7
and why he maintained a certain reserve during this period. Moreover, he took 8
up a new post in January 1907, dividing his time between Amsterdam and 9
Frankfurt, where he was principal guest conductor of the Museum Orchestra. 30
Mahler left Vienna for Amsterdam on 26 September 1909 and was met at the 1
station by Mengelberg. As before, he stayed with the couple: ‘The Mengelbergs 2
are as warm-hearted and hospitable as ever, in a way that only the Dutch under- 3
stand. Diepenbrock is a joy: profound and loyal.’50 Mahler was also touched to 4
discover that the orchestra had retained all its old loyalty. The players sent a 5
deputation, asking him to conduct not only his Seventh Symphony, as planned, 6
but also some other works by Beethoven and Wagner, so that they might have 7
a chance to play this music under him. But the young Max Tak, who was then 8
one of the orchestra’s second violinists, reports that Mahler had lost none of his 9
old tactlessness, and when he made fun of Mengelberg’s habit of placing undue 40
emphasis on metrical divisions in a score – and this while Mengelberg himself 41R
498 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was in the hall – the orchestra took offence. One has the impression that as so
2 often Mahler was simply oblivious to what he was doing, but the result was a
3 degree of tension that was only resolved at the successful performances of the
4 symphony, first in The Hague, and then in Amsterdam itself. Tak also reports
5 that whereas Mahler’s conducting style had formerly been restless and even
6 fidgety, by 1909 he had discovered an almost eerie calm. During his first visit to
7 the Netherlands, Mengelberg had asked him why he gripped his lapel with his
8 free left hand, prompting Mahler to claim that this was a way of forcing himself
9 to remain calm. By 1909 he was conducting almost entirely with his eyes and
10 making only minimal use of the baton in his right hand. In this there is a
1 striking parallel with Strauss, whose stoic deportment on the podium is attested
2 by surviving film footage – what would we not give to have similar footage of
3 Mahler? Even so, Tak went on, Mahler’s beat was now stricter than it ever was
4 with Toscanini, notorious though the latter was for his fanatical concern for
5 precision.
6 One of Diepenbrock’s pupils, Balthazar Verhagen, attended the performance
7 in The Hague and, observing Mahler from close quarters, later recalled the
8 tremendous impression left on him by his conducting. And he too attests that
9 Mahler’s style had changed a great deal, striking him as more relaxed than
20 before. During a coach ride to Scheveningen, Mahler began to shiver and
1 asked the driver to find a sunnier route. When Verhagen pointed out that the
2 sun had already set, Mahler had smiled sadly and commented: ‘Ah, no, people
3 can’t give us the sun.’ Elisabeth Diepenbrock, too, reports that Mahler looked
4 unwell and no longer trusted his own health, which is no wonder when we
5 recall that since his last trip to the Netherlands he had been diagnosed as
6 having a weak heart. While visiting another acquaintance, Mahler weighed
7 himself, so we know that in 1909 he weighed sixty-one kilos (134 pounds, or
8 nine and a half stone): given his height and slim build, this hardly suggests that
9 he was seriously underweight. Indeed, Mahler himself is said to have expressed
30 his satisfaction that he had not lost any weight. The carefree mood of earlier
1 visits could not be recaptured. Mahler’s walk in Scheveningen, with its overcast
2 sky and shuttered hotels, depressed him. The North Sea in October can seem
3 inconsolable to anyone fond of the green pastures and sun of the Alps in
4 summer. ‘I’ve no wish ever to return here,’ Mahler, chilled to the marrow, is
5 said to have exclaimed. His wish was to come true. It was left to Verhagen to
6 sum up the mood of the Dutch Mahlerians: ‘The restless wanderer fell like a
7 meteor into our tranquil lives in The Hague. He hurled at our heads his mighty
8 Seventh Symphony and silently departed – for ever.’51 Having represented his
9 fellow Dutch Mahlerians at Mahler’s burial in Grinzing, Diepenbrock penned
40 an obituary that expresses all the love and respect of the composer’s friends in
41R the Netherlands in language as simple as it is moving.52
The Finances of the Director of the Vienna Court Opera 1

2
At the end of May 1904, the general administrator of all the court theatres in
3
Vienna, August Plappart, gave an interview to the Neue Freie Presse – the flag-
4
ship of the liberal Viennese dailies – in which he expressed his satisfaction at
5
the finances of his two biggest theatres, the Burgtheater and the Court Opera:
6
7
We have every reason to be satisfied with the state of the Court Theatres. In
8
both the Burg and the Opera the receipts have risen considerably, and in both
9
theatres our expectations were exceeded. A few figures will illustrate this. In
10
the Opera in the period from 1 January to 17 May, our takings amounted to
1
715,809 crowns. We had budgeted for receipts of 666,900 crowns in this
2
period. So that in these four-and-a-half months the Opera showed a surplus
3
of 48,909 crowns. In every single month the target was exceeded in both the
4
Burg and the Opera. And the target for the coming year is always based on
5
the receipts for the previous year. From 1 January 1903 to end of December
6
the Opera’s takings were 1,543,665 crowns. The target for this period was
7
1,485,900 crowns.53
8
9
Plappart then went on to draw attention to two facts that are as important
20
today as they were a century ago: in spite of these healthy receipts, there could
1
never be any question of a profit, because the opera house’s budget amounted
2
to 10,000 crowns a day. And, as the only fly in the ointment, new operas –
3
unlike new plays – were never a box-office draw. With the exception of Les
4
Contes d’Hoffmann – new to Vienna but not a new work – contemporary
5
operas never caught on. Fortunately, audiences still flocked to the great reper-
6
tory operas, a gratifying reflection of Mahler’s successes with Mozart,
7
Beethoven and Wagner.
8
In a word, the general administrator’s office was more than happy with
9
Mahler’s directorship in 1903 and 1904, at least as far as the box office was
30
concerned. The speed with which this situation could change has been metic-
1
ulously documented by Franz Willnauer in his study of Mahler’s years at the
2
Court Opera.54 The system that was used to calculate the company’s future
3
financial needs meant that then, as now, success was penalized. In budgetary
4
terms, the Viennese Court Theatres operated according to the calendar year
5
running from January to December rather than by season. If a year was partic-
6
ularly successful, the theatre was punished by having its projected income
7
raised for the following year. This target would be reduced only if the theatre
8
were less successful. Failures may have incurred censure but at least they
9
lowered the bar when it came to planning for the future. Audits, conversely,
40
were drawn up on the basis of the monthly box-office receipts and submitted
41R
500 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 in the middle of the year following the one to which the figures related. The
2 projection fixed the level of the receipts that needed to be achieved, while at
3 the same time restricting the house’s outgoings in terms of staffing levels and
4 other expenses. Mahler’s successes meant that the projection was constantly
5 being raised, but at the same time the company’s outgoings had to remain
6 unchanged: enhanced success was to be achieved with the same level of
7 subsidy, the aim being to ensure that the grants awarded to all the court
8 theatres to cover their inevitable deficits were kept as small as possible and
9 even reduced in size.
10 A glance at the Court Opera’s finances between 1903 and 1908 reveals that a
1 deficit of 212,000 crowns was agreed for 1903. In the event, the shortfall turned
2 out to be 264,000 crowns, requiring an extra subsidy of 52,000 crowns, an over-
3 spend that seems to have been regarded as a venial sin. The following
4 year, 1904, Mahler in fact achieved a feat beyond the capabilities of any present-
5 day opera-house administrator: whereas the agreed deficit was 186,000 crowns,
6 the actual shortfall turned out to be only 149,000 crowns: against all
7 expectations, Mahler had helped the general administrator’s office to save
8 37,000 crowns.
9 The rude awakening came in 1905. The projected deficit was again reduced,
20 this time to 170,000 crowns, but on this occasion it was exceeded to the tune
1 of 258,000 crowns, making a total shortfall of 428,000 crowns. Although
2 Mahler made savings in 1906, he was unable to make up for the earlier
3 mismanagement. Rumours about the director’s failing fortunes attached them-
4 selves to these figures and soon reached the outside world, and there is no
5 doubt that this, too, contributed to Mahler’s increasing weariness with his
6 position. It suddenly counted for nothing that he had spent the last eight years
7 bringing in more money and running the company more efficiently. The poor
8 figures for 1905 were repeated in 1907, by which date his heart was no longer
9 in his job and he was absent for long periods. It is not entirely clear what went
30 wrong in 1905, but three factors may perhaps explain the situation. First,
1 Alfred Roller, who had helped to guarantee the company’s artistic successes,
2 was by no means unassuming in his demands. His surviving estimate for 1905
3 amounts to no less than 282,000 crowns. Second, the agreed deficit for 1905
4 was the punishment for a string of successes that meant that future estimates
5 were increasingly curtailed. And, third, Mahler’s long-term planning – it was
6 he who initiated the modern practice of planning for more than a single season
7 at a time – was artistically justified but financially imbalanced. Of the six new
8 productions of 1905, four were the sort of new works that were feared by
9 Plappart and his box-office managers, while only two were pillars of the reper-
40 tory. True, Mahler had planned a major Mozart cycle for 1905 and 1906, prom-
41R ising (and delivering) full houses, but most of these productions were
scheduled for 1906, hence the success of that year’s season. In 1905, conversely, 1
the company staged Pfitzner’s Die Rose vom Liebesgarten, Ermanno Wolf- 2
Ferrari’s Le donne curiose (performed in German as Die neugierigen Frauen) 3
and, in the form of a double bill, Leo Blech’s Das war ich and Eugen d’Albert’s 4
Die Abreise. None of these proved a hit at the box office. 5
Ironically, then, it was Mahler’s promotion of contemporary works that 6
earned him his superiors’ greatest censure, a situation made all the more iron- 7
ical by the fact that with the exception of Salome, which he was prevented from 8
staging, Mahler knew that none of these works was a masterpiece, hence his 9
half-hearted efforts on their behalf. By law, the general administrator’s office 10
was required to communicate these findings to the comptroller’s office, and it 1
is to the credit of the latter that its records contain no criticism of Mahler, even 2
though Plappart was no Mahlerian. Even so, the shortfall was so scandalous 3
that Montenuovo and Mahler undoubtedly discussed the situation, although 4
no record of their meeting survives. It is possible, however, that Montenuovo’s 5
blind faith in Mahler was suddenly called into question in the middle of 1906, 6
when the figures for 1905 were submitted. However controversial, Mahler 7
could easily be defended as long as he produced outstanding artistic and finan- 8
cial results, but a director hoppled by a financial deficit was altogether more 9
vulnerable. There were two visible consequences of these problems: ticket 20
prices were increased from the autumn of 1906, and the Court Opera’s finances 1
were subjected to closer scrutiny. Comparisons with the continuing success of 2
the Burgtheater must have been difficult to stomach. We shall have no diffi- 3
culty in imagining that Mahler’s already waning interest in his post suffered a 4
further setback at this juncture. If he had been honest with himself, he would 5
have had to admit that the financial burden had arisen not least because he had 6
unduly slackened the reins. In other words, the 1905 shortfall may well have 7
been an additional factor in his decision to stand down in 1907. 8
9
30
Enemies and Friends
1
Mahler rarely made it easy for his friends to remain his friends, whereas he 2
generally made it easy for his enemies to remain his enemies. Time and again 3
he antagonized and frightened away even the most well-meaning contempor- 4
aries, for he had at least two qualities that impeded his dealings with others: he 5
had much of the egocentricity of the genius, even if it fell short of the ruthless 6
exploitation and Machiavellian manipulativeness of a man like Wagner, and he 7
could not brook dishonesty, and so he set no store by sparing people’s feelings 8
when he thought that they deserved to be told the truth. As a young man 9
Mahler was open and brutally honest, and he expected others to behave like- 40
wise. When he discovered that they rarely did, he became mistrustful and 41R
502 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 reserved, renewing contact with his student friends to the exclusion of all
2 others, while never abandoning his own harshness of character or honesty of
3 outlook. It is significant in this context that he made few new friends after he
4 turned thirty. He was never polite for tactical reasons if he could not justify
5 such an approach on practical or personal grounds. This did not preclude him
6 from deploying his austere charms in seeking out fellow combatants and
7 supporters. During his time in Vienna, for example, he courted a number of
8 journalists, hoping to win them over to his cause, but quickly letting such
9 people know that they were no longer welcome whenever the hopes that he
10 had placed in them were disappointed, even when he knew that in dropping
1 them, he may well have gained yet another influential enemy.
2 Mahler’s famous fickleness was often due to this process of recognition, and
3 yet there were other contacts that broke down for no apparent reason, so that
4 even the people concerned were left at a loss. If he became annoyed with a
5 person without the latter understanding why, then the breach was generally
6 irreparable. In the case of the group of friends associated with Siegfried
7 Lipiner, it was clear from an early stage that he was prepared to drop his closest
8 and oldest acquaintances once he gained the impression – in this case it was
9 the correct impression – that they had behaved badly towards his young
20 wife. Mahler was incapable of talking such problems through. With Lipiner he
1 was belatedly reconciled, but no such reconciliation took place with Natalie
2 Bauer-Lechner.
3 Mahler was capable of the most raging fury – one is tempted to describe it
4 as the rage of Achilles. Richard Specht, who knew him well and who wrote
5 the first full-length study of Mahler, attributed both his infinite kindness
6 and his insane rages to childlike aspects of his character, reminding us of
7 Diepenbrock’s reference to Mahler’s ‘good-natured’ qualities and his ‘fairytale
8 eyes’. According to Specht, ‘Just like a child, he would suddenly become
9 trusting and then equally suddenly mistrustful. This mistrust could easily be
30 stirred by an expression of casual malice or even an apparently involuntary
1 smile or glance; and it could rarely be undone. Many were the sins that were
2 committed against him and others as a result of this.’55 Mahler’s brusqueness
3 and capriciousness were both childlike reactions to the world around him,
4 making him easy to influence. He had the unfortunate tendency in everyday
5 administrative matters to rely on incompetent advisers and assistants, which
6 he did not only for the sake of his own convenience but also in order to avoid
7 having to deal with the all-too-human aspects of life. He was remarkably
8 short-sighted when it came to understanding human nature. He hated larger
9 gatherings and regarded small talk as a criminal waste of time, so that if he had
40 been sitting in a corner at a party and heard a remark that fired him with
41R enthusiasm, he would leap to his feet and draw the person aside, forcing them
to divulge their opinions and showering them with his own. He was like a 1
child assessing the usefulness of a new playmate. If at their next meeting he 2
realized that he had encountered only a chance echo of his own ideas, he 3
would drop the person in question and not bother with him again, once more 4
incurring the charge of capriciousness that was repeatedly levelled at him. In 5
Vienna it was rumoured that Mahler could be won over to a particular cause 6
if the supplicant were to walk in front of him or behind him in the street or 7
opera house and whistle a motif from one of his works. If he allowed himself 8
to be taken in by such tricks, it was not out of superficial vanity but from child- 9
like enthusiasm – only his most embittered enemies ever accused him of 10
vanity. He was never able to distinguish properly between toadyism, fawning 1
subservience and genuine affection. 2
When he realized too late that he had been deceived by other people, he 3
would be incandescent with rage. Such rage was directed not only against the 4
people who had failed to live up to his own high standards whereby all men 5
were brothers, but also against himself for having allowed himself to be duped 6
in the first place. At such times he could lose all sense of proportion and 7
become unjust. Self-criticism and self-examination were alien to his nature. 8
Richard Specht doubted whether Mahler ever really got to know other people. 9
Alma’s diaries are the clearest possible indication that she too had the feeling 20
that her husband did not know her. If he valued another person and if that 1
person let it be known that he was in difficulties, he could be inordinately 2
helpful. The only entirely positive thing that the otherwise ambivalent 3
members of the Court Opera orchestra and Vienna Philharmonic had to say 4
about him was that no previous conductor had taken such an interest in their 5
social situation and attempted to improve it, but they did not thank him for it. 6
But if he helped someone who was not a member of his own circle of friends, 7
he would do so in a more or less absent-minded way, implying that he was not 8
to be troubled again. Specht is no doubt right to describe this attitude as the 9
kindness of the egocentric unwilling to see the sufferings of others and at pains 30
to put them from his mind. He was intolerant of other people’s illnesses: 1
‘Illness is a lack of talent,’ he is reported to have said, presumably regarding 2
such illnesses as a dereliction of duty. If a singer or an instrumentalist were to 3
cancel, then that person was deemed to have sinned against the sacred task of 4
serving art. 5
From that point of view it is entirely understandable that Mahler felt a 6
hypochondriac’s concern about the well-being of his own person. He knew how 7
weak his own constitution was – if he struggled to overcome this weakness and 8
punished his body mercilessly, it was because that body was not allowed to fail 9
in its duty to serve the creative spirit. If he tried as far as possible to sweep aside 40
all human limitations – and his work as director of the Vienna Court Opera 41R
504 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 brought him face to face with such limitations every working day – it was
2 because they prevented him from carrying out his one true task in life. Specht
3 reports that Mahler would adopt a utilitarian standpoint when assessing the
4 people who were not members of his immediate circle of friends and judge
5 them according to the ideas or information that they could offer him in return.
6 Occasionally this system would break down, and he might find himself talking
7 to someone about the state of music in Vienna only to find that the other person
8 wanted to discuss natural philosophy, or someone whom he had planned to
9 consult on a new diet suddenly turned out to be familiar with Mahler’s music.
10 He would then react with bewilderment and withdraw into his shell because his
1 insistence on pigeonholing people had been called into question, requiring him
2 to rethink his whole approach in ways that would cost him time and effort.
3 Mahler needlessly made enemies for himself even among those people who
4 had not already shown him rejection and hatred. The composer Franz
5 Schmidt apparently witnessed this for himself. Although his account is
6 subjective and cannot be authenticated by other surviving sources, it none the
7 less sounds plausible. Schmidt’s fortunes have risen in recent years, and it is
8 now generally felt that among Austrian composers of the turn of the century
9 he ranks second only to Mahler. His great oratorio Das Buch mit sieben Siegeln
20 has emerged from the shadows, and his Third and Fourth Symphonies are
1 undoubtedly exceptional pieces. Thanks in part to Schmidt’s own attempts at
2 self-promotion, he was held up as Mahler’s symphonic antithesis both during
3 the latter’s lifetime and more especially after his death, ultimately coming to be
4 regarded as the guardian of the chauvinist Austrian legacy in contrast to that
5 of the ‘Jewish cosmopolitan’ Mahler. When Schmidt’s First Symphony won the
6 Philharmonic Prize in 1900, this was seen in many quarters as a declaration of
7 war on Mahler and his music. A sort of Austrian Pfitzner, Schmidt unfortu-
8 nately fulfilled the hopes that were placed in him and in 1938 began to write
9 a Hitlerian cantata, Deutsche Auferstehung (German Resurrection). An
30 outstanding cellist in his youth, he joined the Vienna Court Opera orchestra
1 in this capacity in 1896 and has left an embittered account of the difficulties
2 caused him by the hostility of the orchestra’s leader, Arnold Rosé. Schmidt
3 wanted his de facto position as principal cellist to be formally recognized and,
4 insisting on his rights, complained to Mahler, who hated such confrontations
5 and left them to be dealt with by Rosé and the orchestra’s board of directors.
6 When Schmidt turned up in Mahler’s office, the latter is said to have leapt to
7 his feet and shouted at the cellist: ‘What do you mean? Are you setting me
8 conditions? Are you trying to play hard to get?’ Schmidt’s insistence infuriated
9 Mahler yet further: ‘You! You’ve exhausted my patience! Be careful! If you
40 refuse to play for me or say one more word, you can consider yourself
41R dismissed! I’m warning you!’56
This was presumably not an isolated case, and it certainly helps to explain 1
why Mahler always had problems with collectives, especially in the form of 2
orchestras and choruses. His conflicts with the Court Opera orchestra and the 3
practically identical Philharmonic were the result of his inability to strike the 4
right note with musicians who were musically and intellectually his inferiors – 5
in this regard, Schmidt was probably the exception. When musicians realize 6
that a conductor does not appreciate them, they can easily fall back on power 7
games. Schmidt had made the mistake of thinking that he could influence 8
Mahler by confronting him in person and that as the orchestra’s best cellist he 9
would get his way. But in this he misjudged Mahler, who was incapable of 10
dealing with such situations. Like a terrier forced into a corner, he bared his 1
teeth and went on the attack. Although he did not make good his threat of 2
dismissing Schmidt, the cellist was now persona non grata. At the same time, 3
Mahler had made an enemy of a man who was growing increasingly influen- 4
tial on the city’s musical scene. He never forgave a person for driving him into 5
a corner. Of course, he would have done better to find a new supporter, but in 6
all decisive situations tactical considerations were always secondary. 7
But Mahler was also adept at intimidating former friends and supporters to 8
such an extent that they abandoned him and even became his enemies. His 9
dealings with the influential critic Ludwig Karpath represent a slightly less 20
extreme form of this particular behavioural pattern. As we have seen, Karpath 1
had been able to pull a few strings at the time of Mahler’s appointment in 2
Vienna. Mahler knew this and was correspondingly grateful, but an immod- 3
erate display of thanks would have contradicted his conviction that he owed 4
that appointment not least to his own intrinsic merits. At this point Karpath 5
committed a decisive error. At a party held shortly before the announcement 6
of Mahler’s engagement, Karpath boasted that it was to him that Mahler owed 7
his appointment in Vienna. Alma, who was present on this occasion, passed 8
this on to Mahler, who duly summoned Karpath to his offices. The result, 9
according to Karpath’s reminiscences, was a scene similar to the one that 30
unfolded between Mahler and Schmidt. Having vented his fury, Mahler ended 1
the encounter with a few words of reconciliation, but Karpath now felt 2
offended that his role in Mahler’s appointment had been belittled, and he was 3
also angry with Alma for acting as a sneak. By his own account, he now 4
avoided all further contact with Mahler, a point which, much to his credit, he 5
later came to regret. Whatever the individual facts of the matter, Mahler could 6
easily have picked up the threads of their former relations and renewed contact 7
with a man who had once been one of his most impassioned supporters. But 8
he did nothing at all. Karpath was not so dishonest as to align himself with 9
Mahler’s enemies, but his enthusiasm for his former hero cooled considerably 40
in consequence of this episode. 41R
506 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 As for Mahler’s real enemies in Vienna, their number was legion. Their
2 group psychopathology is worthy of a study of its own and would involve an
3 examination of its motives and evasions, and of the hatred, betrayal and
4 character assassination that were carried out in the name of journalism.
5 Anti-Semitism was clearly a factor, albeit of varying intensity, but there were
6 other reasons, too, for the hatred to which Mahler was exposed. Writing in
7 January 1906, the ever perceptive Hermann Bahr observed that:
8
9 Once again Mahler is being hounded, hounded, hounded! Why do they hate
10 him so? Well, why do they hate Klimt so? They hate everyone who tries to be
1 true to himself. That is what they cannot bear. ‘Self-willed’ and ‘obstinate’: the
2 words themselves are a criticism. They cannot bear someone to have an
3 opinion or a will of his own. They cannot bear the idea that someone should
4 try to be free. And yet they wish they were free themselves. But do not dare.
5 And are secretly ashamed that they are so cowardly. And avenge their bad
6 conscience on the brave.57
7
8 Bahr was an astute psychologist and there is no doubt that he has struck a note
9 of fundamental importance here. The hatred felt by people who were aware of
20 their own inferiority towards a man as incommensurably great as Mahler has
1 always been one of the most basic reasons for the hostility that he has incurred.
2 And yet a closer examination of the subject reveals the need for a greater
3 degree of differentiation. Karpath was not an isolated case but an instance,
4 rather, of a phenomenon that could assume far more extreme forms. Mahler
5 owed so much to people such as Karpath, but he showed himself to be
6 ungrateful and did not make them his closest confidants and chief advisers not
7 just behind the scenes in the Vienna Court Opera but in the musical life of the
8 city as a whole. In the general administrator’s office, too, there were people
9 who were waiting for some token of Mahler’s gratitude for having helped him
30 to overcome all the anti-Jewish resistance in Vienna to the appointment of a
1 former Jew as director of the Court Opera. And if he now failed to show the
2 requisite gratitude, it was because ingratitude was a typically Jewish quality.
3 And then there was a whole series of famous singers in Vienna who had
4 been local favourites until Mahler took up his appointment, even if their
5 present achievements did not merit such adulation. They soon realized that
6 the new director was deadly serious and not a man to be trifled with: so set in
7 their old ways were they that they could not expect to retain their old
8 positions. A few of them made an effort and showed renewed commitment,
9 but others were too old or tired or cynical or lazy. They fell out of favour
40 with the director, a point borne in on them by the tasks they were now
41R expected to perform. Additionally deprived of the chance to avail themselves
of the services of the claque, they were all too ready to supply the anti- 1
Mahlerian press with titbits of gossip and scandal. Much the same was true of 2
the orchestra. And a sizeable section of the audience was likewise alienated by 3
Mahler’s refusal to admit them after the start of the performance and by his 4
insistence on darkening the auditorium even further, after the Bayreuth 5
model, a development that not only prevented them from reading the word- 6
books during the opera but also from consorting with other members of the 7
audience. From the very outset there were intrigues and campaigns designed 8
to make life impossible for the new director. Efforts were even made to expose 9
him to erotic temptations in the hope that he would then be open to blackmail: 10
not without good reason had Mahler been preceded to Vienna by the reputa- 1
tion of a man whose passions could easily be stirred by female singers – the 2
case of Anna von Mildenburg was already well known, and his affair with 3
Selma Kurz could not be kept quiet for long. 4
But there was also a section of the press that needed no excuse to attack 5
Mahler. We have already quoted the Reichspost piece that appeared in April 6
1897 and that looked forward to the time when Mahler ‘starts his Jew-boy 7
antics at the podium’. The anti-Semitic press never wavered in its basic oppo- 8
sition to his appointment and remained unwilling to moderate its views. Other 9
voices might become less strident or even fall silent, but only as long as Mahler 20
was borne along on a wave of success. When his enthusiasm started to flag and 1
his sensational productions with Roller began to seem run-of-the-mill and he 2
preferred to conduct his own works out of town rather than appear in the pit 3
of the Vienna Court Opera, the old voices of dissent were heard once again, 4
rising to a new pitch of frenzy, especially from 1906. Prominent among these 5
nay-sayers was Heinrich Reinhardt, a composer of operettas, including the 6
successful Das süße Mädel, who was also, unfortunately, the music critic of the 7
Neues Wiener Journal, a paper whose scattershot approach to Mahler criticism 8
was nothing if not consistent. There were no depths to which Reinhardt was 9
not prepared to stoop, however illogical he became in the process. For a long 30
time he had complained about the absence of Gluck’s operas from the reper- 1
tory, but when Iphigénie en Aulide was finally staged, he dismissed the produc- 2
tion as a completely pointless exhumation, no doubt relying on his readers’ 3
short memory. The anti-Mahler clique was centred upon a group of conspira- 4
torial regulars at the Café Imperial. Richard Specht, to whom we owe a brilliant 5
polemic directed at Mahler’s enemies, characterized the group as follows: 6
7
Here was the epicentre of the hatred directed at Mahler. Here they discussed 8
and gossiped and polemicized and played their parts as member of the crit- 9
ical general staff. Nor was it only music reviewers who contributed to the 40
discussion: doctors, painters, librettists and those whom Mahler had failed to 41R
508 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 greet with a sufficient show of friendliness or whose invitations he had

2 snubbed or whose lovers had had to leave the corps de ballet on account of
3 their physical frailty or whose librettos had been rejected as unusable – all of
4 them came together here to discuss whatever ways they could find to destroy
5 Mahler.58
6
7 This war council was run by Robert Hirschfeld, a journalist who resented the
8 fact that his undoubted talents found little scope for deployment in a second-
9 rate rag, the Wiener Abendpost, with the result that he tried to reposition
10 himself among the front rank of Viennese critics by dint of a particularly
1 egregious aggressiveness. He had also prepared a performing edition of
2 Mozart’s Zaide for the Court Opera, an edition that he hoped would be an
3 artistic and commercial success but which in the event disappeared from the
4 repertory after only three performances, a state of affairs for which he
5 inevitably blamed Mahler. Even more wounding to his personal vanity was
6 Mahler’s decision to ban him from his circle of friends following a brief initial
7 interest. His need for attention having been brushed aside in this way, he
8 became Mahler’s most implacable enemy, and when the composer’s Sixth
9 Symphony received its first performance in Vienna on 4 January 1907, readers
20 of the Wiener Abendpost were regaled by Hirschfeld’s sneering sarcasm six
1 days later:
2
3 If he [Mahler] were capable of expressing tragic feelings through the power
4 of musical sound, he could readily dispense with the hammer and its fateful
5 blows. But he lacks that inner, genuine creative strength. And so in his tragic
6 symphony at the highest peak of excitement he reaches for the hammer. He
7 cannot help it. Where music fails a blow falls. That is quite natural. Speakers
8 whose words fail them at the decisive moment beat the table with their fists.59
9
30 After Hirschfeld, Mahler’s most pugnacious opponents were Richard
1 Wallaschek, who wrote for Die Zeit, Hans Liebstöckl and above all Paul
2 Stauber, who was Hirschfeld’s most obsequious vassal. Even Max Graf, who
3 had initially proved supportive of Mahler, turned into a vehement critic. The
4 court would never have forgiven Mahler for engaging in private feuds with
5 individual journalists, and so he never reacted publicly to these attacks but
6 repeatedly complained about them to his closest friends, revealing how deeply
7 he was affected by them. In 1909 Stauber published a pamphlet under the title
8 Mahler’s True Legacy that was intended to counter the study by Paul Stefan in
9 which Stefan had summed up Mahler’s achievements at the Court Opera and
40 attacked the director’s successor, Felix von Weingartner. Stauber sought by
41R every means in his power to ensure that the Mahler years appeared in the
blackest possible light. Central to his pamphlet is an interminable list of 1

singers who appeared under Mahler either on a trial basis or as guests and who 2
were then not taken on permanently. Certainly there were a lot of these trial 3
performances at this time, and there is no doubt that Mahler’s uncertainty as a 4
judge of voices played a role in this. But such a list cannot be paraded as a sign 5
of wholesale failure. Stauber hypocritically praises Mahler’s early years in 6
Vienna but then in an attempt to topple the ‘idol of the Mahler clique’ feigns 7
to detect a rapid decline in standards. In general Stauber paints an appallingly 8
lurid picture of incompetence based on a handful of indisputably true facts 9
and describes the second half of Mahler’s decade in Vienna as follows: 10
1
The opera house was bursting at the seams and threatening to fall apart, 2
discipline was lax, the repertory in a worse shape than it had been under the 3
blind and ailing Jahn. With only a handful of exceptions, of course, there was 4
only one point on which the whole company – soloists, orchestra, chorus, 5
ballet, administrative staff and stage crew – found themselves in agreement: 6
their hatred of a director whose tyrannical whims unfortunately reached the 7
level of rampant megalomania during his final period, making any further 8
productive collaboration out of the question. His ruthlessness now knew no 9
bounds.60 20
1
This was the language used to describe the director of the Vienna Court 2
Opera. Such a tone would now be inconceivable except when it is felt that the 3
rules of political correctness have been infringed. Only in Vienna are there still 4
vestigial signs of this bellicosity in cultural matters, especially when an institu- 5
tion as sacrosanct as the State Opera is concerned. Everything that could be 6
used to criticize Mahler was seized upon eagerly, generally against the back- 7
ground of anti-Semitism. A single example from Stauber’s pamphlet will serve 8
to illustrate this point. In its opening pages, Stauber refers to Paul Stefan as 9
Mahler’s advocate in absentia, describing him as ‘Dr Paul Stefan recte 30
Grünfeld’, implying that Stefan has attempted to camouflage his Jewish origins 1
behind an ‘Aryan’ name. A similar ploy was adopted when referring to Bruno 2
Walter, whose real name was Bruno Schlesinger, the violin melody from the 3
opening bars of the first melody of Mahler’s Fourth Symphony being underlaid 4
with the words ‘Ich heiße Schlesinger, doch ich nenn mich Bruno Walter’ (‘My 5
name is Schlesinger but I call myself Bruno Walter’). Nothing more needed to 6
be said, for contemporaries knew what this meant: we shan’t let the Jews get 7
away with changing their names, we’ll still catch them out. 8
The generally ill-received performances of Mahler’s works in Vienna were 9
particularly welcome fodder to these critics. That they were local premières 40
rather than world premières speaks for itself. Mahler knew what to expect. The 41R
510 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 only one of his works to be premièred in Vienna was the revised version of Das
2 klagende Lied. During his early years in the city only Reinhardt dared question
3 the success of his work at the Opera. As we can see from Stauber, this early
4 period was generally if hypocritically praised, but its duration became increas-
5 ingly curtailed, while other targets were found, chief of which were Mahler’s
6 symphonies whenever they were performed in Vienna. But there was plenty of
7 ammunition elsewhere: as we saw from the caricature reproduced above, there
8 was criticism of Mahler for driving away the best singers, for insulting the
9 orchestra, for dismissing members of the chorus and for failing to share his
10 critics’ view on visiting singers. And during the final years of his regime,
1 Mahler opened himself up to criticism by neglecting his duties as director. On
2 3 April 1907, while he was visiting Italy on a particularly troublesome trip, the
3 anti-Semitic and chauvinist Deutsche Zeitung plumbed new depths of malice:
4
5 The last few days have once again provided striking illustration of the
6 mismanagement from which the Vienna Court Opera is suffering at present.
7 Director Mahler, having secured a huge income which can only be called
8 exorbitant in view of his pernicious behaviour, is now away, ‘travelling in
9 symphonies’ – peddling his own products – and in the meantime everything
20 is going to wrack and ruin in the Court Opera. . . .
1 Herr Mahler is doing a tour of Italy, gathering in laurels and even more
2 money – we shall some time put together how many months’ leave he has
3 already extracted for his private affairs this year – and does not care in
4 the least how his deputy in Vienna is coping with the Court Opera in the
5 meantime.61
6
7 To the extent that contemporary discourse is no longer permeated by anti-
8 Semitism, we need to stress the anti-Semitic subtext of this piece in the
9 Deutsche Zeitung, the readership of which was well versed in spotting the rele-
30 vant signs: for them, it was unnecessary to attack Mahler explicitly as a Jew.
1 But the allusion was clear: the Court Opera’s Jewish director was peddling his
2 wares like some Jewish rag-and-bone man, even though he had extorted vast
3 sums of money from the poor Kaiser and the imperial court, while offering
4 them little in return.
5 But Mahler also had friends. Brusque, over-confident, standoffish and lost
6 to the world both by choice and by circumstance, he was by no means adept at
7 maintaining a circle of friends, and yet he retained the friendship of a sizeable
8 group of people, most of whom he had got to know during the first thirty years
9 of his life, although this is, of course, hardly exceptional in people’s lives in
40 general. As we have noted, he tended to ignore the pleasures and sufferings
41R of others. The ‘kindness of the egocentric’ prevented him from forming
friendships, and anyone who wanted to be his friend had to give up all hope of 1
seeing his affection returned in full measure. Even Alma had cause to be 2
dissatisfied on this score. That he none the less had a number of loyal friends 3
says much for the charisma of genius in general. 4
In Vienna it was largely the group of friends around Siegfried Lipiner that 5
remained Mahler’s closest family, at least until the time of his marriage to 6
Alma. A few more names may be added to this list. First and foremost there 7
was Emil Freund, a childhood friend from Iglau who was a year older than 8
Mahler and who had been practising law in Vienna since 1892. He was also 9
Mahler’s legal adviser, especially after 1897, when the latter returned to 10
Vienna. Friedrich Löhr was likewise a year older than Mahler, who got to 1
know him during his time at the University of Vienna. Löhr worked for a long 2
time as a private tutor, but following the foundation of the University’s 3
Institute of Archaeology he obtained a permanent post there as secretary, 4
functioning as a kind of non-professorial éminence grise. Löhr was the recip- 5
ient of many of Mahler’s most important early letters: in them the composer 6
opened up his heart in a way that is the prerogative of youth. The brothers 7
Heinrich and Rudolf Krzyzanowski were for a while Mahler’s close compan- 8
ions, not only on their long walks together. Heinrich went on to become a 9
Germanist, Rudolf a conductor like Mahler. Albert and Nanna (Nina) Spiegler 20
were also close friends at least until the time of Mahler’s marriage. He had been 1
introduced to Albert Spiegler by Lipiner, who had been married to Nina. And 2
then there was Guido Adler, another friend from Mahler’s youth who 3
remained unwavering in his support. Following his appointment to a chair in 4
musicology at the University of Vienna, he taught many young musicians in 5
the city, not least of whom was Webern. 6
With only a few of these friends – generally those from his youth – did 7
Mahler use the familiar pronoun ‘Du’. Lipiner was one of them, as, of course, 8
were his brothers-in-law Arnold and Eduard Rosé, his in-laws Carl and Anna 9
Moll (he was always far closer to Anna than to her husband) and, finally, 30
Gerhart Hauptmann, whose fraternal feelings to his fellow men and women no 1
doubt encouraged him to make the first move in the direction of greater intim- 2
acy. But Mahler could be just as cordial and friendly with people whom he did 3
not address as ‘Du’. He also stopped using the ‘Du’ form to former lovers once 4
the affair was over: Anna von Mildenburg and Selma Kurz are the two most 5
prominent examples of this punctiliousness on his part. Alfred Roller was a 6
different matter. No one understood him better in his work as a director, and 7
yet Mahler never progressed beyond a formal ‘Dear Roller’. No doubt he was 8
afraid that he might fall under an obligation and no longer be in control of his 9
own decisions if he allowed himself to become too friendly. The companion- 40
ship of the canteen was an abomination to him as was the fraternization of 41R
512 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 artists brought together by their work in the rehearsal room. As far as was
2 possible, Mahler always kept his distance from such friendships, and although
3 he tried to avoid seeming offensive and arrogant in this regard, he did not
4 always achieve that aim.
5 He also avoided becoming too close to people who were not of his own
6 generation. None of the young musicians in his entourage was as devoted to
7 him as Bruno Walter, whom he treated as a kind of a son. And Walter was
8 undoubtedly the most important conductor ever to come within his ambit of
9 influence. But it would never have occurred to Mahler to use the ‘Du’ form to
10 him. The same was true of Schoenberg, Berg and Webern. Mahler was even
1 more circumspect in his dealings with critics. The elderly Eduard Hanslick
2 lived long enough to take a benevolent interest in Mahler’s early appearances
3 in Vienna. Max Kalbeck, who was a friend and champion of Brahms, likewise
4 belonged to the older generation of Viennese critics – he was ten years older
5 than Mahler, to whom he was well disposed. Among the younger generation,
6 it was Julius Korngold, Hanslick’s successor on the Neue Freie Presse, who was
7 most supportive of Mahler. Whether Korngold’s support was tactically moti-
8 vated because he hoped to enlist Mahler’s services in promoting the career of
9 his son, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, must remain an open question, though in
20 June 1907 father and son were able to boast that Mahler had expressed his
1 bemusement and enthusiasm when the ten-year-old Erich Wolfgang played
2 him a cantata of his own composition. When asked how they might best
3 encourage the boy’s precocious talent, Mahler advised them to seek out
4 Alexander Zemlinsky: ‘He’ll give him everything he needs.’ When Zemlinsky
5 was no longer teaching the young Korngold, he wrote to his former pupil: ‘I
6 hear you’re now studying with X. Is he making any progress?’ Two writers on
7 music, Paul Stefan and Richard Specht, cannot be numbered among Mahler’s
8 closer circle of friends, and yet they remained his most loyal supporters long
9 after he was dead. Specht published two monographs on Mahler in 1905 and
30 1913, laying down the guidelines for future studies, while Stefan edited the
1 important collection of essays that was published in 1910 as a fiftieth-birthday
2 tribute to Mahler, the most important journalistic honour that he received.
3 Stefan was always proud to report that when Mahler heard about the volume,
4 he apparently expressed his shock: ‘You are, after all, my friend. You’ll ensure
5 that it does me no harm.’ Away from Vienna, there were three writers in
6 particular who believed in Mahler’s genius and published various writings on
7 the subject: Ernst Nodnagel, Ludwig Schiedermair and Max Marschalk,
8 who wrote for the Vossische Zeitung and who was Gerhart Hauptmann’s
9 brother-in-law.
40 Hauptmann was one of Mahler’s greatest admirers, an admiration no doubt
41R communicated to him by his brother-in-law, for Hauptmann himself had only
a limited understanding of music. He and Mahler appear to have met at a 1

dinner party at the home of Max Burckhard in Vienna, when the other guests 2
included Hauptmann’s second wife, Margarete Marschalk, whom he was to 3
marry in 1904, and Josef Kainz, the greatest actor of his age. From then on, the 4
Mahlers and Hauptmanns met almost every time that the latter were in 5
Vienna. Alma was given the task of keeping an eye on Margarete, who had the 6
habit of spending vast sums of money whenever she went shopping in Vienna. 7
Alma claims that Hauptmann felt great tenderness for Mahler, a feeling that 8
the latter did not fully reciprocate. Hauptmann told her that Mahler expressed 9
in clear terms what he himself felt only chaotically. He – Hauptmann – had 10
received more from Mahler than from any other person. But, according to 1
Alma, Hauptmann’s slowness of mind and convoluted way of speaking, which 2
Thomas Mann caricatures in the figure of Peeperkorn in The Magic Mountain, 3
annoyed the volatile and punctilious Mahler. Hauptmann was then working 4
on Emanuel Quint, and so the two men discussed the figure of Christ. A previ- 5
ously unpublished letter that Mahler wrote to Hauptmann on 7 March 1904, 6
no doubt shortly after their first encounter, is couched in such unusually 7
cordial terms as to make Alma’s claims barely tenable. The letter also attests to 8
the charm that Mahler could exert if his correspondent seemed to be worth 9
the effort: 20
1
Let’s say what’s on our minds so that nothing is lost in the course of careers 2
that will unfortunately keep us apart for far too long: that we belong together 3
and that the bond that has been forged so quickly without our intending it 4
shall continue to exist with our conscious knowledge and intent. You need 5
only to know that my life here is lonely and silent to judge how much it has 6
become a welcome habit in recent days to meet you and to talk and think 7
about everything that has been building up in me over the course of the years. 8
And this was only the beginning – only an initial attempt to reach an agree- 9
ment on what we feel and our way of expressing ourselves, just as two people 30
do who meet on the shore after a long sea journey and discover to their inex- 1
pressible delight that they are from the same country. Every afternoon in 2
recent days I have felt that I had to collect you from the Hotel Sacher for a 3
stroll, so that we might walk through the streets and squares together and 4
enjoy the hour and not think of the ones that were to follow.62 5
6
Among the writers in Vienna who repeatedly championed Mahler’s cause, 7
pride of place goes to Hermann Bahr. The two men never became friends, in 8
spite of Bahr’s concerted attempts at a closer relationship, but Bahr got his own 9
back by marrying Mahler’s cast-off lover, Anna von Mildenburg. Another 40
writer who repeatedly spoke out in defence of Mahler was Felix Salten, the 41R
514 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 influential cultural critic who was the author of both Bambi and, in all likeli-
2 hood, the pornographic classic Josefine Mutzenbacher. Only with the publica-
3 tion of Arthur Schnitzler’s complete diaries has it become possible to judge
4 Mahler’s importance for Schnitzler. It was known that Paul Stefan had invited
5 Schnitzler to contribute to his 1910 tribute, but otherwise Schnitzler made no
6 public statements on the composer, and even in his letters Mahler plays only a
7 marginal role. But a glance at Schnitzler’s diaries reveals the remarkable fact
8 that he attended almost all of Mahler’s concerts in Vienna and many of
9 Mahler’s opera performances, all of them faithfully recorded in his diary, albeit
10 without any more detailed information. One is tempted to speak of Schnitzler’s
1 idolization of Mahler. It helped, of course, that of all the writers associated with
2 Young Vienna, it was Schnitzler who had the closest links with music, even if
3 those links are rarely reflected in his writings. He played the piano to a high
4 standard, often performing duets with his mother. Together they worked
5 through the recently published piano-duet versions of Mahler’s symphonies,
6 which in the years before the rise of the gramophone were the only way of
7 getting to know such music within the privacy of one’s own home. Richard
8 Specht recalls that following the publication of his Sixth Symphony, Mahler
9 discovered that Schnitzler – an author he knew only in passing for he rarely
20 read contemporary literature – had been deeply moved by the sombre vision
1 of the symphony’s final movement. Mahler was galvanized: ‘This Schnitzler
2 must be a wonderful fellow!’ And he expressed the wish to meet the writer as
3 soon as possible, complaining that in Vienna people took far too little interest
4 in important contemporaries, a reluctance inspired either by fear of the
5 unknown, by the wish not to appear importunate or by the desire not to be
6 reckoned a member of a clique. In a letter that he wrote after Mahler’s death,
7 Schnitzler admits that he met the composer only once at the Rosés in October
8 1905 – perhaps this was the meeting that was arranged after Mahler had
9 expressed the wish to get to know him. To the extent that Schnitzler was
30 extremely reserved when it came to meeting people outside his own very
1 narrow circle of friends, who included Hofmannsthal, Beer-Hofmann and
2 Salten, closer contact was out of the question. Mahler, too, never frequented
3 the city’s literary circles, quite apart from the fact that he was too bound up in
4 his work at the Opera and too cut off from the rest of the world during the
5 summer months to be able to look much further than his own immediate
6 circle of acquaintances.
7 But Schnitzler’s contribution to the 1910 volume is clear evidence of the
8 veneration that he felt for Mahler. He initially intended it as a message
9 addressed to Mahler directly, but Stefan asked him to change the wording on
40 the grounds that even three years after he had stepped down from his post at
41R the Court Opera, Mahler’s standing in the city remained precarious, making
any association of personal good wishes with a public show of support prob- 1
lematical in the extreme. In his reply to Stefan, Schnitzler acknowledged the 2
validity of the editor’s argument, while also confessing his inability to find the 3
right words to pay tribute to a figure as exceptional as Mahler precisely because 4
he was so devoted to his art, but for Mahler’s sake he would try to find the right 5
turn of phrase. The final version may be cited as an example of the profound 6
effect that Mahler had on Schnitzler: 7
8
Of all the composers who are writing music today – and many of them are 9
genuinely dear to me – none has given me more than Gustav Mahler, for he 10
has given me joy and emotion of a kind that I owe to only the greatest of men. 1
I have scarcely ever felt the urge to offer an aesthetic or critical explanation 2
of the ultimate reasons for our most powerful artistic experiences; and it 3
seems to me that such an attempt is even more hopeless when applied to 4
music whose primeval laws are based on the rigid roots of mathematical 5
formulas and whose ultimate effects are decided within the most remote and 6
metaphysically vague limitations. All that is left to me, therefore, just as it is 7
often left as a final refuge for more pedantic music lovers, is to trust my own 8
innate feelings and to voice my gratitude for what I have received. It is a 9
wonderful feeling to be allowed to express such thanks on a day which, 20
perhaps filled with more hope than it is with fulfilment, signifies the high 1
point of a gifted artist’s life.63 2
3
In spite of its formulaic language, the present statement and, more especially, 4
Schnitzler’s far less formal diary entries leave us in no doubt about their 5
author’s capacity for being moved by Mahler’s music, making it all the more 6
regrettable that the two men never became friends: Mahler was of a literary 7
bent and particularly receptive to great literature and yet he never forged any 8
closer links with any of Vienna’s leading writers. He could hardly have found a 9
truer friend and a more kindred spirit than he would have done with 30
Schnitzler. 1
In the case of Karl Kraus there is not even any evidence of a personal 2
meeting with Mahler, an omission possibly due to the fact that Alma may have 3
got to know Kraus in her youth but failed to take away any very positive 4
impressions of him. Moreover, Kraus had even less understanding of music 5
than Schnitzler. True, he was certainly not unmusical, as is clear from 6
surviving recordings in which his declamation of couplets and scenes from 7
Offenbach’s operettas reveals a tremendous musicality even though he never 8
learnt to read music. But this seems to have been the full extent of his know- 9
ledge of music, and there is no evidence that he ever attended any concerts. 40
And his monastic lifestyle and preference for working at night left him just as 41R
516 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 isolated as Mahler. Here, too, we have good reason to regret that the two
2 men never got to know each other because – as Mahler said of himself and
3 Strauss – they were like two miners digging the same seam from opposite
4 sides. Each strove in his own way to combat slovenliness (in Kraus’s case it
5 was linguistic slovenliness) and to wage war on ignorance and indolence,
6 corruption and nepotism, Vienna’s false Gemütlichkeit and the debasement of
7 great art to the point where it was used to decorate the homes of middle-class
8 philistines. As a result, they often found that they shared the same enemies in
9 the Viennese press. Above all, Kraus sensed that there was a fundamental
10 anti-Semitism to almost all the attacks on Mahler, attacks that he pilloried in
1 turn. Mahler never expressed his views on Kraus, whereas there is some
2 evidence that Kraus recognized Mahler’s significance. On several occasions he
3 defended Mahler, the Viennese press being in his eyes the cause and embodi-
4 ment of practically every ill.
5 Schoenberg admired Kraus almost as much as Mahler, and in May 1906 he
6 wrote to Kraus as the most implacable critic of the local press, attempting to
7 interest him in seeing Mahler as the victim of that press. Schoenberg offered
8 to call on Kraus with Zemlinsky and tell him about the background to the
9 various campaigns against Mahler. We do not know whether this meeting ever
20 took place. But Schoenberg appears to have approached Kraus again in May
1 1907, when the attacks on Mahler reached their high point. Kraus replied to
2 the effect that at that particular juncture he was unable to take a stand on
3 Mahler’s behalf but would be happy to offer Schoenberg space in the pages of
4 Die Fackel to come to Mahler’s defence. Unfortunately Schoenberg did not take
5 Kraus up on his offer. Instead, Kraus contributed a handful of remarks on
6 the situation.64 But Kraus was on hand when Mahler lost the musical director-
7 ship of the Vienna Philharmonic’s concerts and when the local newspapers –
8 especially the ones that had spearheaded the campaign against him – shed
9 crocodile tears on the composer’s death. After all, he knew how much medioc-
30 rities and the depraved hate all that is exceptional.
1 It seems that on one occasion Kraus did go to the opera in order to hear
2 Mahler conduct a work by his favourite composer, Offenbach, whose Les
3 Contes d’Hoffmann Mahler staged in November 1901. Thirty years later Kraus
4 still remembered this performance when he saw Max Reinhardt’s production
5 in Berlin, the director’s last major undertaking in the city before he left the
6 country for a life of exile. Kraus had no time for Reinhardt and had invariably
7 been critical of his work. He was appalled by the 1931 production: ‘Quite apart
8 from the repeated mistreatment of the music, the total inadequacy of the
9 production was clear not least from the relatively unmutilated Antonia act
40 which even for those who do not retain a memory of Gustav Mahler’s magnif-
41R icent production demonstrates a poverty of invention that would put any
average municipal opera house to shame.’65 For thirty years, then, Kraus had 1
retained a memory of Mahler’s magnificent production. 2
In Paris, too, Mahler had an eminent and devoted circle of friends to which 3
we have already referred. It was Bertha Zuckerkandl who introduced Mahler 4
to her sister Sophie and her brother-in-law Paul Clemenceau. Through them 5
he got to know Paul’s brother, Georges. After studying medicine, Georges had 6
embraced a career in politics and in the wake of the Franco-Prussian War of 7
1870–1 joined the far left. He was entirely on the side of the Dreyfusards 8
during the Dreyfus Affair of the mid-1890s and published Zola’s famous 9
article, ‘J’accuse’, in his newspaper, L’Aurore. The other hero of the Dreyfus 10
Affair was Colonel Georges Picquart, a figure perhaps even more impressive 1
than Zola in that he was not a member of the left wing and needed to over- 2
come a soldier’s ingrained prejudices against the left and, more especially, 3
against a ‘Jewish traitor’ like Dreyfus. Following Dreyfus’s conviction, Picquart 4
was appointed chief of the army’s intelligence section, in which capacity it 5
became painfully clear to him that the real traitor was Major Ferdinand 6
Walsin-Esterhazy and that it was his own colleague Major Hubert-Joseph 7
Henry who was responsible for the campaign of vilification directed at 8
Dreyfus. For defending Dreyfus, Picquart was demoted and transferred over- 9
seas and it was only slowly that he was rehabilitated. He and Dreyfus were 20
finally pardoned in 1906, when Picquart was promoted to the rank of 1
brigadier-general. Georges Clemenceau was the French prime minister from 2
1906 to 1909 and again from 1917 to 1920. His brother and comrade-in-arms, 3
the latter’s wife Sophie and Georges Picquart formed the nucleus of Mahler’s 4
fan club in Paris. To their names must be added those of the mathematician 5
and politician Paul Painlevé, who himself later served as the prime minister of 6
the French Republic in two separate terms, and Baron Guillaume de 7
Lallemand. 8
This illustrious group of supporters was unwilling to be outdone in its 9
enthusiasm for Mahler. Picquart spoke fluent German and was highly 30
cultured. He and Lallemand played Mahler’s symphonies in the same arrange- 1
ments for piano duet as those used by Arthur Schnitzler and his mother. 2
Mahler had followed the Dreyfus Affair with a mixture of close interest and 3
indignation, his sensitivity to anti-Semitism leaving him in no doubt as to the 4
origins of the affair, and so he was delighted to meet the leading Dreyfusards 5
and especially the chief protagonist in the affair, who was still not fully re- 6
habilitated at the time of their first encounter. Like many others, the anti- 7
Jewish Alma had been angered by the pro-Dreyfus campaign in Vienna’s 8
liberal press and, like Karl Kraus, she was intuitively hostile to Dreyfus. If she 9
changed her allegiance, it was almost certainly because of her friendship with 40
Bertha Zuckerkandl and Sophie Clemenceau rather than any real enthusiasm 41R
518 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 for Dreyfus. Of all these French Mahlerians, it was Picquart whom Mahler
2 liked most of all, and whenever they came to Vienna he would arrange for a
3 kind of Dreyfus festival to be mounted at the Court Opera with particularly
4 distinguished casts. These Parisian Mahlerians were, so to speak, the political
5 pendant to the purely musical faction in Amsterdam.
6 This list of Mahler’s friends would not be complete without a mention of a
7 handful of individuals headed by Arnold Berliner. A physicist by training,
8 Berliner had been director of AEG before turning increasingly to writing
9 textbooks and editing scholarly journals, foremost of which was Die
10 Naturwissenschaften (Natural Sciences). Mahler, who owned a copy of his basic
1 handbook on physics, had been introduced to Berliner in Hamburg, where the
2 latter was working for AEG, and had taken English lessons with him. He later
3 moved to Berlin. Mahler invariably consulted him on questions relating to
4 modern science. They remained in contact until Mahler’s death. Berliner took
5 his own life in 1942, when he was due to be deported from his flat in the
6 capital. A manuscript containing his reminiscences of Mahler is no longer
7 extant. Mahler’s other friends in Hamburg included the musician Hermann
8 Behn, who is remembered for preparing piano arrangements of the symphonic
9 repertory, including Mahler’s own music. The composer Josef Bohuslav
20 Foerster and his wife, the soprano Berta Foerster-Lauterer, were also friendly
1 with Mahler both in Hamburg and later in Vienna, where Berta was engaged
2 at the Opera. A number of other figures accompanied Mahler only briefly on
3 his journey through life. In Leipzig they included the musician and journalist
4 Max Steinitzer. As we have observed, Mahler was by no means adept at
5 forming friendships, making the foregoing phalanx of friends all the more
6 impressive.
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The Eighth Symphony 7
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AHLER HAD A very clear idea of the quality of his music, and at no point 4
M in his life was he assailed by self-doubts on that score. And yet he was
never tempted to insist on his own importance in a spirit of self-celebration.
5
6
All the more remarkable is it, therefore, that in the case of his Eighth 7
Symphony he abandoned his usual reserve. In mid-August 1906, for example, 8
he wrote to Willem Mengelberg, a letter that also helps us to identify the work’s 9
terminus ad quem: 20
1
I have just finished my Eighth – it is the grandest thing I have done yet – and 2
so peculiar in content and form that it is really impossible to write anything 3
about it. Try to imagine the whole universe beginning to ring and resound. 4
These are no longer human voices, but planets and suns revolving. – More 5
when I see you.1 6
7
In spite of this, it is worth recalling that there are Mahlerians who, while 8
acknowledging that Mahler’s symphonies continued to improve in quality, 9
exclude the Eighth from this development, seeing it as unique and significant, 30
yet held back by regressive tendencies. Quite apart from its eruptive genesis, 1
Mahler had the impression that in many respects the Eighth was different from 2
all his previous symphonies. Four years were to pass between the completion 3
of the work and its first performance in Munich on 12 September 1910, an 4
occasion to which we shall return in due course. But it is striking that 5
throughout this period Mahler made little attempt to have the work 6
performed. One wonders whether deep-seated doubts had belatedly started to 7
assail him about the work’s relevance, a suggestion that has sometimes been 8
made in the past. But he was at least able to see how enthusiastic his supporters 9
were whenever he showed them the score. In late September 1909 he played 40
excerpts from it to Mengelberg and Diepenbrock and afterwards wrote to 41R
520 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Alma ‘It’s funny: the work always makes the same, typically powerful impres-
2 sion. It would be absurd if my most important work happened to be the easiest
3 to understand.’2 It needs to be stressed that Mahler was still describing his
4 Eighth Symphony as his most important work a year after he had completed
5 Das Lied von der Erde and shortly after he had put the finishing touches to the
6 Ninth. After all, there is no doubt that if Mahlerians all over the world were
7 asked to name the composer’s most important works, it would be Das Lied von
8 der Erde and the Ninth Symphony that came out at the top of the list.
9 Mahler saw things differently. By late June 1910, by which date he was in
10 Munich, working on the preliminary round of rehearsals for the first perform-
1 ance of the Eighth, his enthusiasm had reached new heights and he struck a
2 note that would be unbearably smug in the case of any other composer but
3 which is moving in Mahler’s case precisely because it is so unusual: ‘I’ve
4 already heard every passage in detail at least once, and “do believe he’s a
5 genius!” So far the world has experienced nothing of the kind, and billions of
6 years ago those primeval cells were pretty well organized, if one considers that
7 even then they contained the seed of future works such as this.’3 ‘I do believe
8 he’s a genius’ are words attributed to the leader of the St Petersburg orchestra
9 following a performance of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony under the composer’s
20 direction in 1902. Since then Mahler and Alma often quoted the phrase to
1 each other, half in jest. But there is no sense of jesting in what follows, for all
2 its relaxed tone. Particularly striking is Mahler’s reference to the growth of
3 monads, or entelechy, that had long been associated in his mind with the
4 whole project that was his Eighth Symphony.
5 For Mahler, the special status of the Eighth stemmed not only from its
6 unusual form as a symphonic cantata, but also, we may assume, from its excep-
7 tional genesis. Ever since he had developed his technique of composing only
8 during his summer vacation, he had never managed to complete a whole
9 symphony in the course of a single summer. In terms of the psychology of the
30 creative artist, it seems very much to have been the pressure to use the summer
1 months for this purpose that led to a creative block at the start of each vaca-
2 tion. This might explain Alma’s claim that during the first two weeks of his
3 summer holidays in Maiernigg in 1906 – the last summer that was completely
4 carefree for Mahler – her husband produced nothing at all. But in a later letter
5 to Alma, Mahler remembered things differently:
6
7 In art, as in life, I rely entirely on spontaneity. If I were obliged or compelled
8 to compose, I know for sure that I couldn’t put a single note to paper. Four
9 years ago, on the first morning of our summer in Maiernigg, I went up to my
40 shack, resolved to take it easy (for I was in dire need of rest at the time) and
41R to gather new strength. – As I entered that all-too-familiar room, the creator
THE EIGHTH SYMPHONY 521
spiritus took possession of me, held me in its clutches and chastised me for 1
eight weeks, until the work was all but finished.4 2
3
It was the ‘creator spiritus’ that is invoked in the opening bars of the symphony 4
and that raged for up to eight weeks between mid-June and mid-August 1906, 5
undoubtedly a record for such a large-scale work lasting some eighty minutes 6
in performance. Indeed, there are even some accounts that suggest the creative 7
burst lasted only six weeks in all. 8
The words that Mahler set are taken from two different sources, the 9
Pentecostal hymn attributed to Hrabanus Maurus (c. 780–856), who was 10
Abbot of Fulda from 822 to 842 and Archbishop of Mainz from 847, and the 1
final scene from Part Two of Goethe’s Faust, ‘Mountain Gorges, Forest, Cliff, 2
Wilderness’, also known as the ‘Anchorites’ Scene’, anchorites being the devout 3
hermits who live in caves in the mountains and provide the staffage for this 4
scene. The harnessing together of these two texts has given rise to countless 5
misunderstandings and even bewilderment for there seems to be no connec- 6
tion between the ninth-century father of the Church and the nineteenth- 7
century prince of poets. The most famous expression of this attitude was 8
voiced by Hans Mayer, whose training was literary rather than musical and 9
who asked, rhetorically: ‘Should we also mention the theologically and poeti- 20
cally absurd idea of trying to force together the hymn, “Veni creator spiritus”, 1
and the Chorus Mysticus from Part Two of Faust in an attempt to forge a 2
musical and spiritual entity?’ There was, Mayer argued, a ‘monstrous discrep- 3
ancy’ between the two texts.5 Dieter Borchmeyer, on the other hand, has 4
pointed out that the discrepancy is not in fact as great as it appears and that 5
Goethe not only knew and valued the ‘Veni creator spiritus’ (a point that 6
Mahler cannot have known) but even prepared a German translation and 7
asked his friend Carl Friedrich Zelter to set it to music.6 Zelter evidently made 8
several attempts to do so but in spite of frequent reminders from Goethe he 9
failed to complete the setting. Particularly interesting is Goethe’s interpretation 30
of this Pentecostal hymn as an appeal to genius and, as such, a work likely to 1
speak to all strong and intelligent people.7 It was this that attracted Mahler to 2
the hymn, for it reflects his faith in the power of creativity. In short, this setting 3
is Goethean rather than Catholic in spirit. 4
That the work’s perspective is counter-chronological, with Faust adum- 5
brating the Pentecostal hymn, rather than the other way round, is clear from 6
the symphony’s genesis. While conducting two performances of Le nozze di 7
Figaro in Salzburg in August 1906, Mahler spoke at length with Richard 8
Specht, who made a note of their conversation after the composer’s death. 9
Mahler had explained that it had long been his intention to set the final scene 40
from Faust, including the words of the Mater Gloriosa. All earlier attempts to 41R
522 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 set these words, he claimed, had been too saccharine or weak. He was
2 undoubtedly thinking of Liszt’s Faust Symphony, which ends with a setting of
3 the Chorus Mysticus. In the case of Schumann’s version, he was perhaps a little
4 unjust. But the idea was evidently a long-standing one, albeit a little vague. At
5 that point Mahler had stumbled upon a copy of a book containing Hrabanus
6 Maurus’s hymn and in a flash had seen before his mind’s eye the whole of the
7 symphony’s opening section, to which the final scene from Faust had struck
8 him as the ‘answer’.8 Mahler also had a very specific passage in mind, allowing
9 him to forge a link between two texts that seem to inhabit completely different
10 worlds and ages. This is the plea for light to fire our senses in the middle of
1 Hrabanus Maurus’s hymn: ‘Accende lumen sensibus, / Infunde amorem
2 cordibus’ – ‘May light fire our senses, pour love into our hearts.’ (Goethe’s
3 translation of these lines is both freer and bolder: ‘Ignite lights in our senses,
4 joyful courage in our hearts.’) At the final rehearsal in Munich, Mahler drew
5 Webern’s attention to this passage: ‘The passage accende lumen sensibus forms
6 the bridge to the concluding section of Faust. This spot is the cardinal point of
7 the entire work.’9 Of course, Mahler knew Goethe far better than the world
8 of medieval Catholicism, and so he must have been particularly touched to
9 discover that the Pentecostal hymn anticipates Goethe’s quasi-religious
20 approach to light: ‘Light and spirit, the former ruling in the physical world, the
1 latter in the moral world, are the highest conceivable indivisible energies,’ we
2 read in one of Goethe’s Maxims and Reflections.10
3 Mahler was of course aware that formally speaking he was striking out in an
4 entirely new direction with this work, and on this point too he said as much to
5 Richard Specht. It surprised him that there had been no previous symphony
6 that involved singing from start to finish. In his Second, Third and Fourth
7 Symphonies he himself had used the human voice to summarize ideas which,
8 as he put it, could be expressed only at extreme length in a purely symphonic
9 form. But now he was using the human voice as a musical instrument – the
30 opening movement, Mahler explained, was entirely symphonic in form and
1 yet sung from beginning to end. He could have added that the second move-
2 ment does at least have a lengthy, purely instrumental introduction.
3 The opening movement is the more conventional of the two, a convention-
4 ality positively demanded by the woodcut-like nature of the text as compared
5 to the elderly Goethe’s sublime way with words. When set beside the poly-
6 phonic miracles of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh Symphonies, there is no getting
7 round the fact that the Eighth reveals a reduction in the work’s compositional
8 complexity to the point where the textures are predominantly homophonic. Of
9 course, Mahler did not suddenly lose his skills as a composer. Rather, he was
40 concerned to provide an archaic, hymn-like guise for an archaic, hymnic text,
41R and to that extent his recourse to the oratorio tradition in his choral writing is
a reflection of his need to put across his message as clearly as possible. From 1
that point of view he would certainly not have agreed with those commenta- 2
tors who regard this as a stepping back or even as a regressive move. If we 3
accept this, there remain enough details which, each wondrous in its own way, 4
contribute to the overall impact of the work. The simple expedient of repeating 5
the thunderous cry of ‘Veni’, a repeat not anticipated by the poet, and of adding 6
the trumpets and trombones to underscore this fanfare-like appeal, is enor- 7
mously effective. The descending fourth of the first ‘Veni’ provides a germ cell 8
for the whole of the opening part, and yet it also leaves its mark on the second 9
part of the symphony, too, as does the call of ‘Accende’, which acquires its 10
incandescent quality from the fact that – nonsensically from a linguistic point 1
of view – there is a decisive pause between the first and second syllables, a 2
pause that some conductors take as a licence to disrupt the flow of the music 3
completely: a few milliseconds on the part of a sensitive conductor will make 4
all the difference here. 5
Once one has heard this moment in a good performance, the power of the 6
uplift is unforgettable, and even the elderly Adorno could still write enthusias- 7
tically about it in a performance of the work under Webern in Vienna. 8
Together with the leaping intervals at ‘Infirma nostri corporis’, the uplift and 9
the downward plunge of the ‘Veni creator spiritus’ and the ‘Accende lumen 20
sensibus’ form the basic musical material of the work as a whole. The greater 1
density of the second part does not make it easy for the listener to recognize 2
the extent to which the motivic material of the first part has left its mark on the 3
second movement, a circumstance that already invalidates the reproach that 4
concert reviewers continue to level at the work even today, namely, that the 5
two halves do not hang together. The texts may date from periods that are a 6
thousand years apart, but, musically speaking, the two parts may be described 7
as twins which, although they may not initially look alike, share the same 8
genetic material. 9
The second part begins in E flat minor, a reaction against the E flat major of 30
the end of the first part. The introduction is arguably the most magnificent 1
section of the entire work. After the wildly jubilant note of the ‘Gloria’ that 2
ends the first part of the symphony and that includes the full organ, the listener 3
is left dazzled. Mahler does not say how long the break should last, but the 4
beginning of the second part leaves itself and the listener time to recover. 5
We are reminded of a man who, blinded by the snow, gradually regains his 6
sight and realizes just how high his route has brought him. The outlines 7
become clearer and a vast space opens up inhabited by an unprecedented 8
wealth of detail. Over the gently drifting sounds of the muted first violins, the 9
vista slowly opens up, and we can see both downwards, where the pizzicato 40
cellos and double basses pick out our laborious ascent, and upwards, where 41R
524 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 flute and clarinet make it plain that the highest point has not yet been
2 reached. A vast gulf opens up between the highest and lowest instruments,
3 suggesting an infinite expanse, and only gradually does the middle register
4 fill with the entry of additional winds. No less magnificent is the first choral
5 entry, ‘Waldung, sie schwankt heran’, the words disjointedly stammered by
6 the chorus as it brings life to this primeval and supernatural world, following
7 Goethe’s instructions as if they were stage directions for a Symphonie
8 dramatique – Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and La Damnation de Faust were
9 evidently two of the models for this scene. These strange and sporadic syllabic
10 sounds reveal a compositional boldness that looks forward to word settings of
1 a much later period.
2 Only when the Pater Ecstaticus enters with his ‘Ewiger Wonnebrand’, to be
3 followed by a regular line-up of soloists, does it become impossible to avoid
4 associations of a string of arias sung by members of a glee club taking their
5 turns on the podium. If Goethe’s scene seems barely stageable, Mahler’s setting
6 resembles nothing so much as a concert performance of an opera. Many
7 writers have pointed out that the ending of Goethe’s play defies a theatrical
8 presentation, Albrecht Schöne, for example, asking whether only film could do
9 justice to it. This non-performable aspect of the work becomes a problem for
20 Mahler only because, swayed by his feelings of respect for the original, his
1 setting of the words gives musical prominence to one mythically mystical
2 figure after another, each of whom is accompanied by puzzling descriptions
3 and who sings words that are uniquely difficult to understand. It is not until its
4 final section that the work once again breathes air from other planets. Indeed,
5 there is an almost perceptible jolt when the Chorus mysticus enters with the
6 words ‘Alles Vergängliche’ and draws us back to the peak of Mahler’s inventive
7 powers. It is no accident that in terms of its musical language and atmosphere
8 this chorus recalls the final section of the Second Symphony, bringing the work
9 to an end with a similarly powerful climax.
30 The Eighth Symphony continues to divide opinion. It is often performed on
1 festive occasions and to that extent may be compared to Wagner’s Die
2 Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Beethoven’s Ninth. At the same time, however,
3 Adorno raised such serious objections to it in his influential book on Mahler
4 that one rubs one’s eyes in amazement at finding a Mahlerian of his eminence
5 venting his spleen on the work in this way. Dismissing it as a ‘giant symbolic
6 shell’, Adorno argued that the work’s authority derived from the dogmatic and
7 canonical gesture of its words. It was a representation of the collective spirit,
8 anticipating an age of collectivism that Mahler sensed but which he would
9 have done better to have resisted, instead of joining in. Here Adorno even uses
40 the term ‘offence’ to sum up his attitude to Mahler’s inability to resist this
41R temptation, an extreme expression of stigmatizing opprobrium that reflects the
disappointment of the lover at an error on the part of the object of his desire.11 1
But the Eighth Symphony has also been accused of selling out to the desire on 2
the part of Wilhelmine Germany to create a total work of art that would estab- 3
lish and celebrate values in an age devoid of values. 4
Essentially, this is the same discussion as the one we had over the final 5
movement of the Seventh Symphony when compared to that of the Sixth, 6
except that no one has yet dared to interpret the Eighth as a work of inauthen- 7
ticity, a work of ‘what if?’, with its own inbuilt critique. But by this date in his 8
career Mahler was conceptually and musically too bound up with the logical 9
consequence of his increasingly radical style for such a reproach to appear at 10
all convincing. Why should he have attempted to create a gigantic work of total 1
art in 1906, at a time when such a work was largely discredited? Composing 2
music to accompany the unveiling of Klinger’s titanic monument to Beethoven 3
is not the same as composing music in the spirit of that monument. True, the 4
Second Symphony contains hints of that approach, and yet even there they are 5
already nipped in the bud. There is no reason why a concept that Mahler was 6
unable to realize in 1890 should suddenly have been resurrected in 1906 after 7
the radically progressive instrumental symphonies of the composer’s middle 8
period. But nor is it possible to interpret the two parts of this dramatic 9
symphonic cantata as an undercover critique of the Holy Ghost or of the belief 20
in a Creator or of the idea of erotic love hymned at the end of Faust. Mahler’s 1
exegetes are faced with the problem that whereas the note of affirmation struck 2
by the previous symphonies may be read as a negation in disguise, this is 3
emphatically not true of the Eighth. And whereas Adorno and many like him 4
may be able to get away with the notion of ‘brokenness’ as a central element in 5
Mahler’s style, this does not help us in the case of the Eighth. Attempts to look 6
back to the earlier works raise more questions than they answer. The Eighth 7
stands on its own, casting no backward glances, an assertion with which 8
Mahler, too, would no doubt have agreed. We may suppose that in his 9
Pentecostal creative frenzy Mahler did not fully notice how he had abandoned 30
the most advanced bridgeheads of his compositional style when setting two 1
texts that were particularly close to his heart: the hymn to the spirit of 2
creativity and the hymn to all-embracing erotic love, as Mahler explained in an 3
important letter to Alma dated June 1909.12 In short, Mahler was unaware that 4
he was in part reverting to a kind of conservatism that he had left behind him 5
with his First Symphony. Adorno’s critique is by no means far-fetched, even if 6
we may reject its angry tone. 7
Recent writers have tended to defend the work at all costs and treated it as 8
the monumental piece that Mahler never intended it to be, and yet in advancing 9
this view, they have very real difficulty ignoring the more problematical aspects 40
of the piece.13 If Mahler noticed too late that he had allowed the creator spiritus 41R
526 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 to blind him to weaknesses in the work – they are weaknesses only when judged
2 by his own high standards – then he buried this understanding deep in his
3 heart, for at no point did he voice any doubts or reservations. It seems reason-
4 able to assume that inasmuch as he viewed the creative process as something
5 sacrosanct, he felt that it was no longer permissible to rework or improve the
6 result of this furor. Its sanctity stemmed not from the fact that he prided himself
7 on being a Sturm und Drang genius before whose abilities he prostrated himself
8 in awestruck obeisance but because – especially in the case of his Eighth
9 Symphony – he saw himself as the mouthpiece of a higher principle: entelechy
10 had chosen him, and the spiritus creator had whipped him into submission
1 over an eight-week period until he produced the piece.
2 In the letter that he wrote to Alma on 8 June 1910, Mahler struck out a
3 sentence: ‘If something is expected of me, I never shirk it.’14 The Eighth
4 Symphony, with its two texts combined in this particular way, demanded to be
5 composed; entelechy had forced this task upon him as a result of his old love
6 of the end of Goethe’s drama and a chance encounter with an old book on
7 moral edification. It was not up to him to question the validity of this
8 Pentecostal experience. And when the work’s first performance four years later
9 brought him the supreme rewards of such enthusiastic devotion on the part of
20 so many people, it was understandably difficult for him to weigh up the
1 respective merits of the undeniably weaker passages in the score and the
2 equally undeniable power of those passages that continue to leave their mark
3 on listeners today. To quote the closing lines of Faust, even earth’s insufficiency
4 here finds fulfilment.
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If we view the operations of one of the leading musico-dramatic institutions 4
in Germany – the Imperial and Royal Court Theatre – from the outside, we 5
shall find ourselves faced by a motley assortment of performances of the most 6
varied kind and the most contradictory styles. The only thing that emerges 7
with any clarity from all this is that none of these performances bears the 8
stamp of correctness and that if it takes place at all, it is not from inner neces- 9
sity but because of some dire outward circumstance. It is impossible to point 20
to a single performance in which the end and the means are in total accord. 1
In every case, lack of talent, the faulty training or inappropriate use of certain 2
singers and the inadequate preparation and resultant insecurity of others, to 3
say nothing of the rough and listless delivery of the chorus, gross blunders in 4
the production, the almost complete inability to arrange the onstage action, 5
the crude and senseless acting of some members of the cast and, finally, the 6
grave errors and negligence in the interpretation and performance of the 7
music, with its neglect of nuance and lack of coordination between orchestra 8
and singers, make themselves felt somewhere or other in a more or less 9
disturbing and even offensive manner. Most of these performances bear all 30
the hallmarks of a heedless devil-may-care attitude against which the efforts 1
of individual singers to step outside the artistic framework by seeking 2
applause for their particular achievements appear all the more repellent and 3
make the performance as a whole seem altogether absurd.1 4
5
appearances, the foregoing is not a philippic directed at Mahler 6
I N SPITE OF
by critics such as Reinhardt, Hirschfeld and Liebstöckl but is taken from a
memorandum that Wagner published in the Viennese Botschafter in 1863, his
7
8
aim being to nudge the Court Opera closer to the goal of ‘ennobling the 9
nation’s morals and taste’, a goal already pursued by the Emperor Joseph II. 40
Like Mahler, Wagner had learnt all about the opera industry from the inside, 41R
528 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 working his way up through the ranks and, on the basis of experiences not
2 dissimilar to Mahler’s, proposing concrete suggestions for improving the situ-
3 ation: the number of performances, he argued, should be cut by half, French
4 and Italian operas should be performed by non-subsidized commercial
5 companies, and the running of the opera company should be divided up
6 among three directors with individual responsibilities for voice, orchestra and
7 staging. (Forty years before Mahler, Wagner was already advocating the
8 creation of a director’s post with greater powers than was usual at this period.)
9 Ultimately Wagner was moving in the direction of a festival-type administra-
10 tion similar to the one that he later implemented in Bayreuth, his emphasis on
1 the German repertory necessarily leading to the exclusive promotion of his
2 own particular works.
3 We have already had occasion to quote Mahler’s resigned remark from 1906,
4 when he noted the impossibility of raising an opera company that operated
5 almost every day to the level that he had in mind. It was a logical consequence
6 of Wagner’s admonitions of 1863. Shortly before he stepped down from his
7 post, Mahler gave a long interview to his old shield-bearer Ludwig Karpath in
8 the course of which he observed that:
9
20 No theatre in the world can be maintained at such a pitch that each perform-
1 ance is like the next. And it is this that repels me about the theatre, for of
2 course I should like all performances to be on the same high level and to
3 achieve an ideal that it is simply not possible to attain. No one was able to
4 achieve this before me, and no one will do so after me. And since I have come
5 to this conclusion after ten years in the post, I am leaving a post that was at
6 my disposal right up to the time that I took my definitive decision, a point
7 that I can you assure you is true.2
8
9 Clearly Mahler was no longer thinking of the idea, expressed in conversation
30 with Bernhard Scharlitt a year earlier, of a summer festival of works by Mozart
1 and Wagner in a theatre on the Kahlenberg, for example – the sort of festival
2 that was to be established fifteen years later in Salzburg. After all, he himself
3 had described it as a pipe dream and evidently did not see himself as being
4 in any position to pursue such a project, especially in Vienna, where he would
5 have had to face a strong headwind. We can only speculate on his attitude
6 to the Salzburg Festival, but from everything we know, it seems that he would
7 have been enthusiastic about it. In his model productions with Roller, he
8 had always succeeded in achieving the standards that he (and Wagner) had
9 had in mind, but those achievements were limited to these performances,
40 and only when he taxed his resources to their limits. Mahler’s work with Roller
41R led to a veritable revolution in the theatre but it necessarily meant a reduction
ANNUS TERRIBILIS 529
in the number of performances that Mahler conducted. To that extent Mahler 1

was following Wagner’s advice, but it applied only to the performances that 2
he himself conducted, not to those delegated to other conductors. Nor was 3
there any point in arguing in favour of a reduction in the number of perform- 4
ances – if he had suggested halving their number, as Wagner had proposed, 5
his superiors would simply have doubted his sanity. Let us not forget that 6
before Mahler arrived in the city, no one in charge of the Vienna Court Opera 7
had demanded improved production values and higher dramaturgical 8
standards. As long as the orchestra and singers were up to the mark, then 9
everyone was happy. What Mahler and Roller did, they achieved on their 10
own initiative. Recent decades had seen an increase in the number of perform- 1
ances, an increase shared by every court theatre of the period, for this was 2
the only way in which income could be increased – ticket prices were 3
already too high for them to be raised any further. To do so was not a viable 4
alternative. 5
It was a source of considerable despair for Mahler that although he gradu- 6
ally managed to raise the standard of the performances of works by Gluck, 7
Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner that he himself directed and conducted, 8
bringing them up to the sort of level that Wagner had had in mind and that 9
was the starting point for Mahler’s own theatrical vision, the other works in the 20
repertory – French operas from Meyerbeer to Massenet and Italian operas 1
from Rossini to verismo – remained on the same low level that Wagner had 2
rightly pilloried forty years earlier. (It may be added in passing that in the case 3
of the French and Italian repertory, Mahler demonstrated the sort of Austro- 4
German arrogance that was typical of his age and that can be traced back to 5
Wagner’s own views on the subject.) Musical standards were raised only when 6
Mahler succeeded in signing up a whole series of new conductors willing to 7
invest more time in this area of the repertory: Franz Schalk from 1900, Bruno 8
Walter from 1901, Francesco Spetrino from 1903 and Alexander Zemlinsky 9
from 1907. All were conductors of an eminence previously unknown at the 30
Court Opera. In this regard, Mahler was completely lacking in vanity and set 1
no store by wanting his star to shine more brightly in the company of lesser 2
lights. But after a number of years of self-sacrificial work in harness to Vienna’s 3
opera industry, it had become clear to him that his own work as a composer 4
was more and more important to him and that he needed to champion his 5
music himself. Titurel’s admonition in Wagner’s Parsifal, ‘My son Amfortas, 6
are you officiating?’, had long kept him in his post, serving the great master- 7
pieces of music, but Titurel’s voice was growing weaker, and Mahler’s duties 8
were starting to tire him. 9
But there were two things above all that increased this sense of weariness. 40
First, there was Mahler’s failed attempt to get Strauss’s Salome staged at the 41R
530 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Court Opera, a failure that affected him deeply and left him feeling not only
2 embittered but also embarrassed vis-à-vis Strauss: regarded by many outsiders
3 as the plenipotentiary of the musical life of Vienna, he had been unable to
4 persuade his own company to stage the one modern work that he held in the
5 highest regard and that was being staged by other Court Theatres in Germany
6 and elsewhere. The Salome affair was not the main reason for his resignation,
7 but it was an important stage in that process. Richard Specht was exaggerating
8 when he claimed that ‘it was clear to him that he would go from the moment
9 that he failed to defeat sanctimonious servility and in the face of the court
10 theatre’s censorship to force through a performance of the most brilliant music
1 drama of the turn of the century’,3 but there is none the less a grain of truth to
2 his statement. The second hard fact was the horrendous deficit of 1905 and the
3 concomitant feeling that although his superiors had reacted with surprising
4 restraint, Mahler had lost some of the support that he had enjoyed until then.
5 Even so, we must be wary of assuming that this decision was a fait accompli,
6 as Specht and many of Mahler’s friends later claimed, for the evidence is far
7 from unequivocal.
8 There are signs, easy to overlook but none the less significant, that Mahler’s
9 actions were by no means single-minded and his decision far from final, for in
20 the middle of April 1907, shortly after his return from Italy, we find him
1 writing to Julius von Weis-Osborn in Graz and expressing the hope that he will
2 see his correspondent again soon, perhaps in the company of the latter’s friend,
3 Ernst Decsey, at a performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide. The production
4 had opened on 18 March and was the last time that Mahler and Roller worked
5 together. But there is nothing in Mahler’s letter to indicate that he regarded this
6 as their final collaboration, for he writes that ‘I think it is the best thing Roller
7 and I have achieved so far. Anyway we have advanced a fair distance along our
8 road’.4 This hardly sounds as if Mahler had been carrying around with him his
9 letter of resignation in his back pocket. Rather, one has the impression that he
30 had every intention of continuing his work with Roller and advancing further
1 down the road that they had chosen for themselves.
2 Even so, the year 1907 started badly and continued in the same vein. With
3 hindsight, Mahler’s decision to resign looks like the logical consequence of
4 these events, but was in fact the result of complex developments that might
5 have ended differently if Mahler’s mood had not been so black and if sections
6 of the local press had not surpassed themselves in terms of their hate campaign
7 against him. As we have seen, Mahler had made up his mind in principle to
8 leave his post in Vienna, and yet the situation could have turned out differently
9 if circumstances had been more favourable. It may be added in passing that
40 neither of the terms ‘dismissal’ or ‘discharge’ is the right one here. Mahler’s
41R appointment was for life, so that he could not simply announce his resignation.
And if he had decided to throw in the towel, he would have forfeited all his 1
rights, especially his own pension and Alma’s widow’s pension. Mahler was 2
always worried about his financial situation, and so resignation was never an 3
issue. As a result, his only option was to ask the emperor to ‘relieve’ him of his 4
post, to quote the official terminology. In short, he had to be allowed to retire 5
and in that way to draw his pension. Once he was in receipt of this pension, he 6
could no longer work in Vienna either as a conductor or a theatre adminis- 7
trator, a point codified in the decree that the emperor later signed. But there 8
was nothing to prevent Mahler from assuming a similar position elsewhere. 9
There is a certain symbolic rightness to the fact that the press campaign 10
against Mahler began on 1 January 1907 and continued virtually unabated 1
until the day of his resignation. The witch-hunt was launched by a certain 2
Hans Puchstein in the Deutsches Volksblatt. It needs to be remembered that in 3
a city with as many newspapers as Vienna it was not one or two that were 4
against Mahler but practically all of them, even if the few that spoke out in his 5
defence were among the most influential and liberal. The fact that the left-of- 6
centre Neue Freie Presse was on the whole pro-Mahler may give the impression 7
that the composer had important friends in the city, but the paper’s readership 8
represented only a small part of Vienna’s population. All who subscribed to 9
Pan-German ideals and held conservative views and whose opposition to the 20
Jews ranged from covert prejudice to open anti-Semitism supported Georg 1
von Schönerer or Karl Lueger and read the Wiener Mittagszeitung, the 2
Reichspost, the Wiener Sonn- und Montagszeitung, the Ostdeutsche Rundschau, 3
the Deutsche Zeitung, the Deutsches Volksblatt, the Österreichische Volkszeitung 4
or the Montags-Revue. (In several cases, the paper’s Pan-German agenda was 5
manifest from its title, while Karl Kraus renamed the Deutsches Volksblatt ‘our 6
Christian Taagblaatt’ in deference to its sheep-like readership.) All of them 7
capitalized on the witch-hunt against Mahler, and although their attacks 8
amounted to small-arms fire when set beside the big guns of the Neue Freie 9
Presse, the combined effect was substantial. And so Puchstein opened the 30
proceedings in the Deutsches Volksblatt, regretting the gaps in the Court Opera 1
repertory (and in doing so identifying an undeniable weak point in Mahler’s 2
direction, for the house’s repertory was distinctly one-sided) and criticizing 3
the director’s choice of singers, a criticism always likely to go down well in 4
a city obsessed with voices. In particular Puchstein attacked two of the 5
singers whom Mahler held in especially high regard, Selma Kurz and Marie 6
Gutheil-Schoder. The former was said to be a dispassionate singing machine, 7
the latter technically wayward. In both cases, there was a certain truth to 8
Puchstein’s comments, but in privileging these negative aspects to the 9
exclusion of all others, he failed to take account of Kurz’s vocal artistry and 40
Gutheil-Schoder’s outstanding gifts as a singing actress. 41R
532 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 On 4 January 1907 Mahler introduced his Sixth Symphony to Viennese

2 audiences at the city’s Musikverein. Significantly, the orchestra that he used
3 was neither the Philharmonic nor the Court Opera orchestra but that of the
4 Konzertverein, which had invited him to conduct one of its concerts devoted
5 to new works. By local standards, the performance was remarkably successful
6 both with the general public and with the orchestra. But there was a hard core
7 of Mahler’s opponents, whose protest took the form of children’s trumpets
8 blown from the balcony. Yet this was as nothing when compared with the
9 reviews, the majority of which were negative in tone. But even Mahler’s old
10 supporters had difficulty with a work that is undoubtedly hard to digest. After
1 all, the composer himself had said that it posed riddles that could be solved
2 only by listeners familiar with its five predecessors. He may also have
3 committed the error of subtitling the piece in the programme his ‘Tragic’
4 symphony, a description seen by many critics as challenging Beethoven. Even
5 Max Kalbeck, Brahms’s friend and biographer and essentially well disposed to
6 Mahler, barely knew where to begin with the work. Mahler had been profligate
7 with his instrumental resources, Kalbeck wrote, and was wrong to use ‘the
8 primitive tools of barbaric natural music and folk music’, by which he meant
9 the cowbells, switch and, of course, the infamous hammer blows that caused a
20 considerable stir. (In a further revision, Mahler had eliminated the third of
1 these blows. The question of whether or not it should be reinstated continues
2 to divide opinion.)
3 Writing in the Neue Freie Presse, Julius Korngold remained the most sympa-
4 thetic of Mahler’s critics, and yet even he had problems with the piece.
5 Alluding to Haydn’s ‘Surprise Symphony’ (known in German as the
6 ‘Symphonie mit dem Paukenschlag’), he expressed particular reservations
7 about the work’s final movement, asking whether it was in fact possible ‘for the
8 ear to accommodate the extreme polyphony that is inflicted on the listener in
9 the tangle of voices of modern scores’. Turning to the instrumentation, he
30 missed the smooth blending together of the different elements, hearing instead
1 a realistic juxtaposition of them and even instrumental dissonances. He
2 concluded that although the Sixth Symphony represented an advance on
3 Mahler’s earlier works in terms of its unified symphonic structure, its realistic
4 effects would tax any listener’s nerves and ultimately become intolerable. Not
5 for the first time and certainly not for the last, other critics objected that the
6 outward resources lavished on the work merely sought to paper over its inner
7 hollowness. As Max Vancsa wrote in Die Wage, ‘If you take away the vast
8 forces for which it is scored, no sense of tragic emotion remains, and only a
9 minimum of emotion in general.’5
40 The leaders of the anti-Mahler faction naturally gave their all. We have
41R already quoted from Robert Hirschfeld’s review in the Wiener Abendpost,
comparing the hammer blows with an orator thumping his fist on a desk 1
because he has run out of ideas. Writing in the Neues Wiener Journal, Heinrich 2
Reinhardt went even further: ‘Brass! Plenty of brass! An unprecedented 3
amount of brass! Even more brass! Nothing but brass! And that was just the 4
opening movement. The second movement is the third because the third one 5
is the second. The contrapuntal and thematic writing is nil.’ And Reinhardt 6
went on to infer the current state of the Court Opera from the musical quali- 7
ties of the symphony: ‘The Vienna Court Opera has sunk to a new low that 8
few people would have thought possible.’ Nor was this his final insult, for he 9
proceeded to claim that it was with ‘rabbit-like fecundity’ that Mahler 10
produced a new, larger-than-life work each year, the latest specimen revealing 1
the most ‘hopeless lack of ideas’. In the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt, Hans 2
Liebstöckl likewise spoke of a ‘shameful impoverishment of invention’ and 3
‘impotence of inspiration’. Mahler was ‘on a permanent pilgrimage’, atoning for 4
works that were an expression of ‘original sin’. ‘He is still writing in exactly the 5
same way that he did at the beginning. The only thing new is the celesta and 6
the cowbells in the orchestra.’ If these passages have been quoted, it is not 7
because they differ substantially from earlier reviews of Mahler’s music but 8
because they indicate the tone that was struck at the start of 1907, a tone 9
which, in contrast to earlier campaigns, continued to resonate until the writers 20
had achieved their declared aim of destroying the hated director and 1
wounding him where he was most vulnerable: his own compositions, the 2
singers whom he engaged, his work at the Court Opera (although it was only 3
with difficulty that his enemies were able to criticize his own productions) and 4
his increasing absences from Vienna. 5
Mahler had only a few days in which to regain his breath before Richard 6
Wallascheck, writing in Die Zeit on 12 January, heaped more coals on the fire. 7
Wallascheck had the temerity to rubbish the recent productions of Mahler and 8
Roller, to complain about the state of the repertory and to report that the 9
singers at the Court Opera were increasingly unhappy about the fact that while 30
Mahler was pleased to grant himself frequent leaves of absence, he almost 1
never allowed his singers to sign lucrative deals out of town – a complaint 2
which, although true, was out of date. Mahler had realized that he could no 3
longer refuse to grant such permission to his singers, with the result that he 4
had for some time adopted a more liberal approach to such requests. Until now 5
he had abided by his maxim of not reacting to such reproaches in the press, but 6
a change was in the offing. In the course of a conversation with Montenuovo 7
he asked his superior whether it was time to take an official stance on such 8
attacks. It is unclear if Montenuovo had already lost confidence in Mahler or 9
whether he was merely opposed to such a stance in this one particular case, 40
but, whatever the answer, he let it be known that he considered such a show 41R
534 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 of support to be inopportune. Mahler should respond by showing his critics

2 what he was capable of as an artist – Montenuovo was thinking specifically of
3 the first night of Die Walküre, which was due to take place on 4 February.
4 Produced at a particularly critical time, this staging found appreciably more
5 detractors than the earlier achievements of the tried and tested team of Mahler
6 and Roller. Many of the reviewers found the stage too dark and the costumes
7 too modern, while the fact that Siegmund wore a brown wig rather than the
8 usual blond one kept the columnists exercised for a period of several days.
9 Mahler’s position was now so precarious that even critics who had previously
10 lacked the confidence of their convictions, suddenly found that the conductor’s
1 tempos were far too idiosyncratic.
2 The month of February also marked the first signs of trouble within the
3 company itself. The first night of a new production of Auber’s La Muette de
4 Portici was planned for the end of the month. An important and, indeed,
5 remarkable example of French grand opera, the work centres on the silent role
6 of Fenella, normally taken by a trained dancer. The Court Opera wanted to
7 break with this tradition and to cast Marie Gutheil-Schoder in the part, an
8 exceptionally talented singing actress who was, however, afraid that people
9 would say that she had finally lost her voice. The house accordingly reverted to
20 the idea of a dancer but one of exceptional merit. Party to this decision were
1 Bruno Walter, who was to conduct the first night, the company’s stage
2 manager, August Stoll, and Roller, who had developed an interest in the ballet
3 – in this he differed from Mahler, who remained relatively indifferent to this
4 particular art form. Roller even thought of choreographing a ballet himself
5 and calling it Rübezahl, the same title as Mahler’s unfinished opera. (Alma’s
6 account of this episode is typically confusing.) Roller suggested casting the
7 young dancer Grete Wiesenthal as Fenella. She had already made a name for
8 herself with her novel style of dancing, and the literary figures of New Vienna
9 – especially Hugo von Hofmannsthal – lay at her feet. Roller and Walter
30 ensured that they had Mahler’s support and were confident that the young
1 dancer would be a sensation. Unfortunately, the ballet master, Josef Hassreiter,
2 felt, not unreasonably, that he had been passed over and created a scandal by
3 offering to resign. Mahler supported his friend and colleague, though he must
4 have known that Roller had been wrong to go over the ballet master’s head.
5 Indeed, Roller’s high-handed, non-conciliatory manner had made more
6 enemies than friends in Vienna and made Mahler’s position more difficult.
7 Although a compromise was found, allowing Wiesenthal to alternate with
8 another dancer, the scandal was soon being reported in the press, culminating
9 in a further meeting between Mahler and Montenuovo, to whom Hassreiter
40 had gone running. ‘This is the first time you have condoned an irregularity
41R since you have directed the Opera,’ Montenuovo is said to have rebuked
Mahler. ‘My sense of duty will not allow me to overlook it.’6 It is no longer 1
possible to say whether Alma was right when she writes that from this 2
moment onwards Montenuovo, unable to get over his annoyance, had looked 3
for an opportunity to get rid of Mahler, but if her account of the meeting is 4
correct, then it is clear that Montenuovo was beginning to withdraw his 5
support: the press campaigns against the director, the increasingly sour atmos- 6
phere within the house and Mahler’s own behaviour were not without their 7
consequences. 8
The next incident was waiting just around the corner. In the wake of the new 9
production of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide that had opened on 18 March and 10
that was more favourably received by the critics than Die Walküre had been, 1
Mahler and Alma set off for Italy, a tour which, planned some time earlier, 2
involved two concerts in Rome and one in Trieste. In Rome Mahler conducted 3
the Accademia di Santa Cecilia in two mixed programmes that included only 4
one of his own compositions: the Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony. In 5
Trieste he introduced his First Symphony to Italian audiences. The photo- 6
graphs that were taken in the course of this tour show a relaxed Mahler 7
behaving for all the world like a tourist rather than a hounded conductor. He 8
was in fact away for almost four weeks, during which time he conducted only 9
three concerts, an undertaking which by his own standards must have seemed 20
more like a holiday. Such a break could hardly be begrudged him, and yet it is 1
questionable whether such a lengthy absence was wise when the situation in 2
Vienna was so tense. Unsurprisingly, it was seen as an affront. But if Mahler 3
was already resolved to give up his post at the end of the year, the way in which 4
his visit to Italy was viewed in Vienna may well have been a matter of some 5
indifference to him. A letter that Roller wrote to his wife at the end of April 6
suggests that Mahler was inwardly resolved on such a step. As such, it is at 7
odds with the letter to Julius von Weis-Osborn quoted earlier: ‘The Opera is 8
really in a mess as a result of Viennese roguery. I admire Mahler for main- 9
taining his equanimity and for taking things step by step like the knight in 30
[Ludwig Uhland’s ballad] “Schwäbische Kunde”. It seems that now – on 1 May 1
it will be ten years since he was appointed director – all available forces are 2
coming together to bring about his downfall. If only people knew how much 3
he’d like to go!’7 4
Mahler’s relaxed expression in the photographs taken in Rome does not in 5
fact reflect the tense situation in Vienna, for another problem was already 6
preying on his mind. The tenor Fritz Schrödter had served the house well in 7
the past and even taken part in performances of Mahler’s music, but he was 8
one of those singers whose powers were noticeably waning and who tried to 9
compensate by means of a display of truculence. Mahler would have liked to 40
have got rid of him but realized that this would cause the usual commotion, 41R
536 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 reviving the old accusation of ‘Mahler the Jew driving away the best singers’.
2 As a result he had suggested extending Schrödter’s contract but on a reduced
3 salary. Schrödter was furious and brooded on reprisals, for which Mahler’s
4 extended absence offered ample opportunity. Within days of his return to
5 Vienna, Mahler could read in the local papers that Schrödter had flatly
6 turned down the director’s offer of a new contract and that he had used his
7 influence with court officials to ensure that he was re-employed under the old
8 conditions. Such a blatant affront to the director’s authority made an already
9 difficult situation infinitely worse.
10 On 21 April, at the height of the Schrödter affair, Mahler suffered a further
1 humiliation that affected him all the more deeply for being so unexpected.
2 Until now, it had never occurred to anyone to boo a performance under
3 Mahler’s direction, but this is precisely what happened during the perform-
4 ance of Tristan und Isolde on 21 April. It is not entirely clear from surviving
5 accounts when the booing broke out, although it seems as if it was directed in
6 the main at the visiting bass Felix von Kraus, who was singing King Marke. But
7 any boos for a singer engaged by Mahler were effectively aimed at Mahler too,
8 and he certainly got the message. Although his friends tried to assure him that
9 it was merely a childish prank on the part of a handful of goaded opera-goers,
20 he himself is said to have remarked that if his audience had abandoned him,
1 then it was time for him to go. His resistance was beginning to fail him, and
2 his plans to find an alternative to running the intractable Court Opera were
3 taking on clearer form, while his disgust at the press campaigns against him
4 continued to grow. There are no surviving letters in which he vents his feelings
5 at these developments – this will have been reserved for private conversations
6 with his friends and with his wife. But a single sentence shows how much he
7 was wounded by all this. In June, his old friend Arnold Berliner wrote to ask
8 him whether the rumours about his resignation were true: ‘It is all quite true.
9 I am going because I can no longer endure the rabble.’8 Mahler’s turmoil and
30 agitation are clear not least from the fact that instead of signing this brief note
1 with his own name, he initially signed himself ‘Berliner’.
2 Meanwhile, the Mahlers’ extended visit to Italy had had a sequel that
3 appears to have been the final straw for Montenuovo. Here, too, we have only
4 Alma’s testimony when she claims that Mahler had intended to play a trick on
5 the Court Opera in order to extend his leave of absence. Prior to his departure
6 he had announced that he would be away until only just after Easter but
7 planned to submit a request from Italy, asking to be allowed to remain in the
8 country in order to conduct the third concert in Trieste, thereby presenting the
9 company with a fait accompli. But he appears to have given away his hand by
40 noting down the dates of his entire month-long absence in the main ledger.
41R One of Mahler’s increasingly numerous enemies in the company took this
ledger to the general administrator’s office, leading to another meeting with 1

Montenuovo, presumably before Mahler left for Rome. It seems as if he had 2
repeatedly threatened to step down from his post, a threat that worked only as 3
long as he could rely on Montenuovo’s support. But the situation had changed, 4
and Mahler was apparently shocked and surprised when, far from protesting, 5
Montenuovo took up the idea and suggested that both parties should seriously 6
consider the matter. Mahler had crossed the Rubicon, and even if he now 7
regretted his offer, he could no longer back down without losing face. It looks 8
as if both men were later taken aback at the repercussions of their conversa- 9
tion, and it is believed that Montenuovo made one final attempt to persuade 10
Mahler to remain, but as the result of an incautious remark to a journalist 1
Mahler had now made it impossible for him to remain in his post without a 2
serious loss of face. 3
4
5
Mahler’s Resignation
6
Events followed hard on each other’s heels during the month of May. Although 7
it remains a matter for speculation, it is conceivable that two illnesses in 8
Mahler’s family tipped the scales. Alma was ill when she returned from 9
Italy. True, she had often been ill in recent years, but on this occasion she 20
needed an operation, details of which are unknown. And then, in early 1
May, Anna succumbed to scarlet fever. During the first five months of this 2
annus terribilis Mahler was frantically busy. He had been worn down by 3
the attacks launched against him by the press and could no longer count on 4
the loyalty of his superiors, a loyalty that he himself had tested to the limits. He 5
could no longer remain in a house where his work was more and more of 6
a torment. He needed to be set free by a final liberating blow. It will have been 7
in early May that Mahler took his definitive decision to resign. Already the 8
rumours in the city were rampant. Writing retrospectively, Paul Stefan 9
observed that: 30
1
Mahler’s fate was sealed with ultimately breakneck speed. Die Walküre was 2
perhaps the most perfect production in this theatre in living memory, a 3
performance such as people dream about. Storms of applause thundered around 4
Mahler’s head before the second act – he never accepted an audience’s thanks 5
and avoided any greeting. A weary man thanked them. And indignation after 6
indignation, affairs, sensations, announcements. Time and again it was 7
rumoured that he was definitely leaving, hoping for liberation and freedom 8
from the tyranny of art. Iphigenia in Aulis, wonderful acting before an empty 9
house, and a work for listeners other than those who were there as subscribers. 40
Othello. Disquiet, announcements, announcements. An address signed by 41R
538 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the best names in Vienna begged Mahler to remain. He left, finally, in June,
2 he really left.9
3
4 Dated 11 May, the document to which Stefan refers here is undoubtedly
5 impressive, containing, as it does, not just the best, but the very best, names in
6 Vienna and reflecting the enormous impact that Mahler’s activities had had on
7 the intellectual and artistic elite of the city. Written after all the decisions had
8 been taken, it begins by summing up Mahler’s ten-year directorship, which
9 was said to have enriched the city
10
1 by your ability to recreate favourite works in an entirely novel and impressive
2 way and lay bare their essence and lend them musical expression, and by a
3 magnificent series of artistic feats whose achieved aim was the implementa-
4 tion of a new style of performance, but above all – and perhaps even more
5 than through any individual achievements – by your great example of
6 meeting the implacable demands of a rigorous cultivation of art, which you
7 did by sweeping away thoughtless prejudices in a manner free from any cult
8 of personality.
9
20 The writers went on to condemn the press campaign against Mahler, before
1 concluding by expressing
2
3 the thanks of a number of people who owe you a very great deal, people
4 in whom these works, in the form that you have given to them through
5 your magnificent interpretations, have remained indelibly alive and who
6 were privileged to receive decisive and lasting impressions as a permanent
7 gift and who know, finally, what you mean to us and what you will always
8 mean to us.10
9
30 This document is in fact curiously ambiguous in character, for at no point is
1 Mahler invited to remain – presumably the signatories knew that it was too
2 late for such a request, only the final phrase holding out the promise of a
3 change of heart. Even so, the list of sixty-nine signatories is exceedingly
4 impressive, the only notable absentee being Specht, who no doubt initiated
5 the move and who may well have declined to sign it because he had already
6 been denounced as one of Mahler’s closest supporters. The following roll call,
7 which features only those names that are still familiar to us today, is a wistful
8 reminder of the enviable state of Vienna’s cultural scene in 1907: there were
9 the writers Peter Altenberg, Hermann Bahr, Richard Beer-Hofmann, Hugo
40 von Hofmannsthal, Alfred Polgar, Felix Salten, Arthur Schnitzler, Jakob
41R Wassermann and Stefan Zweig; the architects and artists Josef Hoffmann,
Gustav Klimt and Kolo Moser; the actors and theatre managers Max 1
Burckhard, Josef Kainz, Adolf von Sonnenthal and Hugo Thimig; the physi- 2
cian Josef Breuer; the distinguished anatomist Emil Zuckerkandl and his wife, 3
Bertha; and, finally, the composer Arnold Schoenberg. At the beginning of 4
June, Sigmund Freud, Ernst Mach and Lilli Lehmann were among many other 5
personalities to add their names to this tribute. We do not know how Mahler 6
reacted to this appeal, but we may assume that he was moved and touched by 7
it. It is by no means certain that he knew how much he was admired and even 8
worshipped by Vienna’s elite, for he cannot have been personally acquainted 9
with many of the signatories. 10
By the second half of May the speculation reached fever pitch. On 17 May, 1
the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt announced that ‘Director Mahler has 2
indicated to a prominent personality his intention of leaving his position at 3
the Court Opera next autumn’. Five days later the pro-Mahler Neue Freie 4
Presse reported that ‘In artistic circles rumours have been circulating for 5
some time that Director Mahler is planning to leave his position. Several 6
discussions between the Second Chief Comptroller Prince Montenuovo and 7
Director Mahler have given these rumours added stimulus.’ And by 23 May 8
the anti-Mahlerian Neues Wiener Journal was no longer in any doubt on the 9
matter: ‘The resignation of Gustav Mahler, on which we carried a report a 20
few days ago, can already be treated as definite. The reasons which have 1
caused the Director of the Court Opera to take this decision are obvious. 2
The conditions at the theatre have made an artistic crisis inevitable, which 3
Herr Mahler no longer feels capable of overcoming.’11 The Neues Wiener 4
Journal was well informed, and four days later Mahler asked to be relieved 5
of his post. 6
In order to counter the rumours, Mahler asked to see his old comrade-in- 7
arms Ludwig Karpath and granted him a lengthy interview that took place 8
during a walk along the Ringstraße on 4 June and that appeared in edited form 9
in the Neues Wiener Tagblatt on the 5th. (A fuller version was published in 30
Karpath’s reminiscences in 1934.) Mahler used this platform to deny in the 1
strongest possible terms all the reports that were circulating about him. It was 2
being claimed, for example, that he had clashed with Schrödter, who had 3
demanded Mahler’s dismissal by the Kaiser. Mahler stressed that he was 4
leaving of his own volition as he wanted to be completely independent. Above 5
all, he had realized that, the opera industry being what it was, it was impossible 6
to ensure that every performance was of the same high standard. The 1905 7
deficit had been repaid, and the house would be ending the present financial 8
year with a healthy surplus. Money was not an issue as he was planning to 9
leave his post before an intended increase in his pension. (In the event, this 40
increase was granted to him.) But recent weeks had been very hard for him, 41R
540 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 precipitating his decision to leave. To prevent any demonstrations for or

2 against his directorship, he would not be conducting any further perfor-
3 mances between now and the expiry of his contract. (Mahler was unable to
4 hold to this resolve.) And he would not be accepting any other appointments.
5 He would have to remain in his post only until such time as a successor was
6 found.12
7 Mahler mentioned the name of Felix Mottl – it was an open secret that the
8 general music director of the Munich Opera was the preferred candidate in
9 influential circles. Mottl’s greatest champion was Princess Pauline Metternich,
10 the granddaughter of the great Austrian statesman, who had married her uncle
1 Richard Metternich, Austria’s ambassador in Paris from 1859 to 1870, when
2 the couple had returned to Vienna. Culturally speaking, Pauline Metternich
3 was the éminence grise of the Viennese court, organizing parades, celebrations
4 and exhibitions. She had never liked Mahler and for a long time had cham-
5 pioned Mottl, prompting Karl Kraus to suspect that Mahler had stumbled over
6 the princess’s train. We shall later examine the question why it was not Mottl
7 who succeeded Mahler but Felix von Weingartner. In the event Mottl died only
8 weeks after Mahler, collapsing while conducting a performance of Tristan und
9 Isolde in Munich and dying a few days later.
20 Writing in the Neue Freie Presse on 4 June, Julius Korngold still found it
1 difficult to believe the rumours: ‘Is it true that we are losing Mahler?’ He
2 recounted the events of the last few weeks, carefully weighing them up and
3 showing great understanding for Mahler. He alone dared to take Mahler’s
4 character as the starting point of his disquisition:
5
6 Like all men of genius, Mahler is essentially naïve by nature, and as in his
7 symphonies, so in his character, there is a remarkable element of naïveté
8 mixed in with keen rationality. This explains all his infringements of the most
9 trivial rules of caution and wisdom in life, and there are many people in his
30 immediate circle who have not hesitated to take advantage of this. It would
1 have been easy for Mahler to win over people outside his workplace, people
2 who would have included the mightiest in the land. After all, they were
3 looking everywhere for this intelligent and fascinating man. He refused to be
4 found – by anybody. He was always consumed by his own ideas, assailed by
5 an incessant flood of artistic inspiration. A great loner in a position held
6 by someone traditionally beset on all sides; simple, lacking in all sense of
7 need, a man innocent of all posturing, a child in the circle of his own kind.
8
9 And Korngold ended by striking a prophetic note: ‘The day will come when
40 the importance of the “Mahler era” will be clearly felt and will seem like some
41R wondrous legend of a brilliant time at the Court Opera.’13
None of the surviving documents allows us to say exactly how Mahler’s 1

retirement was seen from the immediate perspective of Montenuovo and, ultim- 2
ately, the Kaiser, although a paper headed the ‘Most Humble Submission 3
by the Most Loyally Obedient Second Chief Comptroller Prince Alfred 4
Montenuovo Relating to Changes in the Running of the Court Opera’ and 5
submitted on 2 October 1907 offers a retrospective assessment of the situation. 6
It had taken until then to sort out all the uncertainty about Mahler’s successor. 7
Felix von Weingartner had been born in Zara (now Zadar) in Dalmatia on 8
2 June 1863 and, like Mahler and Mottl, was Austrian. And, as Montenuovo 9
rightly noted, he was one of the finest contemporary conductors, worthy of 10
being ranked alongside Mahler, Schuch, Mottl, Nikisch and Muck. During the 1
1890s he had been a conductor at the Berlin Court Opera and also directed the 2
Hofkapelle’s symphony concerts. Although he stepped down from his post at 3
the Opera, he continued to conduct the symphony concerts, having signed a 4
contract that would have kept him in Berlin until 1921. (By this date the 5
orchestra had in fact long since ceased to exist.) The Viennese court used all 6
its diplomatic skills to free him from the fetters of his Prussian contract, 7
allowing Montenuovo to present to the Kaiser a successor to Mahler who 8
enjoyed the highest reputation and who owed nothing to Viennese intrigue. 9
That his period in office was relatively brief and by no means as glorious as 20
might have been expected was due to many reasons that we shall examine in 1
due course. Above all, however, he underestimated the one point that 2
Korngold had rightly anticipated: although Mahler may have been hated as 3
long as he ran the company, this period was soon transfigured in people’s 4
memories, and as a director and as a conductor Weingartner was judged by 5
Mahler’s standards and found wanting. 6
Before Montenuovo could introduce Weingartner to the Kaiser, he first had 7
to list the reasons for Mahler’s departure, and in the elegant chancellery 8
language that considered all press campaigns and petty arguments beneath its 9
dignity, he attributed that departure to Mahler’s increased activities away from 30
the Court Opera and to his ever more frequent absences: 1
2
On the occasion of a discussion that I held with him last April on 3
conditions in the Court Opera and the disadvantages bound up with 4
such absences, he declared that he now saw his true task in life in the 5
world of artistic activity that he was then pursuing and that he could not 6
forgo increasingly frequent and lengthy leaves of absence, not least because 7
in his view the institution did not suffer in consequence. On the strength 8
of my own experience I was unable to share this view, and so Mahler 9
felt persuaded to express his inclination to resign from running the Court 40
Opera.14 41R
542 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 There is no doubt that in his arid bureaucratic language Montenuovo had

2 identified the root cause of the problem, while high-mindedly passing over all
3 the secondary reasons, which evidently did not belong in such an official
4 document as this.
5 This is not the first time we have had occasion to observe how anxious and
6 at the same time how astute Mahler could be when dealing with matters of
7 finance. A letter that he wrote to Montenuovo almost certainly at the height of
8 the crisis in the middle of May shows how tenaciously and successfully he
9 fought to maintain his financial position after he stepped down as director –
10 the modest circumstances of his early youth and the years when he was
1 responsible for the welfare of his brothers and sisters had left a lasting mark
2 on him.15 It was entirely legitimate for him, therefore, to think of his
3 family’s provision. (It will be remembered that his heart disease had not yet
4 been diagnosed.) According to the terms of his contract, he was entitled to
5 a pension of 11,000 crowns after ten years, but that period was not yet up.
6 He argued in his letter that he had geared his entire lifestyle to the pension
7 that he would have received after thirteen years in harness: 14,000 crowns.
8 He asked to be granted that sum. Of particular interest is his justification
9 for this demand: he had stepped down, he explained, ‘through no fault of
20 my own’ but as the result of ‘an unforeseen chain of events’, an explanation
1 that sits ill with the true facts of the matter. He also demanded a one-off
2 payment of 20,000 crowns and an assurance that his wife and children
3 would continue to be entitled to a widow’s pension. Montenuovo took his time
4 before replying, a delay due not least to the arguments over Mottl and
5 Weingartner.
6 It seems likely that Montenuovo spoke to the Kaiser in May or June in order
7 to discuss Mahler’s settlement, but it was not until 10 August that he wrote to
8 Mahler from his summer vacation in Semmering to inform him that the
9 Weingartner case had been resolved and that the Kaiser had agreed to all of
30 Mahler’s financial requests and demands. Whether or not the court was aware
1 of what it had lost in Mahler, its generosity is clear from the icing on
2 Montenuovo’s cake: although Mahler’s rank in the civil list was only that of a
3 senior civil servant, he was awarded a widow’s pension equivalent to that of a
4 privy councillor.16 Another two months were to pass before Montenuovo could
5 summarize all these points in his submission to the Kaiser. Of some interest in
6 this context is the clause in the decree relieving Mahler of his post and stating
7 that Mahler could not work as an administrator or even as a conductor in any
8 of Vienna’s theatres, otherwise he would lose his pension. On 5 October, three
9 days after Montenuovo’s submission, the Kaiser’s decree had been signed,
40 summarizing his subordinate’s report and naming Weingartner as Mahler’s
41R successor. As Weingartner was not available until 1 January 1908, Mahler was
asked to stay on until the end of the year. With a positively Prussian sense of 1
duty he not only agreed to this request but helped to prepare the forthcoming 2
season, which he did with an apparent sense of liberation now that the 3
decision had finally been taken. 4
5
6
New Perspectives
7
An undated letter to the Berlin impresario Norbert Salter, probably written in 8
May, reveals that Mahler lost no time in casting around for alternative employ- 9
ment. It must have been clear to him that he and his family could live only 10
relatively modestly on the pension that he had been accorded. Even though 1
this pension was lavish by any standards, it was still less than half the 2
36,000 crowns that he had received while in office. It had taken him a long 3
time to pay off the debts that the rest of his family had amassed, with the 4
result that he and Alma had had little time to enjoy the benefits of his well-paid 5
post. The house in Maiernigg was necessary for the Mahlers’ summer vaca- 6
tions but it had to be staffed and maintained, while Mahler’s concert tours 7
brought him little extra income – a reasonable way of topping up his salary 8
as director of the Vienna Court Opera, but inadequate if his only additional 9
income was his pension. And so we find Mahler writing to Salter: ‘I am at 20
present so overwhelmed with projects and offers that – especially as no 1
successor to me has yet been found – I cannot yet reply to any of them. 2
Naturally I must first take a long look at things. The best will be for you to 3
collect everything you receive connected with me, and we shall discuss the 4
matter when I come to Berlin in the very near future. I dare say America will 5
be inevitable for me.’17 6
We may well be right in assuming that the number of projects and offers to 7
which Mahler refers was substantially smaller than he claims it to have been. 8
At all events, he was not open to offers from every quarter, as he wanted his 9
correspondent to believe. Vienna would, of course, have been the most prac- 30
tical solution, but this was ruled out by the provisions of his pension settle- 1
ment. Nor could there be any question of his taking over the running of 2
another opera house – he had no wish to repeat the experiences of the 3
past. And, in any case, which opera house could it have been after he had 4
already run the world’s leading company? Anything else would have felt like 5
a relegation. Nor could Mahler consider the post of principal conductor 6
at a court opera house, for where was the director whom Mahler would allow 7
to boss him around, quite apart from the fact that the salary attached to 8
such a position fell far short of his expectations. The only possibility in this 9
regard would have been the musical directorship of the Bayreuth Festival (one 40
wonders how the Festival would have turned out), but Mahler was of course 41R
544 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 clear in his own mind that Wagner would have turned in his grave at the
2 thought of a ‘former Jew’ running his Festival. And Cosima would have killed
3 herself first.
4 All that remained in Germany and Austria was the possibility of taking over
5 a leading orchestra, but here, too, there were only two orchestras worth
6 considering: the Vienna and the Berlin Philharmonics. The former was ruled
7 out by the bitter experiences that Mahler had had with this orchestra in the
8 past, while the Berlin Philharmonic was in the best possible hands with Arthur
9 Nikisch, a magus of the podium who was to retain control of both the Berlin
10 orchestra and the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra until his death in 1922. It
1 would never have occurred to the Berliners to swap the world-famous maestro
2 for a conductor like Mahler, who had the reputation not only for being diffi-
3 cult but for preferring composition to conducting. The Berlin Philharmonic
4 was emphatically not one of the offers with which Mahler had been ‘over-
5 whelmed’. In the light of all this, it makes sense that he ended his letter to Salter
6 by noting that America was ‘inevitable’ if he wanted to achieve anything. He
7 had never been to the country, and his knowledge of English was no better
8 than it had been when he visited London in 1892, but he knew very well that
9 he could earn a small fortune in a country whose cultural life was in the
20 ascendant, and he also knew that the German repertory was being rebuilt
1 at the Metropolitan Opera after the death of Anton Seidl, who had already
2 done much in this regard. Finally, he knew that the Met’s director, Heinrich
3 Conried, was really called Heinrich Cohn. A native of Bielitz in Silesia, he had
4 begun his career as an actor in the Austrian provinces and is even said to have
5 appeared briefly on the boards of the Vienna Burgtheater, only for his diminu-
6 tive stature to impede his career on the stage. He had succeeded Maurice Grau
7 as the lessee of the Metropolitan Opera in February 1903, Grau’s successes in
8 this regard having turned the post into a highly lucrative one. The house was
9 owned by the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, and so the lessee
30 was not a court appointee as Mahler had been in Vienna. If the company was
1 properly run, the lessee could earn considerable amounts of money. Mahler
2 and Conried made contact astonishingly quickly – we do not know when this
3 was or who instituted the contact, but presumably it was Salter. By 4 June
4 Mahler was on the night train to Berlin to enter into negotiations with
5 Conried, who was currently staying in the Prussian capital.
6 Conried had inherited a company that was in the pink of financial health.
7 The Met had moved into its new premises in 1883, an outwardly unprepos-
8 sessing building known to the locals as a yellow-brick brewery and situated
9 on Broadway between Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Streets. Its auditorium,
40 conversely, was a magnificent temple to the arts affectionately known as
41R the ‘Golden Horseshoe’ and seating some 3,000 patrons. As such, it was
larger than most European houses. Before 1883 and for a short time afterwards 1
there was a rival company in the Academy of Music on Fourteenth Street. 2
Since 1966 the Met has been housed in the Lincoln Center in an even larger 3
building inimical to intimate effects. One of the oldest of American opera 4
houses, it soon acquired a reputation as a Mecca for the world’s great singers. 5
During the 1880s, moreover, the German conductor Leopold Damrosch was 6
instrumental in establishing German opera at the Metropolitan Opera. 7
Following his premature death in 1885, he was succeeded by Anton Seidl, who 8
introduced the majority of Wagner’s mature music dramas to astonished New 9
York audiences, turning Wagner’s works into one of the cornerstones of the 10
repertory and importing eminent singers from Germany and Austria, 1
including Amalie Materna, Bayreuth’s first Brünnhilde. By the 1890s German 2
opera from Beethoven to Wagner had come to dominate the Metropolitan 3
repertory, a dominance that played no small part in Mahler’s decision to accept 4
a position with the company. His old friend Lilli Lehmann appeared here in 5
all her leading roles, especially Isolde. Max Alvary, with whom Mahler had 6
worked in London in 1892, sang his first Wagner roles in New York. And 7
Albert Niemann, the first Bayreuth Siegmund and Wagner’s Paris Tannhäuser, 8
was also a Metropolitan Opera regular. By the date of Seidl’s early death in 9
1898, the German repertory and Wagner in particular were firmly established 20
at the Met. Maurice Grau, who ran the company from 1891 until his retire- 1
ment in 1903, was fortunate in being able to engage singers of the calibre of 2
Édouard and Jean de Reszke. Jean was regarded as the leading dramatic tenor 3
of his day, at home in both Wagner and the Italian and French repertory. In the 4
autumn of 1903, Grau also signed up a young tenor from Naples, an engage- 5
ment that was to prove momentous, for Enrico Caruso was to become the 6
most successful singer of the early twentieth century and one of the principal 7
attractions of the Met, where he sang an unhealthily large number of perform- 8
ances. Although Caruso and Mahler never worked together, they were none 9
the less in close contact with one another, as is clear from the caricatures of the 30
composer produced by the tenor, who was also an excellent draughtsman. 1
Conried was initially able to reap the rewards of his predecessors’ hard 2
work, but in 1906 – and herein lies an important precondition of Mahler’s 3
engagement – he found himself having to face a serious challenge in the new 4
Manhattan Opera House that was being run by Oscar Hammerstein. 5
Hammerstein, too, was a German Jew. The son of a building contractor from 6
Stettin, he moved to America at an early age and after working for a time in a 7
cigarette factory eventually became one of his new country’s most successful 8
theatre producers. Over the years he is said to have built no fewer than 9
thirteen theatres, a number of which he also ran. (His grandson, Oscar 40
Hammerstein II, was the librettist of some of the most successful American 41R
546 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 musicals, including Show Boat and Oklahoma!) Hammerstein set about chal-
2 lenging the hegemony of Conried and the Met. It had been clear from the
3 rivalry between the old Academy of Music and the Met that New York did not
4 need two large opera houses, and so Conried found himself fighting a battle
5 for his company’s very existence, but fortune was on his side. Although
6 Hammerstein was able to engage Alessandro Bonci as his leading tenor,
7 Conried had Caruso, who was already on his way to becoming an inter-
8 national star. The ailing Conried retired in 1908, before the rivalry between the
9 two houses had been settled, and it was not until Hammerstein, financially
10 crippled by a further operatic enterprise in Philadelphia, retired in 1910 that
1 the Met, under its new director Otto Kahn, was finally able to claim victory.
2 Back in 1907, Conried was understandably anxious to increase the Met’s
3 drawing power, and to this end he introduced three measures in particular.
4 Hammerstein having made a name for himself with his brilliant successes
5 in the French repertory, Conried decided against entering into direct rivalry in
6 this area but built up the Italian repertory instead, rightly believing that in
7 Caruso he held the strongest hand. Secondly, he signed up the Russian bass
8 Fyodor Chaliapin, who had already proved a sensation in western Europe,
9 although in the event his larger-than-life, hyper-realistic acting style found
20 fewer supporters among New York’s opera lovers than it had done elsewhere,
1 while American audiences, used to the polished and stylish singing of a bygone
2 era, responded less warmly to the bass’s indifference to the bel canto tradition.
3 Conried’s third ploy – and it is the one that brings us back to Mahler – was to
4 consolidate the German repertory by bringing in new singers such as Berta
5 Morena and, later, Leo Slezak and new conductors. It was not unknown in
6 New York that the most electrifying Wagner performances in Europe were
7 those that had been conducted by Mahler in Vienna. A successor to Seidl still
8 had to be found, and when Conried, who regularly visited Europe in his search
9 for new and talented artists, heard that Mahler was about to step down from
30 his post in Vienna, his excitement is not hard to imagine.
1 Conried’s was not the first offer that Mahler received from New York. As
2 early as February 1887, while he was still a minor conductor in Leipzig, he had
3 written to Friedrich Löhr to announce that ‘At the same time I have received
4 an offer from New York, an invitation to replace Anton Seidl – perhaps I shall
5 end up by accepting it!’18 There is also a surviving letter to Lilli Lehmann that
6 Mahler wrote in late April or early May 1898 and in which he reports that he
7 has received a request from New York to conduct fifty concerts a season and
8 become director of the National Conservatory of Music.19 Neither plan came
9 to anything. Concrete negotiations with Conried seem to have started in May
40 1907. (As so often, Mahler’s unfortunate tendency not to date his letters proves
41R a nightmare for his biographer.) The go-between was Norbert Salter, while
Mahler’s negotiating team in Vienna appears to have been Roller and Rudolf 1
Winternitz, who ran a fashion house in Vienna that worked closely with the 2
Court Opera’s costume department. The negotiations opened with a series of 3
skirmishes, prompting Mahler to ask Salter if, in the event of his failing to 4
come to an arrangement with Conried, Hammerstein might be interested in 5
him. His letter even suggests that Hammerstein had already signalled his 6
interest. Conried wanted to sign Mahler up for six months and also offered to 7
arrange a number of concerts for him. Mahler replied to the effect that if 8
nothing came of his ‘dismissal’ by the Kaiser, he could make himself available 9
for a period of only eight weeks. But if his resignation was accepted, then he 10
could come for six months. At the end of May Mahler telegraphed to Conried 1
to announce that everything was fine and that he would be travelling to Berlin 2
in early June to ‘draw up our battle-plan’.20 3
Mahler took the night train to Berlin on 4 June and put up at the Hotel 4
Kaiserhof, where Conried, too, was staying. Having changed and breakfasted, 5
he went to see Conried, apparently in the company of Winternitz. They 6
continued to discuss the details of the contract, suggesting that everything was 7
not yet ‘fine’, the principal sticking point being the length of time that Mahler 8
would be present in New York. Here there was a yawning gulf between the 9
parties’ goals, Conried wanting to keep Mahler in New York as long as he 20
could, while Mahler was keen to earn as much money as he could in the 1
shortest possible time, the strangeness of the New World filling him with feel- 2
ings of apprehension, quite apart from the fact that he knew he would never 3
find time to compose in New York. He was determined not to take on any new 4
commitments that were as onerous and as time-consuming as those in Vienna. 5
But he reached a provisional agreement with Conried in Berlin on 5 June and 6
in a letter that was repeatedly interrupted by various distractions he commu- 7
nicated its contents to Alma. For six months’ work in New York he would 8
receive 125,000 crowns, a breathtaking increase on the 36,000 crowns that he 9
had been receiving for ten months’ work in Vienna. He agreed to work at the 30
Met for four years, during which time he reckoned on being able to earn half 1
a million crowns. As an alternative plan, which was evidently drawn up in case 2
he was unable to free himself from his contract in Vienna, he would visit New 3
York each year for between six and eight weeks, for which he would be paid 4
50,000 crowns a year, making a total of 200,000 crowns over a four-year 5
period. 6
The situation in Vienna was now made more complicated by the fact that 7
Mottl was unable to break his contract with Munich. The prince regent 8
Luitpold was not willing to lose this pillar of the city’s musical life, leaving 9
Montenuovo feeling duped, for he had in principle accepted Mahler’s request 40
to be relieved of his post but could not let him go without at the same time 41R
548 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 being able to put forward the name of a successor. It looks as if Montenuovo,

2 overcome by remorse, now tried to discourage Mahler from leaving, even
3 though both men had already agreed on his departure. But Mahler, armed
4 with his still secret contract with Conried and its altogether fabulous condi-
5 tions, was in an exceptionally strong position and so he rejected Montenuovo’s
6 overtures. For several weeks Montenuovo could come up with no successor,
7 but at least Mahler’s assurance that he would remain until the end of the year
8 gave him some breathing space. If necessary he could even have forced Mahler
9 to stay longer by refusing to let him go. Negotiations with Weingartner soon
10 got under way, although even as late as early August it looked as if Weingartner
1 would be obliged to remain in Berlin. By 9 August, however, everything had
2 been sorted out. These developments also help to explain why Franz Joseph
3 was able to sign Mahler’s dismissal papers at the same time as Weingartner’s
4 provisional appointment on 5 October. Mahler was home and dry, because
5 even in the unlikely event of his having to remain in his post, he could still
6 carry out his American tours. For the present, Montenuovo, who knew of the
7 negotiations going on behind his back, insisted that Conried should make no
8 public announcement until his dealings with Weingartner had been brought to
9 a satisfactory conclusion. Although Montenuovo’s plans may for a time have
20 been thrown into confusion, by August everything had fallen into place.
1 Conried and Mahler met again in Vienna on 21 June, and on this occasion
2 both men brought their seconds with them, Ernest Görlitz and I. C. Coppicus
3 in the case of Conried, Roller and Winternitz in that of Mahler. (Quite why
4 Winternitz should have played such an important role in these negotiations
5 remains unclear.) The definitive contract between Mahler and Conried was
6 signed in Vienna on 21 June, the wily Conried describing himself as ‘President
7 of the Conried Metropolitan Opera Co.’21 This definitive contract looked
8 rather different from the one that Mahler and Conried had provisionally
9 agreed upon in Berlin, a fact that earlier writers on Mahler have tended to
30 ignore. It reduced Mahler’s visits to New York to the basic minimum that he
1 himself had initially proposed, namely, three months at the height of the
2 winter season. Specifically, Mahler agreed to arrive in the city between 20 and
3 25 January each year and to make himself available within two days of his
4 arrival. Particularly interesting is the final clause of all: Mahler would not be
5 obligated to conduct Parsifal. The origins of this clause can be traced back to a
6 letter that Wagner wrote to King Ludwig II of Bavaria, insisting that the work
7 should remain the preserve of Bayreuth. Attempts were soon being made to
8 overturn this ban, but Mahler would never have acted in the face of his
9 idol’s wishes. In fact, Conried had already mounted a production of Parsifal
40 at the Met in December 1903, a production that was regarded by many
41R Wagnerians, and especially by Bayreuth, as an act of sacrilege and decried as
a ‘rape of the Grail’. The fact that Conried was Jewish made it easy for 1
Bayreuth’s anti-Semites to compare his crime to Alberich’s rape of the 2
Rhinegold and to invest the Met’s director with the features of a rapacious Jew 3
in a caricature of the period. In an addendum to the contract, which was not 4
signed until September, it was agreed that Mahler would take up his duties 5
four weeks earlier than originally specified and that he would receive an extra 6
25,000 crowns in consequence. Otherwise Mahler’s season would last from the 7
end of January to the end of April every year from 1908 to 1911. During this 8
four-year period Mahler received 300,000 crowns: in other words, his fee was 9
more than twice what he received in Vienna, even though he was doing only a 10
third of the work. Conried also paid his travel expenses between Europe and 1
America and first-class hotel accommodation and board. For the first year at 2
least, Alma, too, would be paid for in terms of travel and accommodation. 3
Under the terms of his contract, Mahler could accept no other work in 4
America but was free to undertake engagements elsewhere. If he were to fall 5
ill, he would receive no fee – in the event, Mahler was no longer bound by the 6
terms of Conried’s contract when he finally succumbed to his last fatal illness. 7
Not even the most experienced professional businessman well versed in 8
contract law could have negotiated his contract as tenaciously and as success- 9
fully as this allegedly otherworldly artist. 20
Mahler’s prospects for the next four years now seemed rosier than he could 1
possibly have imagined only a short time previously. None the less, he bridled 2
at the forced labour of his work at the Met with reluctant and arrogant singers, 3
an orchestra whose members could not hold a candle to their counterparts 4
in Vienna, an ignorant public, a foreign language, life in vast, dark hotel 5
complexes in Manhattan, and long sea crossings between the two continents – 6
in short, nothing to rouse his enthusiasm. Quite the opposite, in fact. But the 7
chance to earn so much money in a concentrated three-month period and to 8
spend the rest of the year composing and promoting his own music, without 9
being interrupted each autumn with the start of the new opera season, fired his 30
imagination. After a terrible period of uncertainty and of the most unwelcome 1
haste to which he was ever subjected, he had finally succeeded in breaking free. 2
The future lay at his feet. He felt in the best of health. He had survived all the 3
burdens that had been placed upon him, and only his old attacks of migraine 4
had returned with redoubled force, he told Alma in a letter that he wrote to her 5
from the Hochschneeberg, whither he had retired on his own on 23 June, the 6
day after the Vienna opera season finished. He then returned to the capital for 7
a day, before heading back to the mountains. Then, on 30 June, he caught the 8
train to the Wörthersee, where he was joined by Alma and the couple’s two 9
daughters. By the evening of the 30th the family was together again, and their 40
best holiday for years could begin. 41R
550 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 The Onset of Horror

2
A laconic letter to Arnold Berliner of 4 July hints at the coming horror without
3
as yet revealing its full import: ‘We have had frightful bad luck! I shall tell you
4
when we next meet. Now my elder daughter has scarlet fever – diphtheria!’22
5
His younger daughter, Anna, had already caught scarlet fever at the beginning
6
of May, after previously having suffered a scalded hand as the result of an
7
accident on the part of her English nanny, Maud Turner. Her recovery had
8
been slow. Because of the danger of infection, Anna had gone to stay with her
9
grandparents, while Mahler himself had taken rooms in a hotel. According to
10
Anna’s later reminiscences, her father blamed her grandparents for returning
1
her to the family hearth too soon, with the result that Maria became infected.
2
It may be added here that the diagnosis of scarlet fever and diphtheria is scien-
3
tifically unsustainable. Whereas the symptoms may initially be the same, there
4
is no doubt that Maria was suffering from diphtheria and that scarlet fever
5
would not have killed her. Diphtheria bacteria and scarlet fever streptococci
6
are two different pathogens, so that anyone suffering from scarlet fever cannot
7
infect another person with diphtheria. To that extent, Anna’s grandparents
8
may be absolved of any blame. Anna seemed to have recovered when her elder
9
sister, in actual fact the healthier of the two, succumbed to what appeared to
20
be the same illness.
1
A century ago scarlet fever was one of the commonest of all childhood
2
diseases. As with Mahler’s own fatal illness, the discovery of antibiotics has
3
largely put an end to the horrors of scarlet fever. The accompanying skin rash
4
was painful and unpleasant but not life-threatening, the only risk arising from
5
the high temperature that sometimes affected the patient but which could be
6
combated with quinine, bed rest and cold compresses. Even a century ago
7
healthy children normally recovered from scarlet fever, as was the case with
8
Anna Mahler, but inflammation of the mucous membrane caused by scarlet
9
fever might cause complications, leading contemporary medicine to conclude
30
that the fever had developed into diphtheria. Thus we find Brockhaus’s en-
1
cyclopaedia claiming in 1894 that ‘inflammation of the mucous membrane
2
may assume varying degrees of seriousness and even take on the character of
3
diphtheria’. Vaccination has led to the virtual elimination of diphtheria in the
4
modern world but even now it remains substantially more dangerous than
5
scarlet fever. In Mahler’s day there was no antidote to either. Diphtheria was
6
dangerous because inflammation of the pharyngeal cavity and larynx might
7
lead to asphyxiation, not just as a result of the inflammation itself but through
8
neuroparalysis, which might paralyse the muscles of the larynx, to say nothing
9
of the delayed effects of damage to the cardiac muscle. Even today, therefore,
40
it is by no means exceptional for doctors to perform a tracheotomy in order to
41R
improve the patient’s breathing. But neither vaccination nor antibiotics were 1
available for Maria Mahler. Brockhaus gives an idea of what she and her 2
parents had to endure in consequence: 3
4
As for the course that diphtheria takes, the illness generally begins suddenly 5
with a high temperature, shivering and tiredness, difficulty in swallowing, a 6
swelling of the lymph glands in the jaw and a whitish deposit on the mucous 7
membrane of the tonsils and pharynx, a coating that spreads fairly quickly to 8
other areas. These white areas cannot be wiped clean, and if an attempt is 9
made to remove them by force, the area will be left raw and bloody. Left to 10
themselves, they break off and leave discoloured, putrid ulcers that cause an 1
extremely foul smell in the mouth. If the inflammation and the formation of 2
these deposits spreads to the pharynx, the patient quickly grows hoarse, 3
followed by complete voicelessness, coughing, wheezing and in the case of 4
small children asphyxiation. Diphtheria of the nasal cavity can be recognized 5
by nosebleeds and a malodorous suppurating discharge from the nostrils. 6
7
This is what happened to Maria Mahler, the couple’s elder daughter, who in 8
photographs always looked healthier and more ebullient than her sister, Maria 9
being a strikingly beautiful, gifted child who, as Bruno Walter wrote after her 20
death, seemed to exude more than average energy and vitality. Within three 1
days of the Mahlers’ arrival in Maiernigg, the first symptoms had started to 2
appear. It is unlikely that the child could have been saved even if the family had 3
been in Vienna. Given the diagnosis, her chances of surviving were poor. Her 4
final illness lasted not two weeks, as Alma later recalled, but only ten days. 5
Mahler withdrew to his room, while a storm raged outside, and a red sky 6
provided a backdrop to these implacable events. ‘In this weather, in this raging 7
storm, I’d never have sent the children outside’ – Alma’s forebodings when 8
Mahler wrote his Kindertotenlieder seemed to have been confirmed in the 9
most terrible way imaginable. The doctor treating the child, Carl Victor 30
Blumenthal, attempted a tracheotomy during the night of 10/11 July. Alma 1
recalls running along the shore of the lake, screaming, until the child’s English 2
nanny found her and announced that it was all over, meaning, in fact, that the 3
operation was over. But it made no difference. Throughout the rest of the night 4
and the whole of the following day the child lay in Alma’s bed, eyes wide open, 5
gasping for breath, while Mahler – according to Alma – fled the house, unable 6
to bear the sight and sound of his dying daughter. She finally passed away early 7
on the morning of the 12th. 8
Alma’s mother had arrived from Vienna, but it was all too much for her, too, 9
and during a walk by the lake, she suffered a heart spasm, apparently at the 40
very moment that the tiny coffin was being lifted into a cart and taken away to 41R
552 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Klagenfurt. Mahler came down to the lakeside, his face distorted with grief,
2 while Alma recalled retrospectively that it was ‘almost a joy’ for her to fall into
3 a deep faint. Mahler, Alma and Anna Moll retired indoors like frightened
4 birds, feeling that if they were to emerge from their room, they might never
5 come back. Blumenthal now had to minister to the needs of both women,
6 prompting Mahler to suggest, by way of a distraction, that the doctor should
7 examine his own heart, too, as his wife was always expressing her concern on
8 that score. Blumenthal did as he was asked and afterwards famously remarked
9 ‘Well, you’ve no cause to be proud of a heart like that.’ The sounds that he
10 heard indicated a heart-valve defect, a diagnosis that we examined in detail in
1 an earlier chapter. For Mahler and his wife, life in their beautiful house in
2 Maiernigg and work in the composing house in the forest behind it now
3 became impossible. Precipitately they packed their belongings and fled from
4 the Wörthersee. Alma spent the rest of the summer at Schluderbach in the
5 Tyrol, a village to the south of Toblach at the intersection of the roads to
6 Cortina and Misurina in an area familiar to Mahler from his earlier visits
7 to the Dolomites. He himself travelled to Vienna for a few days in order to
8 prepare for his final season and to consult a heart specialist, Friedrich Kovacs.
9 He left Maiernigg on 17 July in the company of Richard Nepallek, a Viennese
20 neurologist whom Alma knew and who had come to Maiernigg to offer the
1 couple his support and deal with all the formalities following Maria’s death,
2 Mahler and Alma themselves being incapable of carrying out these tasks.
3 In the course of the train journey back to Vienna, Mahler wrote to Alma,
4 arguably one of the strangest letters that he ever penned. It begins: ‘Dearest,
5 we’re sitting here in the dining car, and our eyes are in our stomachs (what a
6 shame neither of you is here, you’d revel in it). I beg you, now your two
7 guardians have left, don’t overdo things and keep a hold on everything.’ A day
8 later he wrote again, this time reporting that he had put up at the Hotel
9 Imperial, had a bath, eaten some ham, heard the first garbled reports on his
30 resignation and slept extremely well, so that he was now feeling fine.23 These
1 are entirely normal letters, except that they are not normal in the context of the
2 catastrophe that had struck only a few days earlier. Did Mahler really not have
3 anything better to do a week after the terrible death of his elder daughter than
4 to report that he had slept well and enjoyed a slice of ham? These letters are
5 puzzling in the extreme. Such total disregard for all that had happened and the
6 cheerful tone that he adopts here – was it all just an attempt to protect himself
7 from the tragedy? A tragically ironic stance? Not one of the letters that he
8 wrote during these weeks and months refers to what had taken place. There is
9 not even the merest hint. That they do not reflect the real Mahler is clear from
40 a letter that Bruno Walter wrote to his parents in the middle of September: ‘He
41R has been completely broken by it; outwardly one sees nothing, but anyone who
knows him knows that inwardly he is completely washed up. She seems to bear 1
it more easily, with tears and philosophizing. I really don’t know how anyone 2
can bear anything like this.’24 Alma later wrote that the death of their daughter 3
drove a wedge between the couple, claiming that Mahler unconsciously 4
blamed her for the child’s death. After a few days in Vienna, during which time 5
he received Kovacs’s partial confirmation of Blumenthal’s diagnosis, Mahler 6
joined Alma in Schluderbach, and in the middle of August the couple returned 7
to Maiernigg. In the face of all the claims that they left Maiernigg following 8
their daughter’s death and never returned, it is worth noting that according to 9
Alma they did not feel as uncomfortable as they had thought they would. But 10
in spite of this, they did not return there the following year. 1
We can only speculate on Mahler’s reaction. A year later, however, he wrote 2
an important letter to Bruno Walter that allows us a far deeper insight into his 3
inner workings than he normally granted others. Indeed, it is perhaps the most 4
disturbing letter that he ever wrote, for it describes his attempts to deal with 5
the tragedy. In a note to the published edition, Walter himself adds ‘I suppose 6
I had suggested that Mahler should read Feuchtersleben’s Diatetics of the Soul.’ 7
One of Walter’s favourite titles, Ernst von Feuchtersleben’s study had first 8
appeared in 1838 and been reprinted forty-five times by 1883. (An English 9
translation was published in 1852.) It was one of the most successful best- 20
sellers of the age, highly regarded by Grillparzer and others, and a forerunner 1
of all those self-help manuals that nowadays seek to guide a disorientated 2
society. Just as a correct diet should help to redress the body’s imbalance, so the 3
soul needed the right sustenance, for outer balance must be matched by inner 4
balance. For a perennial optimist like Walter, this may well have been the right 5
reading matter, but for the emotionally fragile Mahler it was bound to seem an 6
ineffectual product of the bourgeois Biedermeier age, the equivalent of an 7
attempt to cure pneumonia with lime-blossom tea. His reply to Walter’s letter, 8
which is no longer extant, was correspondingly prickly: 9
30
What is all this about the soul? And its sickness? And where should I find a 1
remedy? On a visit to Scandinavia? That would have been no more than a 2
distraction. It was only here, in solitude, that I could come to my senses and 3
regain a sense of awareness. – Ever since I was overcome by panic and terror, 4
as I was at that time, I have tried only to avert my eyes and stop listening. – If 5
I’m to find the way back to myself, I must surrender to the horrors of loneli- 6
ness. But basically I am speaking only in riddles, because you do not know 7
what went on inside me and what is still going on inside me; but it is certainly 8
not a hypochondriac’s fear of death, as you suppose. That I must die was some- 9
thing I already knew. – But without trying to explain or describe something for 40
which there are perhaps no words at all, I shall say only that at a single blow I 41R
554 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 have lost all the clarity and calm that I had ever struggled to achieve; and that
2 I stood vis-à-vis de rien and that at the end of my life I am like a beginner who
3 has to learn how to walk and stand. – Is this a mental outlook that must be
4 fought with a psychiatrist’s weapons, as you imply? And as for my ‘work’, there
5 is something distinctly depressing about having to learn everything over again.
6 I cannot work at my desk. Inner activity must be accompanied by outer activity.
7
8 Mahler then reports on his racing pulse and the fear that he feels at even a
9 modest increase in physical activity, especially since such violent physical
10 activity had always been the motivating force behind his creative work:
1
2 Imagine Beethoven having both his legs amputated as the result of an acci-
3 dent. If you know how he lived his life – do you think that after this he could
4 have drafted even a single movement of a quartet? And this can hardly be
5 compared with my own situation. I admit that, superficial though it may
6 seem, this is the greatest calamity that has ever befallen me. I have to start a
7 new life – and here too I am a complete beginner.25
8
9 Here, too, there is no mention of his daughter’s death but only of his heart diag-
20 nosis, with its serious consequences in terms of severely reducing his physical
1 movements and of the need to keep checking his pulse, which for Mahler was
2 a positively unhealthy thing to do. With hindsight we may well be inclined to
3 think that averting his eyes and no longer listening was his way of attempting
4 to mitigate the horror of the situation. Like the letter as a whole, it suggests that
5 a massive shift had taken place in Mahler’s psychological makeup. He simply
6 could not handle his doctor’s diagnosis concerning his heart disease – a diag-
7 nosis initially more serious than it actually was – coming so soon after the death
8 of his daughter. The phrase ‘at a single blow’ implies that he had to link the two
9 hammer blows in an attempt to come to terms with them. The loss of his
30 daughter was something with which he could not cope – certainly not through
1 his forced jollity immediately after the catastrophe – and so he attempted to
2 hide it away inside a lesser problem in the hope that it would become more
3 bearable. If Mahler was still claiming that his life had fallen apart a whole year
4 after the catastrophe and in doing so apparently referring to his doctor’s diag-
5 nosis about his own state of health, then he did so not from heartlessness but in
6 an attempt not to overtax his ability to come to terms with the situation and to
7 allow his psyche time to deal with what was manageable.
8 It was not Ernst von Feuchtersleben who could help Mahler in the summer
9 of 1907 but only another, more powerful source of consolation: ‘Ja, gib mir
40 Ruh, ich hab Erquickung not’ (‘Yes, give me peace, I need refreshment’).
41R According to Alma, it was during this period that Mahler sought comfort in
Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte, a collection of free adaptations of Chinese 1

poetry. Alma claims that a friend of her father, Theobald Pollak, had given 2
a copy of this slender volume to Mahler several years earlier, but this is 3
impossible as the book was not published until the autumn of 1907. It seems 4
that Alma is mixing up the Bethge edition with an older book of poems by 5
Li-Tai-Po. She also claims that her husband singled out a number of the poems 6
which he intended to set to music at a later date and that he took out the 7
volume again under the weight of the blows of fate that rained down on him 8
in the summer of 1907. The poems, she writes, are immeasurably sad, which 9
is not in fact true, as Bethge’s selection – like Mahler’s own – includes poems 10
that are light-hearted and cheerful alternating with others that strike a more 1
tragic tone. There is no doubt that Mahler was motivated by feelings similar to 2
those expressed by Bethge himself in his introduction to the collection: 3
4
The very first time that I came across poems from the Chinese, I was alto- 5
gether enchanted. What a lovely lyric art I found here! I felt a timidly 6
diaphanous delicacy of lyric sounds, I gazed into an art of words that is 7
entirely filled with imagery and that sheds light on a world of wistful 8
nostalgia and the mysteries of existence, I felt a slight lyric trembling, an 9
outpouring of symbolism, something tender and airy like moonlight, and an 20
emotional gracefulness that reminded me of a flower.26 1
2
It is impossible to say for certain whether Mahler got to know Bethge’s volume 3
in 1907 or not until 1908.27 Alma was fond of rewriting history, adapting events 4
to suit her own perception of them, highlighting some events and combining 5
others whenever it helped to heighten the drama of the situation. If she is right 6
when she asserts that Mahler began work on the initial sketches for Das Lied von 7
der Erde in Schluderbach in the summer of 1907, it can have been no more than 8
the first tentative steps of the kind that Mahler would record in his sketchbooks 9
during his walks. Most of the work on the score was undertaken during the 30
summer of 1908. Be that as it may, the qualities that drew Mahler to these poems 1
are as clear from the ones that he did not set as from those that he did. Among 2
the former group is the following, a sad little poem by an unknown poet: 3
4
Der Herbstwind reißt die Blätter von den Bäumen, 5
Sie wirbeln durch die kalte Luft zur Erde; 6
Ich sehe ihnen ohne Mitleid zu 7
Mit starren Augen. 8
9
Mein Herz war einsam, da sie kamen. Einsam 40
Seh ich sie wandern. Trauer füllt mein Herz, 41R
556 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 So wie die Täler sich mit Schatten füllen

2 Beim Nahn des Abends.
3
4 Die winterlichen Stürme werden bald
5 Das Wasser wandeln zu Kristall. Jedoch
6 Sobald der Lenz kommt, springen alle Bäche
7 In neuer Wonne!
8
9 Sobald der Lenz kommt, will ich auf die Gipfel
10 Der Berge steigen! Sonne, liebe Sonne,
1 Erbarme dich, laß meines Herzens Trauer
2 Dann endlich schmelzen.
3
4 [The autumn wind tears the leaves from the trees, they whirl to the ground
5 through the cold air, I watch them, pitiless, with staring eyes. My heart grew
6 lonely when they came. Lonely I see them drift. Sadness fills my heart just as they
7 fill the valleys with shadows as evening approaches. The winter storms will
8 shortly turn the water to crystal. But when spring comes, all the brooks will leap
9 with joy again! As soon as spring comes I’ll climb up to the summits of the
20 mountains! Sun, dear sun, take pity on me and let my heart’s sadness melt at last.]
1
2 These lines make it clear why Mahler did not return to Rückert and his
3 Kindertotenlieder, which had once captured his imagination. Rückert had
4 wallowed in his pain too pitilessly and too monomaniacally, and Mahler had
5 followed him without restraint, retracing his lines with garish colours. Now
6 screams of protest and outrage had to be replaced by delicacy, sadness and a
7 slight sense of trembling in order to give expression to all that he had suffered,
8 and for this Bethge’s reworked poems were ideal. Just as, in the poem that we
9 have just quoted, grief finally melts away beneath the sun of life, so in the final
30 movement of Das Lied von der Erde, the quietistic tone that is struck by Wang-
1 Wei’s poem is further intensified by Mahler’s additional lines. Whereas
2 Bethge’s version ends with the words ‘Die Erde ist die gleiche überall, / Und
3 ewig, ewig sind die weißen Wolken’ (‘The earth is everywhere the same, and
4 forever, forever are the white clouds’), Mahler expands this passage and
5 adds greater weight to its underlying sentiments: ‘Die liebe Erde allüberall
6 blüht auf im Lenz / und grünt aufs neu! / Allüberall und ewig blauen licht die
7 Fernen! / Ewig, ewig!’ (‘Everywhere the dear earth blossoms in spring and
8 grows green again! Everywhere and forever the distance shines bright and
9 blue! Forever . . . forever!’). Das Lied von der Erde is one of the vessels into
40 which Mahler poured his attempt to achieve clarity and calm by wresting them
41R back again.
As far as Mahler’s work commitments were concerned, the rest of the year 1
ran smoothly after Montenuovo’s brief attempt to rescind his resignation had 2
been nipped in the bud. The reader may be inclined to ask why the general 3
administrator, August Plappart von Leenheer, played no part in these develop- 4
ments, but the answer is simple: Plappart had left his post on 30 June 1906, and 5
the post remained unfilled. Mahler had charge of no more new productions, 6
his last collaboration with Roller having been Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide back 7
in March, a production that had played to half-empty houses. In the event, 8
Mahler’s resolve not to appear on the podium at the Court Opera could not be 9
maintained as there were a number of performances that still needed to be 10
conducted, at least until such time as the official decree, with all its financial 1
provisions, had been duly ratified by the Kaiser. In such matters, Mahler was 2
punctilious, not wanting to be accused of insubordination until his pension 3
had been properly sorted out. He used his prerogative as director to arrange 4
the performances in such a way that in September and October the house 5
seemed to be mounting a kind of secret Mahler Festival. Once again he revis- 6
ited the greatest successes of his ten-year tenure in Vienna: Don Giovanni, Le 7
nozze di Figaro, Die Zauberflöte, Die Walküre, Iphigénie en Aulide and Fidelio 8
– only Tristan und Isolde was missing. In keeping with the standard practice of 9
the period, the audience did not know who was conducting until the door to 20
the pit opened, and Mahler or some other conductor emerged. But everyone 1
was aware that sooner or later he would conduct his very last performance in 2
Vienna. In early October he travelled to Frankfurt and Wiesbaden – it was the 3
last time he applied for, and was granted, leave of absence – in order to conduct 4
works by Beethoven and Wagner at a concert in Wiesbaden on the 9th with the 5
Kaim Orchestra from Munich. The age of orchestral tours had already begun. 6
No one could have known at the time that a repertory performance of 7
Fidelio on 15 October would be the last time that Mahler conducted at the 8
Court Opera. We do not know whether Mahler himself was aware of the 9
significance of the occasion. Ludwig Karpath even gives the impression that he 30
was standing in for another conductor. Be that as it may, the audience 1
accorded him an ovation. Alma, still weakened by the summer’s events, then 2
went to take the waters at Semmering, and on the 19th Mahler left for three 3
concerts in St Petersburg and Helsinki, or Helsingfors as it was then known. 4
(Finland was under Russian control, although from 1905 it had enjoyed a 5
certain autonomy.) His concerts in St Petersburg took place on 26 October and 6
9 November and included works by Beethoven, Berlioz and Wagner, whereas 7
the concert in Finland on 1 November featured his own Fifth Symphony, 8
which he conducted for the final time. His long letters to Alma are full of 9
melancholy reminiscences of their honeymoon trip to St Petersburg in 1902. 40
They are also filled with his sad and persistent reminders to write to him more 41R
558 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 often and with expressions of his own disquiet about her health – Alma, too,
2 was thought to have a bad heart. Throughout it all, it is impossible to avoid the
3 feeling that he was afraid of losing her too. On his first evening in Helsingfors,
4 where he arrived after an eight-hour train journey from St Petersburg, Mahler
5 attended a concert conducted by Robert Kajanus, one of the leading figures in
6 the musical life of his country. Among the works performed were two by Jean
7 Sibelius, his op. 16 Spring Song and the Valse triste op. 44. Mahler was deeply
8 disappointed: ‘The first composition was a standard piece of kitsch spiced with
9 a national sauce prepared from the “Nordic” harmonies we know only too
10 well. Yuck.’28 But when he met Sibelius, he was forced to admit that he was
1 extremely sympathetic as a person. Sibelius was naturally interested in what
2 Mahler could do for him in New York, a hope that in the event remained
3 unfulfilled. Mahler also got to know the most famous Finnish painter of the
4 period, Akseli Gallen-Kallela, and went sailing with him through the Finnish
5 skerries. They stopped off at the home of the architect Eliel Saarinen to warm
6 up, and while they were there, Gallen unpacked his easel and started to paint
7 Mahler’s portrait. It was by now dark and massive logs were hissing and crack-
8 ling in the hearth as if in a smithy. Gallen’s portrait shows Mahler face-on, his
9 head resting in his right hand, the glow of the fire reflected in his face and in
20 the lenses of his glasses. It is the most impressive likeness of him after Rodin’s.
1 In St Petersburg, Mahler’s performance of his Fifth Symphony caused
2 mainly bewilderment. The audience included representatives of two very
3 different generations of Russian musicians: Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov and
4 Igor Stravinsky. Rimsky-Korsakov found the instrumentation ‘coarse and
5 clumsy’ and dismissed the work as a whole as an ‘arrogant improvisation’ by a
6 composer ‘who never knows what will happen in the next bar’. Stravinsky, who
7 for a time studied privately with Rimsky, was only twenty-five years old at this
8 time and later recalled Mahler’s striking appearance on the podium rather
9 than the work, which evidently left very little of an impression on him.
30 By 12 November Mahler was back in Vienna, where he conducted a
1 performance of his Second Symphony on the 24th, his final appearance in the
2 city as a conductor. Reactions to the piece were no different from those that he
3 had endured during the previous ten years. To put it mildly, they were mixed.
4 Of course, the reviewers were also tempted to use the occasion to combine a
5 critique of the concert with a more general survey of Mahler’s years in the city.
6 It is unnecessary to quote from any of them as the picture had not changed.
7 Events now moved quickly. In the rider to his agreement with Conried, Mahler
8 had promised to sail from Cherbourg on 12 December. Now only three weeks
9 remained to prepare for the trip and take his leave of Vienna, a leave-taking that
40 assumed various ceremonial forms. Using highly official language he bade
41R farewell to the members of the Court Opera in a printed letter in which, with
typically unwavering honesty, he did nothing to hide the problems that the two 1
parties had had to face. He struck the right tone from the outset: ‘Instead of the 2
whole, the complete creation, that I had dreamt of, I leave behind something 3
piecemeal and imperfect – as man is fated to do.’ And he went on: ‘In the throes 4
of the battle, in the heat of the moment, neither you nor I have been spared 5
wounds, or errors. But when a work has been successfully performed, a task 6
accomplished, we have forgotten all the difficulties and exertions; we have felt 7
richly rewarded even in the absence of the outward signs of success. We have all 8
made progress, and so has the Institution for which we have worked.’ He ended 9
with a barbed remark, specifically excluding from his message of gratitude all 10
those who had obstructed his work in the course of the last ten years: ‘Please 1
accept my hearty thanks, you who have helped forward my difficult and often 2
thankless task, who have supported me and have fought at my side.’29 3
The extent to which Mahler’s relations with the company and with his super- 4
iors had broken down is abundantly clear from the fact that no one felt it neces- 5
sary to arrange an official farewell for the departing director who had turned the 6
Vienna Opera into the leading and most progressive opera house in the world. 7
The relief at finally getting rid of the difficult genius far outweighed any sadness 8
at his departure, to say nothing of the people who had spent the last ten years 9
intriguing against him and who now looked forward to a time when they could 20
drink to Weingartner’s health and to an easier life without Mahler. But 1
Weingartner had barely arrived in Vienna as the great white hope for the future 2
when he discovered what loyalty meant to the locals. In his reminiscences he had 3
no hesitation in stressing that Mahler’s great legacy consisted in little more than 4
a clapped-out ensemble and dubious production values. Nor was he squeamish 5
about the means that he used in getting his way, reintroducing the old cuts in Die 6
Walküre and ruining the legendary Fidelio by cutting the Leonore Overture no. 3 7
between the last two scenes of the opera and instead playing the Leonore 8
Overture no. 2 at the start of the performance. It was with this restudied Fidelio 9
that Weingartner introduced himself to Viennese audiences on 23 January 1908. 30
But without the Leonore Overture, there was no time for the scene change 1
required by Roller’s sets, preventing the final scene from creating so brilliant an 2
effect. At this point Weingartner reverted to the old prison courtyard from Act 3
One, thereby losing one of the great coups of the Roller–Mahler production. By 4
the same token, the chorus at the end of the opening act was allowed to stand 5
downstage as a group and trumpet its wretchedness to the audience. 6
It now turned out that Mahler had more supporters than he had thought, for 7
a section of the audience, including people who did not necessarily lament the 8
director’s departure, had in the meantime grown to like the Mahler–Roller 9
Fidelio and voiced their protests at Weingartner’s interference with it, protests 40
that Weingartner believed could only be the work of a pro-Mahler political 41R
560 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 clique. But perhaps it included people who had always protested because it was
2 in their nature to do so. Mahlerians such as Paul Stefan trembled with rage and
3 disgust at Weingartner’s violation of the work, and writers on Mahler have
4 followed his lead. It is interesting, however, to note that Alfred Roller found the
5 changes neither particularly bad nor particularly good. In a long letter that he
6 wrote to Mahler in New York on the eve of the 1908 restudied revival, Roller
7 describes what their joint achievement looked like in his successor’s hands. If
8 Mahler had been hoping for a picture of a natural disaster – he was always keen
9 to hear negative comments about Weingartner – then he will have been disap-
10 pointed, for Roller offers a surprisingly neutral account of the proceedings,
1 before concluding: ‘On the whole, a quite businesslike and, as it strikes me, a
2 rather philistine production without any particular inspiration or go; it does not
3 exactly ruin the opera but neither does it do anything to reveal its depths.
4 Weingartner seems to have the orchestra well in hand. His conducting, certainly,
5 seems to me rather pedestrian. I have no sense of an overarching structure.’30
6 Weingartner would not be deflected from his course, so firmly convinced was he
7 that everything that was anti-Mahler would go down well in Vienna. But local
8 perceptions of Mahler among at least a section of the press and public had been
9 transformed, and to the extent that Weingartner, for all that he was a fine
20 conductor, was judged by his predecessor’s standards and found wanting, he was
1 left with little choice but to sever his connections with Vienna in 1911.
2 In a handful of brief private letters Mahler took his leave of a number of
3 individuals, including Anna von Mildenburg. It is hard to avoid the impression
4 that he had a bad conscience that because of their former relationship his
5 dealings with her in Vienna had been so formal and distant. Zemlinsky and
6 Schoenberg were invited to afternoon coffee, while Bruno Walter received a
7 letter assuring him that their bond required no words to underline it. But
8 Mahler’s admirers were not content to leave it at that. Presumably at the insti-
9 gation of the loyal and assiduous Paul Stefan, it was decided that Mahler
30 should be given a proper send-off at the station. The printed invitation was
1 signed by Webern and Stefan as well as two pupils of Zemlinsky and
2 Schoenberg, Karl Horwitz and Heinrich Jalowetz, and asked the composer’s
3 admirers to present themselves at the Westbahnhof at 8.30 on Monday
4 9 December. ‘Since the aim is to surprise Mahler with this demonstration, it
5 seems imperative not to confide in persons close to the press.’31 Some two
6 hundred people responded to the invitation, including, of course, Berg and
7 Schoenberg, Roller and Klimt. Alma does not say whether Mahler was
8 genuinely surprised but described the send-off as follows:
9
40 They were all drawn up when we arrived, flowers in their hands and tears in
41R their eyes, ready to board the train and deck out our compartment with
flowers from roof to floor. When we drew slowly out it was without regret or 1
backward glances. We had been too hard hit. All we wanted was to get away, 2
the farther the better. We even felt happy as Vienna was left behind. We did 3
not miss our child, who had been left with my mother. We knew now that 4
anxious love was of no avail against catastrophe, and that no spot on earth 5
gives immunity. We had been through the fire. So we thought. But, in spite of 6
all, one thing had us both in its grip – the future.32 7
8
According to Alma, Mahler insisted during the journey that he was taking his 9
leave of repertory opera but expressed his happiness that he had contrived to 10
hide from the public the fact that he was making bricks without straw. 1
According to another account, Klimt is said to have commented only ‘It’s over’ 2
on the forecourt at the Westbahnhof. In Paris the Mahlers put up at the Hotel 3
Bellevue and in the evening attended a performance of Tristan und Isolde at 4
the Palais Garnier. The Tristan was Ernest van Dyck, who had appeared to 5
great acclaim in Vienna, but the Mahlers left before the end. On 12 December, 6
in keeping with the terms of Mahler’s contract, they set sail from Cherbourg 7
aboard the Kaiserin Auguste Viktoria. Mahler was seasick. They arrived in New 8
York on 20 December. A new era was beginning, although it was to be very 9
much shorter than planned. 20
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5
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41R
1
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3 31
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7 Das Lied von der Erde
8
9
10
1
2
3
4 SEPTEMBER 1908 Bruno Walter received a letter from Toblach
5
6
I N EARLY
inviting him to meet Mahler for lunch in Vienna on the 5th: ‘I have been
hard at work (from which you can tell that I am more or less “acclimatized”).
7 I myself do not know what the whole thing could be called. I have been
8 granted a time that was good, and I think it is the most personal thing I have
9 done so far. Perhaps more about that when I see you.’1 The work to which
20 Mahler was referring here was Das Lied von der Erde.
1 The first edition of Hans Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte was published by
2 Insel-Verlag of Leipzig in 1907. Hans Bethge (1876–1946) was a writer with a
3 doctorate in Romance literature. A native of Dessau, he later moved to Berlin.2
4 Die chinesische Flöte contains adaptations of eighth-century Chinese poems
5 based on German, French and English translations, Bethge himself not being
6 conversant with Chinese. The volume was remarkably successful, no doubt
7 because it tapped into a vein of japonaiserie already mined by Jugendstil
8 artists. Bethge built on the success of the collection and published adaptations
9 of Indian, Japanese and Persian poetry. It is worth mentioning here that one of
30 Sou-Chong’s most famous arias in Franz Lehár’s The Land of Smiles and a
1 favourite of the tenor Richard Tauber derives from Ma-Huang-Tschung’s ‘The
2 Spurned Lover’ in Bethge’s anthology. Lehár’s version reads: ‘Von Apfelblüten
3 einen Kranz / Legt ich der Lieblichsten vors Fenster / In einer Mondnacht im
4 April’ (‘I laid a garland of apple blossoms before my sweetheart’s window one
5 moonlit night in April’), whereas Bethge’s version is: ‘Von Birnbaumblüten
6 einen Kranz / Legt ich der Herrlichsten vors Fenster / In einer Mondnacht im
7 April’ (‘I laid a garland of pear-tree blossoms before the most glorious woman’s
8 window one moonlit night in April’). This is not the place to discuss the poetic
9 or philological merits of Bethge’s adaptations. What matters is that they cast a
40 spell on Mahler, who until then had taken very little interest in Chinese or
41R oriental literature, unless we count individual poems by the Orientalist
DAS LIED VON DER ERDE 563
Friedrich Rückert. Most of Mahler’s work on Das Lied von der Erde can be 1
dated to the summer of 1908. Alma’s claim that the earliest sketches date from 2
1907 is almost certainly ruled out by the fact that the anthology was probably 3
not published until the autumn of that year. Mahler may also have revised the 4
score in 1909, but in general he began work on it in July 1908 and had 5
completed it by September.3 The first performance was conducted by Bruno 6
Walter on 20 November 1911 six months after Mahler’s death. It took place in 7
the Munich Tonhalle. The orchestra was that of the local Konzertverein, and 8
the soloists were both American, Sarah Jane Cahier (‘Mrs Charles Cahier’) and 9
William Miller. After the interval Walter conducted the Second Symphony as 10
part of a memorial concert organized by the loyal Emil Gutmann. 1
Das Lied von der Erde is a puzzling work for Mahler’s admirers and also for 2
scholars. That we are dealing here with one of his most important works was 3
clear from a very early date, but exactly what sort of a work is it in terms of 4
musical history? Is it a cycle of orchestral songs, as its main heading claims, or 5
is it, rather, a ‘symphony for tenor and contralto (or baritone) voice and 6
orchestra’, as its subheading states? Mahler seems initially to have envisaged 7
the former alternative and planned to write a piece modelled on Berlioz’s Les 8
Nuits d’été, for example, but in the course of his work he appears to have given 9
increasing prominence to the goal of overcoming the hitherto strict division 20
between symphony and song. The result is what Hermann Danuser has 1
described as ‘one of the most radical dovetailings of existing genres in the 2
whole history of music until then’.4 The three middle movements, ‘Von der 3
Jugend’, ‘Von der Schönheit’ and ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling’, most clearly 4
resemble lieder in terms of their character and length, whereas the introduc- 5
tory and dramatically assured ‘Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde’, which 6
lasts a full eight minutes, and, above all, the final movement, ‘Der Abschied’, 7
which, at almost thirty minutes, lasts nearly as long as the previous five move- 8
ments together, both go far beyond anything that we might define as a song. 9
‘Der Abschied’ in particular constitutes a final symphonic Adagio similar to 30
those that end the Third and Ninth Symphonies. Indeed, it is this final move- 1
ment that most encourages us to define the work as a symphony, even though 2
the concept of a song cannot be abandoned altogether. The secret of the work’s 3
unusual impact lies in the sense of a coincidentia oppositorum, a union of 4
opposites, song and symphony no longer being forced beneath the same yoke, 5
as is otherwise the case with Mahler, but allowed to flow freely into one 6
another as if at the end of a lengthy tradition. The boldness of the concept is 7
subsumed by the purity of its realization. Nor is the fact that the work has six 8
movements particularly exceptional: so, too, has the Third Symphony. 9
The existential scope of the work is already clear from its opening move- 40
ment. The refrain, ‘Dunkel ist das Leben, ist der Tod’ (‘Life is dark, and so is 41R
564 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 death’), is taken over from Bethge’s adaptation of the original poem by Li-Tai-
2 Po and marks out the extremes between which the song-symphony operates,
3 for these lines are not those of a lament but of an ecstatically ebullient drinking
4 song. The strident, gleaming tone of the opening, which places inordinate
5 demands on the tenor’s power and penetration, is achieved by means of the
6 tension inherent in the interval of a second, while the vaguely exotic character
7 of the work as a whole stems from the use of pentatonic elements that had not
8 previously been a part of Mahler’s musical language. Instead of being built
9 around the usual major and minor modes, the work is based on a five-note
10 scale associated with central and eastern Asia. Other examples of pentatoni-
1 cism that may be familiar to the reader are Puccini’s Turandot and Lehár’s
2 aforementioned Land of Smiles, in particular the song ‘Von Apfelblüten einen
3 Kranz’, in which pentatonicism is used insistently to suggest a particular exoti-
4 cism. The other distinguishing feature of the musical language of Das Lied von
5 der Erde is its prevailing diatonicism. In this case, however, the pentatonic
6 colouring rescues it from the charge levelled against the unadulterated diatoni-
7 cism of the final movement of the Seventh Symphony.
8 The second song, ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’, bears the performance marking
9 ‘Etwas schleppend. Ermüdet’ (‘Somewhat dragging. Weary’). ‘Weary’ is not so
20 much a tempo marking as an instruction to the performer on how to interpret
1 the piece. The muted first violins move sinuously and yet lethargically in hexa-
2 chords, and the lake above which the autumn mists float appears to be ruffled.
3 The first oboe adds its plaintive strains. This could almost be a quotation from
4 the start of the scene between Pimen and Grigory in Mussorgsky’s Boris
5 Godunov. Even the situation is similar: Pimen is writing his chronicle by the
6 light of an oil lamp, while the words that Mahler has set here include the phrase
7 ‘My little lamp guttered with a hiss’. Autumn and weariness settle like mildew
8 on the lonely Chinese poet, who lives in a little hut on the shores of a lake. The
9 sense of uplift at the words ‘Sonne der Liebe, willst du nie mehr scheinen’ (‘Sun
30 of love, will you never shine again?’) is as vain as it is brief, and the end of the
1 question, ‘Um meine bittern Tränen mild aufzutrocknen’ (‘And dry up tenderly
2 my bitter tears’), sinks back into the lethargy of the opening in which nature
3 and the soul are attuned with one another. The world of nature is apportioned
4 to the supporting violins, the sighs of the soul to the plaintive woodwind. The
5 fact that the soul can find no secure basis for certainty or trust is reflected in
6 the almost complete absence of a bass register and the spare textures of the
7 instrumentation, which is chamber-like in its diaphanous lightness.
8 Mahler never came closer to Impressionism in music than in the third move-
9 ment, ‘Von der Jugend’, plein-air painting of the most gossamery kind. There
40 could hardly be a starker contrast than with ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’. In the
41R earlier song we encountered a man utterly alone and able to contemplate only
death as a form of release, whereas here we have a friend among friends, with- 1
drawing momentarily from the pavilion in the centre of a small lake, and with 2
a sense of pleasure and inner calm watching and listening to his friends as they 3
drink and talk and write poetry. Mahler links the two songs together by 4
appearing to repeat the basic figure from ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’ at the start 5
of ‘Von der Jugend’. This time, however, it is entrusted not to the strascinando 6
violins but to the flute and oboe, which leap along in typically cheeky fashion – 7
the notes on the printed page reveal the inner relationship more clearly than 8
their aural impression. The strings are marked ‘saltando’ (‘leaping’), and the 9
tenor voice, too, leaps like a ball on a fountain, almost chuckling, filled with a 10
very real zest for life and intense vitality. There is something particularly ingeni- 1
ous about Mahler’s treatment of the text, with its reference to a mirror image: 2
‘Auf des kleinen, kleinen Teiches stiller, stiller Wasserfläche zeigt sich alles 3
wunderlich im Spiegelbilde.’ (‘On the little pool’s still surface everything is 4
strangely mirrored’.) Twelve-note technique would, of course, have provided a 5
simple solution to this problem in the form of retrograde, inversion and retro- 6
grade-inversion. But this was not an option available to Mahler, and so he used 7
individual notes and even entire sections that appear to mirror each other. 8
The fourth song, ‘Von der Schönheit’, likewise uses mirror effects. Here the 9
poet describes young women on the riverbank, their delicate outlines reflected 20
in the water. Whereas the earlier song had described an all-male society, here 1
we have its counterpart in the form of a group of young women, albeit one 2
startled by a party of wild-eyed men on horseback. This gives Mahler a chance 3
to interpolate what is almost certainly the briefest quick march in his output, 4
an agitated wild hunt that bursts into the comodo dolcissimo idyll with unex- 5
pected and alarming brutality and is by no means as harmless as the text would 6
have us believe. The male principle drives away all porcelain-like delicacy and 7
subtlety, even if it passes across the stage with lightning speed. The narrator 8
grows breathless and proves incapable of providing a precise account of events 9
in so low a register – the passage is barely singable, a feature due not to the 30
inability of the singer or to Mahler’s incompetence but to the situation, which 1
takes the narrator’s breath away. The most beautiful of the women casts 2
agitated, languorous glances in the direction of the wildest of the young men, 3
but as the violas die away the sense of bewilderment remains long after the 4
song has ended: the virginal idyll has been destroyed for good. 5
In the fifth song, ‘Der Trunkene im Frühling’, the singer who had launched the 6
cycle with the opening drinking song seems to have woken up from one of his 7
many drunken stupors. But perhaps this song is sung by the ‘lonely man in 8
autumn’, who had sought refuge from his loneliness in drink. The fact that ‘Der 9
Einsame im Herbst’ is sung by the alto and not by the tenor, who sings the two 40
drinking songs, should not carry undue weight, not only because the alto can be 41R
566 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 replaced by a baritone but also because these are not songs associated with specific
2 roles: it is the alto who embodies the lonely man. Mahler paints an inimitable
3 portrait of a drinker (the poem’s original title) but also of a ‘drunken man’ –
4 including the Nietzschean connotations of that term that are also found in Alfred
5 Mombert’s anthology of poems, Der himmlische Zecher (The Celestial Toper) that
6 appeared in 1909. For this toper, real life and the world of dreams merge as one,
7 and he is incapable of distinguishing any longer between daytime, dreams and
8 drinking. The reeling motion of the song and its rapid shifts reflect the drunkard’s
9 vacillating frame of mind, but beneath the satirical surface there is something self-
10 destructive, and we shall probably not go far wrong in seeing behind this appar-
1 ently happy drunkard the figure of Wagner’s ailing Tristan reeling across the stage:
2 ‘Verfluchter Tag mit deinem Schein! Wachst du ewig meiner Pein?’ (‘Accursed day
3 with your bright light! Do you watch forever over my torment?’)
4 But it is the final song, ‘Der Abschied’, that ultimately confirms our defini-
5 tion of the work as a symphony. On hearing the first five songs, a keeper of the
6 seal of the great musico-aesthetic tradition might argue that for all the sophis-
7 tication and delights of the work, they do not justify its subtitle as a ‘symphony’,
8 but the final movement suddenly raises the whole work to the level of the great
9 symphonic tradition and retrospectively exudes an authority that lifts the
20 miniatures and snapshots of the previous movements to expressive heights
1 unparalleled in Mahler’s output. This final movement – the word ‘song’, which
2 had earlier been appropriate, no longer does it justice – is worthy of taking its
3 place alongside the greatest of Mahler’s Adagios, while surpassing them in
4 terms of its ability to achieve the same effect with far more economical means.
5 Never has the unfathomable loneliness of the human soul been laid so bare
6 and seemed as vulnerable as it does here. This is also the only time that Mahler
7 has combined two separate poems, Mong-Kao-Jen’s ‘In Erwartung des
8 Freundes’ and Wang-Wei’s ‘Der Abschied des Freundes’, linking together the
9 two phases of expectation and valediction in a single movement, albeit with a
30 number of changes to both texts. Expectation and valediction now appear as
1 the two sides of the same coin, and this coin is loneliness and death. (It may be
2 added in passing that if the mezzo-soprano or baritone soloist sits down
3 during the long orchestral interlude, then they have the most disruptive effect
4 imaginable on the flow and cohesion of this movement.)
5 Until now, even in ‘Der Einsame im Herbst’, sadness had seemed relatively
6 light-footed, with violin figurations and plaintive solo woodwind. But the
7 final movement begins with the performance marking ‘Schwer’ (‘Heavy’). By
8 retaining his extremely translucent, chamber-like instrumentation, Mahler
9 ensures that this heaviness is achieved not through massive orchestral effects but
40 simply through a low pizzicato in the double basses and cellos, semibreves in the
41R harps, a tam-tam struck pianissimo, two horns also marked pianissimo and the
contrabassoon in its lowest register. This is repeated twice before the first oboe 1
enters with a characteristic turn that will later leave its mark on the final move- 2
ment of the Ninth. The use of extreme contrast that had characterized the earlier 3
movements is now replaced by a uniform mood of bleakness culminating in the 4
extraordinarily spare textures of the middle section at ‘Es wehet kühl im 5
Schatten meiner Fichten’, where the solo voice is accompanied only by a pedal 6
point in the double basses and the turn in the upper register of the flute, the 7
melancholic fluttering of the bird of death seeming to derive from the end of the 8
Second Symphony. At the phrase ‘O Schönheit!’, there is a sense of optimism and 9
uplift, only for a veiled funeral march to usher in the orchestral interlude that 10
leads to the second, concluding poem by Wang-Wei, starting with the words ‘Ich 1
stieg vom Pferd’. Mahler found this subjective perspective too direct and so he 2
objectified the farewell by simply changing the personal pronoun from ‘I’ (‘Ich’) 3
to ‘he’ (‘Er’) and instructing the singer to interpret these lines ‘in a narrative tone, 4
without expression’. The range is very narrow, making it difficult to distinguish 5
between narrative economy or neutrality and total weariness. 6
The work ends with a sevenfold repeat of the word ‘Ewig’ (‘forever’/‘eternal’). 7
Mahler found a bold solution to the problem of how to end a symphony that 8
somehow has to reach a conclusion while at the same time implying the infinity 9
and open-endedness of human hopes and longings and sufferings: the ideas of 20
closure and open-endedness are intertwined like death and life. To that extent 1
the work could also be called ‘The Song of Life and Death’. Over a basic C major 2
tonality the voice moves seven times from E to D, remaining on the second 3
degree of the scale with a hovering persistence instead of completing the obvious 4
final step to C. The final chord is a triad with added sixth (C–E–G–A), the note 5
A producing a dissonance that avoids the shrillness of the famous nine-note 6
chord in the fragmentary Tenth Symphony but which, combined with the vocal 7
line of the soloist, none the less invests this ending with a sense of delicate 8
suspension. On the one hand, then, Mahler avoids closure, while on the other 9
hand providing the work with a conclusion that represents an expanded form of 30
the Grundgestalt of A–G–E that shapes the work as a whole.5 Das Lied von der 1
Erde does not end and yet it ends, prolonging life and death in the evolutionary 2
scale and cycle of nature – earth – and extending them into eternity. 3
4
5
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41R
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7 Starting Afresh: New York
8
9
(1908–11)
10
1
2
3
4 A New City – a New Opera House
5
In Mahler’s day the crossing from Cherbourg to New York lasted a whole week.
6
The couple put up at the Hotel Majestic, a huge conglomeration of six tower
7
blocks arranged in parallel in two groups of three, overlooking Central Park
8
West on the corner of Seventy-Second Street. A postcard to Mahler’s mother-
9
in-law indicates that they were staying on the eleventh floor. The hotel seems
20
not to have been entirely to the Mahlers’ liking, for on their next visit they
1
stayed at the Savoy on Fifth Avenue at the corner of Fifty-Ninth Street and the
2
south-eastern corner of Central Park, where Central Park South and Fifth
3
Avenue intersect. It was also substantially closer to the Met, which lay between
4
Thirty-Ninth and Fortieth Street on the one hand and between Seventh Avenue
5
and Broadway on the other. Moreover, the Savoy was popular with singers like
6
Caruso, who stayed there whenever they were appearing at the Met.
7
Neither Mahler nor Alma knew New York when they arrived on
8
20 December 1907. It had changed enormously during the period since 1880,
9
when electric lighting was installed on Broadway, ushering in the city’s trans-
30
formation into an international capital. Two years later the first electric power
1
station began operating. The Gilded Age was a time of economic prosperity
2
that was gradually established in the wake of the Civil War and that developed
3
with increasing speed. The leading New York families were said to consist of
4
the four hundred men and women who every January were invited by Caroline
5
Astor to a vast ball at her home. Their fortunes had been made earlier in the
6
century, but the Gilded Age finally gave them an opportunity to spend them
7
ostentatiously. In addition to foundations and hospitals, a new and attractive
8
institution like the Metropolitan Opera, where they owned boxes, naturally
9
came within their purview. The Astors, for example, had made millions
40
trading in furs and real estate back at the beginning of the century and had
41R
STARTING AFRESH: NEW YORK 569
continued to add to their wealth in the course of the years that followed – in 1
the end it was said that they owned half of Manhattan. The Vanderbilts 2
owed their fortune to property and stock-market speculations, while the 3
Rockefellers, who had moved to New York from Cleveland, owed theirs to oil. 4
Their fairytale wealth helped to support the Met and, by extension, funded the 5
lavish terms of Mahler’s contract. The 1880s were a golden age in New York’s 6
cultural history, enjoying a boom from which the city continues to benefit even 7
today: in 1880 the Metropolitan Museum of Art was opened, the Met in 1883, 8
Carnegie Hall, where Mahler was to conduct the New York Philharmonic, 9
followed in 1891, the city’s neoclassical Public Library in 1902. Meanwhile, the 10
year 1895 had seen the inception of a particular type of unscrupulous jour- 1
nalism, when William Randolph Hearst bought the Morning Journal and 2
sought to defeat his rival Joseph Pulitzer by any means available. The story of 3
this struggle is enshrined in Orson Welles’s film classic Citizen Kane, Hearst 4
being the model for Charles Foster Kane. 5
Brooklyn Bridge was opened to traffic in 1883, and within five years New 6
York, Brooklyn, Queens and Staten Island could unite to form America’s 7
largest city. With a population of three and a half million, it was exceeded only 8
by London and Paris. So attractive was New York that it proved a magnet for 9
immigrants from Europe. Traditionally, they came from Ireland, Germany, 20
Scandinavia and Italy, but by the end of the century the largest influx was of 1
Russian Jews who, fleeing from the increasing number of pogroms at home, 2
sought refuge not only in western Europe but also in America and especially 3
in New York. Mahler did not like these immigrants, above all the ones who had 4
got on in the New World and who were currently working at the Met – he 5
regarded them as the main reason for the house’s desperate artistic plight, 6
although he would presumably have had no answer to the question as to how 7
an American opera house could function at the end of the nineteenth century 8
with only American artists in a land with no operatic tradition to look back on. 9
Having barely set foot in the city, Mahler rushed off to the Met to see the 30
house for himself. Everything there was new to him. According to Alma, it was 1
only now that he discovered that he would be making his debut with Tristan 2
und Isolde. And yet even if this was news to him, it will have been an agreeable 3
surprise, for he knew that Tristan und Isolde and Fidelio were the two pieces 4
with which he could win over an audience in a twinkling, always assuming that 5
the cast was right. He held his first orchestral rehearsal on 23 December and at 6
once gave notice of his rigorous approach, breaking off within minutes and 7
insisting that all other rehearsals in the house be discontinued as he claimed not 8
to be able to hear his own players. The chorus was currently rehearsing in the 9
foyer, as was its wont. Until then no other conductor had been able to do 40
anything about this unfortunate situation, even though it was impossible to 41R
570 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 close the doors to the auditorium sufficiently tightly to keep out extraneous
2 noises. But Mahler got his way. For the opening night on the first day of the new
3 year, his cast was all that he could have dreamt of: his Isolde was the Swedish-
4 American soprano Olive Fremstad, arguably less convincing as an actress than
5 Anna von Mildenburg, but blessed with a fuller and more radiant voice, as her
6 few surviving recordings make clear. Mahler had not previously worked with
7 the Munich heldentenor Heinrich Knote, but he seems to have been enthusi-
8 astic about him. Knote’s recordings are all excellent and show that of all the
9 great Wagner tenors of his time he was arguably the most modern and closest
10 to today’s ideal. The only comparable singer in Mahler’s day was Leo Slezak in
1 Vienna, but he did not sing heavy roles like Tristan and Siegfried. When
2 compared with Erik Schmedes in Vienna and Carl Burrian at the Met, both of
3 whom produced a thick and viscous tone, Knote was slimmer, more youthful
4 and also more expressive, his outstanding technique fully equal to all the
5 demands of a part like Tristan, which is notorious for ruining voices. In the
6 second act in particular, few Wagner tenors are able to stay in tune in the piano
7 passages of the Love Duet, but Knote proved that it is possible to sing even these
8 difficult sections of the score with perfect intonation and tonal beauty. Mahler
9 was beside himself with pleasure and showered Knote with compliments. In
20 terms of their vocal beauty and purity of intonation, Fremstad and Knote were
1 evidently preferable to Mildenburg and Schmedes, just as the Met’s famous
2 ensemble in general was superior to its no less famous counterpart in Vienna.
3 The reviews of the first night were ecstatic. Fremstad was making her
4 role debut as Isolde and was exceptionally well received, but it was Mahler –
5 introduced to local audiences as the ‘eminent conductor from Vienna’, his
6 activities as a composer largely overlooked – who was undoubtedly the star of
7 the evening. W. J. Henderson, the much-feared critic of the New York Sun,
8 observed that Mahler’s guiding hand was discernible in every detail. And
9 although Mahler’s tempos had occasionally departed from those that were
30 familiar from New York’s Wagner tradition, the ‘eloquent variety of Wagner’s
1 instrumentation was displayed by the simple process of bringing out clearly
2 every solo phrase, while the harmonic and contrapuntal background was
3 never slighted’. Other writers stressed the lucidity and powerful rhythmic
4 quality of Mahler’s conducting and his ability to create tremendous climaxes.
5 It is clear from these reviews that neither the audience nor the local critics had
6 heard Wagner’s music conducted like this before.
7 There is an interesting account of the fascination exerted by Mahler’s
8 conducting debut at the Met, interesting not least for the comparison that it
9 draws with Alfred Hertz, the company’s principal conductor, who was mainly
40 responsible for the German repertory. The account is that of a Russian-born
41R pianist and critic who later persuaded Toscanini to conduct the NBC
Symphony Orchestra and later still became the network’s director of music. In 1
1908 Samuel Chotzinoff was still a young music lover lucky enough to be 2
present when Mahler made his Met debut: 3
4
Mahler came out hurriedly and climbed swiftly into the conductor’s chair. His 5
profile was sharp and arresting. He looked and behaved quite unlike Hertz. 6
His gestures were economical and precise. The prelude sounded different. It 7
was not as lush as with Hertz. There were fewer retards and accelerations. 8
There was a severity about this interpretation that, strangely enough, height- 9
ened both its sensuousness and its suspense. The curtain went up, the invis- 10
ible sailor sang his precarious measures, and suddenly the orchestra and 1
Isolde plunged me into waves of strong, beautiful, rugged sound. For the first 2
time I could remember, I heard distinctly the words Isolde was singing. My 3
eyes turned to Mahler to find a reason. He was ‘riding’ the orchestra with the 4
calculated sureness of a master trainer, at one moment curbing it to a crafty 5
balance between it and the voice on the stage, at another giving it its head as 6
it raced alone. Perhaps at certain climaxes he was too solicitous for the voice. 7
Though I heard the words and the voice, I was sensible of the reins on the 8
orchestra, and I did not feel the thrill and elation of a great fusion of both, 9
which I had expected. Nevertheless, it was an entirely new Tristan for me. 20
Now at last I knew how Wagner should sound. Hertz had misled us. Wagner 1
could be as clear, as understandable, as lucid as Aïda.1 2
3
Chotzinoff ’s testimony is informative not least because, although writing 4
retrospectively, he avoids the clichés and sweeping generalizations of New 5
York’s resident critics and provides us with one of the most precise analyses 6
and succinct characterizations of Mahler’s conducting that have come down to 7
us. As many observers confirmed, Mahler had abandoned the eccentric 8
gestures of his youth and adopted a stricter and more economical style of 9
conducting. Moreover, he preferred a Wagnerian sound that was lean-textured 30
and yet muscular, embodying the phenotype closest to his own physical 1
appearance – such links do indeed exist and are by no means far-fetched. He 2
eschewed an excessive use of rubato. And, above all, he favoured the voice over 3
the orchestra. Presumably Chotzinoff was unaware that in striving for clarity, 4
Mahler was in fact aspiring to Wagner’s own ideal attitude to the relationship 5
between words and music. Like most Wagner conductors then as now, Hertz 6
was unable to resist the temptation to give the orchestra its head and drown 7
even singers like Fremstad and Knote. In contrast, Mahler’s rigour and 8
austerity were clearly felt to be unusual and yet uncommonly fascinating. 9
All surviving accounts of Mahler’s conducting indicate that towards the end 40
of his life he created an impression similar to the one made by his New York 41R
572 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 rival, Arturo Toscanini, at the end of his career. The young theatre director
2 Peter Brook heard the elderly Toscanini at one of his final concerts in London.
3 He was expecting a ‘spectacular whirlwind of passionate gesticulation and
4 demonic movement’, but instead he found himself watching a frail figure
5
6 beating time with tiny, almost imperceptible movements of one hand. And he
7 listened. . . . The almost motionless old man was all attention, and such was
8 the clarity of his mind, such was the intensity of his feeling, that there was
9 nothing further he had to do. He needed only to listen, to let the music take
10 shape for his inner ear, and the outer sound called towards him by his
1 listening matched what he needed to hear.2
2
3 New York’s second most important critic after Henderson was Henry E.
4 Krehbiel, who wrote for the New York Tribune. He had heard of Mahler’s
5 exploits in Vienna and expected that the conductor would sweep away the
6 cobwebs from the Met’s musty stage with no less revolutionary ardour, but in
7 this he was being unrealistic, for how could Mahler have achieved such a feat
8 in only a week? From the outset Krehbiel was carping in his criticisms of
9 Mahler, and when disagreements later arose over Krehbiel’s contribution to the
20 programme notes of one of Mahler’s concerts, he became the conductor’s most
1 outspoken critic. Henderson, too, later backed away from his initial enthu-
2 siasm, not least because he did not know what to make of Mahler’s music on
3 the rare occasions when it was performed by the New York Philharmonic, with
4 the result that Mahler forfeited the support of the city’s two most important
5 critics. True, there was never the same vicious campaign against him as there
6 had been in Vienna and certainly none of the anti-Semitic undertones and
7 overtones of that campaign, but the result was a perceptible cooling in Mahler’s
8 initial enthusiasm for the musical life of New York. With few exceptions, he
9 never had any luck with his ‘superiors’. Krehbiel’s obituary of Mahler was a
30 truly infamous piece of writing, far worse than any of his reviews and, as such,
1 a classic example of a posthumous character assassination. In spite of all this,
2 the audience at the performance on 1 January 1908 was captivated and
3 rewarded Mahler with a standing ovation. Even Mahler himself was surprised
4 at the scope of his success.
5 Although the singers left little to be desired, the same could not be said of
6 the orchestra or of the house’s production values, at least when compared to
7 those in Vienna, a point that Mahler noted at once – one wonders whether he
8 had harboured any illusions in this regard. A glance at the names of the singers
9 with whom he worked at the Met will confirm that he will have had no
40 complaints – and almost all of them left gramophone recordings, allowing us
41R to build up a mental picture of the sound of the Met’s ensemble. They included
not only Caruso (with whom he never worked) as primus inter pares but also 1
the American contralto Louise Homer; the Italian character baritone Antonio 2
Scotti, who was the finest Scarpia of his age and Mahler’s Don Giovanni; the 3
tenor Alessandro Bonci, a lirico spinto who had abandoned Hammerstein for 4
Conried; Johanna Gadski, who sang both Donna Elvira and Brünnhilde and 5
who was second only to Olive Fremstad as a hochdramatisch soprano; and 6
Berta Morena, who came to New York at Mahler’s suggestion and sang 7
Leonore in his Fidelio. For Wagner’s tenor roles, Mahler had at his disposal not 8
only Knote but also Carl Burrian and, for two seasons, Erik Schmedes. They 9
were the three leading heldentenors in the world. For roles such as Zerlina in 10
Don Giovanni, Mahler could choose between Marcella Sembrich and 1
Geraldine Farrar, the former drawing to the end of an illustrious career, the 2
latter still at the start of hers. Emmy Destinn, the finest jugendlich-dramatisch 3
soprano of the age, was his Mařenka in The Bartered Bride and Lisa in his final 4
series of performances of The Queen of Spades in March 1910, a production in 5
which his old comrade-in-arms from Vienna, Leo Slezak, took the part of 6
Hermann. Slezak appeared in only four seasons at the Met: in spite of his 7
successes as Verdi’s Otello and Wagner’s tenor heroes, he felt ill at ease in the 8
New World and soon returned to Vienna and the Tegernsee. We do not know 9
whether Mahler liked Fyodor Chaliapin, who sang Leporello in Don Giovanni, 20
but it is unlikely that the musical liberties that the Russian bass took will have 1
been to Mahler’s taste. On the other hand, the singer reports in his memoirs 2
that at the first rehearsal for Don Giovanni, Mahler complained that none 3
of the singers showed the commitment that he was used to. New York’s 4
audiences – the Vanderbilts, the Morgans, the Astors and the Rockefellers, 5
who had financed the building of the new house, making land available and 6
continuing to make donations in order to keep the company afloat (the theatre 7
was literally built around the boxes that they owned), together with all the 8
older moneyed families and many of the nouveaux riches – valued the opera 9
for reasons other than those for which Mahler revered this art form. Then as 30
now the Met’s philosophy was centred on its singers’ performances and its 1
magnificent interior. 2
Of the company’s conductors, the valiant Anton Seidl had been by far the 3
most significant to date, so that it is all the more to Conried’s credit that he hit 4
on the idea of appointing Mahler, a decision that then encouraged Otto Kahn 5
to sign up Toscanini. According to Alma, Conried had ultimate authority over 6
the productions, and there is no doubt that in this regard there could be no talk 7
at the Met of opera productions that could be compared to those achieved in 8
Vienna by Mahler and Roller. All the productions that were taken over or 9
restudied by Mahler – the last-named group includes Fidelio, Le nozze di 40
Figaro, The Bartered Bride and The Queen of Spades – were officially placed in 41R
574 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the hands of the house producer, Anton Schertel, but we may be certain that,
2 starting with his revival of Fidelio, Mahler took a personal interest in what
3 happened on the stage, albeit not to the extent that he had done in Vienna.
4 Previous writers on Mahler have sometimes given the impression that at the
5 Met he was too tired to care about anything any longer but that he simply
6 carried out his conducting duties and ignored all other aspects of the perform-
7 ance. Alma claims that Mahler ‘did not care’ about the staging,3 and although
8 this may have been true of the first run of performances of Tristan und
9 Isolde, it could certainly not be said of what followed. For Don Giovanni on
10 23 January 1908 Mahler is said to have demanded fifteen rehearsals with
1 orchestra and soloists, which was undoubtedly far more than was usual at the
2 Met. And for Fidelio, his first genuinely new production on 20 March 1908, he
3 will at least have attempted to transfer his old working methods to the new
4 house, and not merely by reproducing Roller’s sets. Indeed, in one of his letters,
5 he states explicitly that his aim was to conduct and to direct. Even if he had
6 come to New York with the firm intention of not allowing himself to be worn
7 down by the opera industry as much as he had been in Vienna, he was bound
8 to attempt to sweep away the wretched conditions that he found there. If he
9 had stayed any longer in New York, he might even have agreed to succeed
20 Conried, and we should now be speaking of a Mahler era at the Met as well as
1 in Vienna.
2 With the exception of the singers, Mahler took only a few days to realize that
3 conditions at the Met were in urgent need of improvement. But it was also
4 clear to him that he could not achieve this alone and that the only person who
5 could help him was Roller. In an uncharacteristically detailed letter that he
6 wrote four weeks after his arrival in New York, he invited Roller to join him in
7 America, beginning with a uniquely intemperate diagnosis: ‘As a result of the
8 absolute incompetence and fraudulent activities of those who have for years
9 had control over the stage in matters of business and art (managers, producers,
30 stage managers, etc.), almost all of whom are immigrants, the situation at the
1 Opera is bleak.’4 The locals, he went on, were better qualified, for although the
2 tastes of the audiences and of the multimillionaires who held the reins of
3 power were corrupt, at least they were not as blasé as their counterparts in
4 Vienna but were hungry for the new and extremely eager to learn. No doubt to
5 Roller’s complete bewilderment, Mahler went on to spell out what was
6 happening behind the scenes at the Met: he had barely arrived in New York
7 before he had been offered Conried’s post. There is no doubt that Conried was
8 seriously ill – Alma diagnosed his illness as tabes, a wasting disease that
9 marked one of the final stages of syphilis. Mahler does not mention this, but
40 merely states that Conried was completely discredited, mainly as a result of
41R unfairness and tactlessness. It looks as if New York’s operatic millionaires had
had their eye on Mahler for some time and that the enormous success of his 1
Tristan und Isolde reinforced the desirability of his appointment. Mahler lost 2
no time in turning down the offer, which apparently came as a surprise to him. 3
He had not shaken off the burden of his Vienna appointment to take on a 4
similar workload in New York. Above all, the directorship would have required 5
him to spend nine months of every year in America, putting an end to the free- 6
doms that he had only recently acquired. He goes on in his letter to Roller: ‘As 7
you have guessed, I quite decisively refused. But I expressed my willingness to 8
continue assisting the management, in some capacity, in artistic matters, and 9
in any case to continue conducting and producing.’ 10
Having failed to enlist Mahler’s services, the authorities cast around for an 1
alternative and approached Giulio Gatti-Casazza, who was currently running 2
La Scala in Milan, with Toscanini as his music director. According to Mahler, 3
the plan was to appoint Gatti-Casazza as Conried’s successor, entrust the 4
Italian repertory to Toscanini and leave the German repertory with Mahler 5
himself – as always, it was Italian and German operas that formed the twin 6
pillars of the Metropolitan repertory. Mahler seems not to have suspected that 7
this decision would spark one of the decisive conflicts that would make it 8
impossible for him to remain at the Met. After all, he should have known that 9
Toscanini was making a name for himself with his spectacular Wagner 20
performances at La Scala. Was it likely that a man as ambitious as Toscanini 1
would allow himself to be reduced to conducting no more than Puccini and 2
Verdi in New York? But this conflict still lay in the future. 3
For the present Mahler was keen for Roller to come to New York and 4
assume responsibility for the sets and costumes at the Met, for in Mahler’s view 5
these were in urgent need of an overhaul. Roller’s responsibilities, Mahler went 6
on, would allow him excellent prospects without any of the administrative 7
chores with which he had had to contend in Vienna. And he would have ample 8
funds at his disposal, although he would have to negotiate the terms himself 9
and secure complete freedom of action and authority over everything 30
concerning the stage. Roller could arrange things in such a way that he would 1
need to spend only five months a year in New York and in return should 2
demand a salary of fifteen thousand dollars. Roller’s reply has not survived. 3
Letters between New York and Vienna took almost two weeks to arrive, and 4
Mahler had written twice more before he received Roller’s first surviving 5
answer. In the first of these letters he was still hopeful that Roller might be 6
appointed head of productions. By now, however, Conried’s successor had 7
been announced as Giulio Gatti-Casazza in tandem with Andreas Dippel, a 8
former tenor with whom Mahler had worked in Vienna. But Mahler still 9
regarded himself as ‘hovering as a kind of spirit over the waters’, as he put it in 40
his letter of 15 February 1908. During the intervening weeks, moreover, Roller 41R
576 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 had received a visit from Rawlins Cottenet, a member of the Metropolitan

2 Board who had come to conduct negotiations with him in Vienna. In this
3 context, it is worth noting that in his first letter to Roller, Mahler had
4 mentioned that at the Met Roller had a reputation for ‘squandering millions’,
5 a reputation that Roller must now be at pains to repudiate. But between 15
6 and 27 February – the dates of Mahler’s second and third letters to Roller –
7 events had taken an unfortunate turn. Roller’s reputation seems not to have
8 improved, and Cottenet evidently had nothing positive to report on his
9 meeting with Vienna’s self-assured designer, while Gatti-Casazza and perhaps
10 also Dippel saw no reason to spend yet more money on a post whose raison
1 d’être was unclear and to lumber themselves with a designer generally regarded
2 as difficult, especially since the task of stage manager was currently in the
3 conscientious and trouble-free hands of Anton Schertel.
4 Mahler’s third letter attests to his annoyance and helplessness: ‘Things have
5 taken a turn that I cannot yet entirely assess. This much seems clear to me: that
6 someone has put a spoke in my wheel.’ And Mahler concludes on a note of
7 disillusionment: ‘I no longer believe an offer will be made to you.’5 Roller’s
8 reply to this letter reflects his own disappointment, for he clearly felt that his
9 days at the Vienna Court Opera were numbered – his permanent appointment
20 did indeed end in 1909. Roller, too, was unsure why nothing had come of the
1 matter: perhaps his faulty English was to blame or – and he considered this the
2 most likely explanation – Gatti-Casazza was responsible. The reasons can no
3 longer be disentangled, although it looks as if all the foregoing factors played
4 a part. Gatti-Casazza was undoubtedly afraid of Mahler’s power, especially as
5 a ‘spirit hovering over the waters’ aided and abetted by the loyal Roller. The
6 episode has been recounted at length since it seems likely that it had the same
7 effect on Mahler as the Salome debacle in Vienna. It was the first intrigue that
8 affected him in a city that he had thought immune to intrigue, and it also
9 represented a bitter defeat less than two months after his triumphant Tristan
30 und Isolde. One could say that from now on his days at the Met were
1 numbered. Even when he was still confident that Roller would be appointed,
2 he had told the latter that he did not intend to remain at the Met for more than
3 two seasons. When it became clear that Roller would not be appointed, he told
4 Mengelberg in no uncertain terms: ‘I am quite entranced with this country,
5 even though the artistic satisfaction to be got out of the Metropolitan is very
6 far from what it might be. But now I must finally do something for my family.’6
7 The optimism of the first few days proved as fleeting as a spring shower. In
8 his letters Mahler repeatedly praised native American culture and contrasted
9 it with that of the ‘loathsome Germans’ who blamed American conditions for
40 their failure to make any impression in the New World and who spoke ill of
41R America when they returned to Europe. (There is some truth to the suggestion
that resentment against the German Jews in New York also played a part in this 1
negative assessment.) During the early part of February, when Mahler thought 2
that something might come of Roller’s appointment in New York, he wrote a 3
long letter to his father-in-law, Carl Moll: ‘If I were still theatre-oriented, I 4
would have found here, as never before, the arena for my restless energies. 5
Now I must be satisfied, however, with “stocking the larder” for Almschi and 6
Gucki as well as I can.’7 Once again Mahler stresses that his only concern is to 7
provide for his family, the unspoken implication being that a time would come 8
when he could no longer do so. Everything he did was done on the basis of ‘If 9
I remain healthy’ – the phrase recurs with striking frequency in his letters of 10
this period. The events of the previous summer had left him profoundly 1
shocked, although there were still the occasional flashes of his old wit and 2
good humour. He explained his daily routine to his father-in-law: 3
4
I am constantly loafing. – That is work one never sees the end of. My working 5
schedule is of uncommon simplicity. When I arise, I have breakfast. Hereafter 6
my conscience assaults me for a time (always depending on the weather). 7
Afterwards I idle away my chores. Then comes lunch. Thereupon I must rest 8
for a few hours on doctor’s orders. When I get up, it is snack time. From then 9
until dinner I would have some time. But those wretched habits are so diffi- 20
cult to conquer. Right – now and then I also conduct and hold rehearsals.8 1
2
It is not clear where Mahler picked up his ideas about American innocence 3
and good humour, although one suspects that he was responding like any 4
modern visitor to America, whose initial impression is invariably that the 5
Americans are incredibly friendly and uncomplicated. The picture that we are 6
able to form of Mahler’s contacts outside the Met suggests that those contacts 7
were limited in the extreme. Alma reports that during these initial weeks and 8
months in New York, Mahler often spent half the day in bed at the Majestic, 9
sleeping, reading and even taking his meals there in order to spare his heart for 30
the rehearsals and performances, as his doctor had insisted. Only after the 1
1908/9 season did he start to regain confidence in his physical abilities: the 2
tremendous workload that he shouldered as conductor of the New York 3
Philharmonic is one that he could not have taken on if he were still following 4
doctor’s orders. Having decided to ignore a holiday that meant nothing to him 5
now that he had lost his elder daughter and left his younger one in Europe, he 6
found his first Christmas in America a particularly dispiriting experience. 7
Alma felt abandoned and homesick, leading to the realization that a deep gulf 8
divided her from her husband. The German impresario Maurice Baumfeld 9
rescued the couple from their brooding introspection and invited them to 40
spend Christmas with him. Only when a group of actors joined them did the 41R
578 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Mahlers flee: they cared little for the company and the most dissolute among
2 them was called ‘Putzi’, the term of affection that they had used for Maria, their
3 late daughter. But where would the Mahlers have found convivial entertain-
4 ment? Most of the ex-Germans who were working at the Met and, more gener-
5 ally, on the cultural scene in New York were not to the Mahlers’ liking.
6 Conried, who was in any case tarred by the same brush, was ill, and neither
7 Mahler nor his wife spoke adequate English. Even during his years in Vienna
8 he had felt little inclination to mix with singers, whom he found uneducated
9 and uncultured – not all of them were of Lilli Lehmann’s intellectual calibre –
10 and he was in any case anxious to maintain his distance.
1 Only slowly did Mahler forge any closer contacts. There was Caruso, the
2 outstanding singer and brilliant caricaturist, who entertained and sometimes
3 annoyed his colleagues with his practical jokes. And then there were some of the
4 other singers from Europe whom Mahler learnt to tolerate and whose number
5 included Heinrich Knote. Knote had an American brother-in-law, the famous
6 physician Leon Corning, described by Alma as a Hoffmannesque figure,
7 morbidly avaricious and the inhabitant of a haunted house that the Mahlers were
8 invited to visit. Towards the end of Mahler’s first season in New York – he left on
9 23 April after only four months in the city – the couple got to know another
20 important person, Joseph Fraenkel, whom both Mahler and Alma found sympa-
1 thetic, witty, spontaneous and even a little splenetic, but always original. He had
2 moved to New York from Vienna ten years earlier and had made a name for
3 himself as a neurologist and psychiatrist. Mahler was particularly taken by his
4 theory on ears, according to which we can control all our other organs with the
5 single exception of the ears, which alone reveal the naked truth about a person.
6 The Mahlers duly made a party game of judging new acquaintances by their
7 ears. Fraenkel said of himself that he divided people into those with whom he
8 lived and those on whom he lived. Of all the people whom Mahler met in New
9 York, Fraenkel seems to have been the one who inspired him the most: it was the
30 last great friendship of his life. Fraenkel inevitably became the Mahlers’ personal
1 physician in New York and initially had to deal with Alma rather than her
2 husband: typically she reacted to the new and difficult situation by showing
3 symptoms of a weak heart and a nervous breakdown. Mahler, who was in fact
4 more at risk than his wife, largely forgot his own illnesses and fretted over Alma.
5 Fraenkel had also made a point of getting to know New York and loved the city’s
6 artistic treasures, proving an excellent guide. What Alma does not reveal in her
7 published reminiscences is that Fraenkel fell hopelessly in love with her,
8 although it is unclear to what extent he let her know his feelings. All that we
9 know for certain is that after Mahler’s death he invited Alma to marry him, an
40 invitation that she turned down. Shortly afterwards the confirmed bachelor
41R married one of Alma’s friends.
Events continued to run their course at the Met throughout the months of 1
February and March 1908. Once Conried had left, Mahler was free to choose 2
whether to stay or leave, for his contract had been with Conried or, rather, with 3
the company to whom the Met was leased. He had no hesitation in publicly 4
announcing that with Conried’s departure his own contract was no longer 5
valid but declared his willingness to make himself available as a conductor at 6
least for the coming season. In the middle of March he signed a new contract, 7
this time with the most powerful man at the Met, Otto H. Kahn. Kahn hailed 8
from Mannheim but now worked for the banking firm of Kuhn, Loeb and Co. 9
in New York. A board of management without a representative from the world 10
of banking was as inconceivable then as it is now, and so Kahn was a member 1
of the board of the Metropolitan Opera and Real Estate Company, which 2
looked after the interests of the leading families who financed the Met. As 3
such, he was responsible for finding a successor to Conried. While he was in 4
Milan, negotiating with Gatti-Casazza (he would rather have had Toscanini as 5
his director, but the latter turned him down), Andreas Dippel was appointed 6
manager in New York. For two years the two directors functioned as a team, 7
but Gatti-Casazza then assumed overall control, a position he maintained until 8
1935 – these were the Met’s golden years. 9
Under the terms of his new contract with Kahn, Mahler would continue to 20
spend three months in New York and also had a chance to conduct concerts 1
not only for the company itself but also independently, allowing him to 2
increase his income and present himself to local audiences as a concert 3
conductor. Kahn assured Mahler that the ‘two Italian gentlemen’ – Gatti- 4
Casazza and Toscanini – valued their colleague’s artistry, while Mahler for his 5
part had apparently expressed his diplomatic belief that he could ‘look forward 6
to developments under the new regime with confidence’.9 The truth of the 7
matter is that Mahler’s doubts about his future at the Met had in the meantime 8
grown considerably. Whatever Conried’s failings, he had at least spoken the 9
same language in every sense of the term, whereas the same could not be said 30
of Gatti-Casazza. Quite apart from the fact that he had never had a high 1
opinion of Italian impresarios, Mahler knew that Gatti-Casazza was too 2
committed to a repertory that he had always held in low regard and was 3
unlikely to sympathize with his ambitions for the German repertory. 4
The performances that Mahler had conducted at the Met left him feeling 5
dissatisfied. Even his first new production in the United States, Fidelio on 6
20 March, had failed in this respect, for although he had tried to bring the 7
stage to life, Mahler was bound to realize that he no longer had the strength 8
and inclination to invest as much energy in the proceedings as he had done in 9
Vienna. The reviews were again very good and in some cases even ecstatic. 40
Although there were no complaints on this occasion about the absence of any 41R
580 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 revolution in the staging of the work, in spite of excellent performances from

2 Berta Morena and Carl Burrian in the main roles, Mahler was forced to admit
3 that even though this may have been the best Fidelio ever seen in New York, it
4 still fell some way short of his achievements in Vienna.
5 It was not only these experiences and the vague prospect of having to
6 work with the ‘Italian gentlemen’ but also, and above all, the failure of his
7 attempts to bring Roller to New York that persuaded Mahler to look for fresh
8 woods and pastures new. And these pastures contained not an opera house but
9 a concert hall.
10 Within weeks of his arrival in America, Mahler had received an approach
1 from the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Karl Muck had conducted part of the
2 orchestra’s season, and now a successor was needed. Mahler turned down the
3 invitation and instead recommended his colleague from Amsterdam, Willem
4 Mengelberg, describing the orchestra in a letter to Mengelberg as the best in
5 America and worthy of being placed alongside the Vienna Philharmonic. But
6 nothing came of all this. Meanwhile Mahler had already received an invitation
7 from Walter Damrosch to conduct three concerts with his New York
8 Symphony Society in the spring of 1908. Damrosch was the son of the Met
9 pioneer Leopold Damrosch, who had come to America from Breslau and run
20 the Met briefly before dying in harness in 1885. Mahler’s contract with
1 Conried had explicitly precluded such activities, and so these concerts had to
2 be postponed until the winter of 1908/9, finally taking place between late
3 November and the middle of December. Three concerts were given, the
4 second of which included the local première of Mahler’s Second Symphony.
5 Mahler’s new contract with Kahn left him with a freer hand than previously
6 and allowed him to lend an ear to what can only be termed a bold plan, to
7 which he gave ebullient expression in a letter that he wrote to his mother-in-
8 law, Anna Moll, in late March.
9 These new contacts had been forged in the immediate aftermath of his
30 successful performances of Fidelio and came from a Ladies’ Committee made
1 up of several New York socialites eager to immortalize themselves in the city’s
2 cultural life and with spare capital at their disposal – money earned by their
3 husbands. As the talk of the town, Mahler seemed to them to be the ideal
4 figure to lead such an enterprise. At the Met it was the older money that set the
5 tone and there was little scope for these nouvelles riches at the opera, whereas
6 the city’s up-and-coming orchestral scene could certainly benefit from a
7 makeover. By local standards, the New York Symphony Orchestra under
8 Damrosch was a worthy institution, even if Mahler thought less highly of it
9 than others did, but the city’s second orchestra, the New York Philharmonic
40 Society, was in a poor way, and it was this that the Ladies’ Committee under
41R Mrs George R. Sheldon decided needed its help. According to Mahler:
I am moving, or rather ‘things’ are moving, towards the formation of a 1

Mahler Orchestra entirely at my disposal, which would not only earn me a 2
good deal of money, but also give me some satisfaction. Everything now 3
depends on the New Yorkers’ attitude to my work. – Since they are 4
completely unprejudiced I hope I shall here find fertile ground for my works 5
and thus a spiritual home, something that, for all the sensationalism, I could 6
not achieve in Europe. A tree needs such ground if it is not to die.10 7
8
At the end of April the committee’s plans were made public and involved a 9
series of gala concerts under Mahler at Carnegie Hall during the coming 10
season – Carnegie Hall was to be the scene of all his concerts in New York. 1
Mahler was to be given the chance to form a new orchestra made up of the 2
finest musicians of New York and Brooklyn and promoted under the not espe- 3
cially attractive working title of the Greater New York Orchestra. This festival 4
orchestra would then form the nucleus of a permanent ensemble that would be 5
conducted by other conductors. For the present, however, Mahler was its sole 6
music director. In the event this plan came to nothing for reasons that need not 7
concern us here. Instead the committee contented itself with revitalizing the 8
New York Philharmonic under Mahler. His contract as principal conductor 9
was announced in February 1909, and his first two concerts duly took place in 20
late March and early April. His first concert in his new function was held in 1
Carnegie Hall on 4 November 1909. During the two seasons remaining to him 2
in New York, Mahler conducted the almost incredible total of ninety-five 3
concerts with the New York Philharmonic, a total all the more remarkable for 4
taking place within such a limited timeframe. 5
Between 1 January and mid-April 1908 Mahler conducted twenty-seven 6
performances at the Met, a by no means negligible number. The critics 7
regarded Don Giovanni and Fidelio as his finest achievements, although he 8
himself no doubt derived the greatest satisfaction from his very first appear- 9
ance in the Met pit conducting Tristan und Isolde. Despite his best efforts, 30
neither Die Walküre nor Siegfried came up to his expectations. His four 1
months in New York were ultimately a time of disappointment, the impres- 2
sions that he took away with him dispiriting rather than inspiring, and yet the 3
Mahlers’ mood by the date of their departure for Europe was better than it had 4
been when they set off. Their memories of the previous summer and of their 5
first Christmas without Putzi were slowly starting to fade. The unique prospect 6
of conducting his own orchestra was an exciting one and would make up for 7
all the annoyance that Mahler had had with the Vienna Philharmonic and 8
all the insults that he had suffered. The engagement even offered him a chance 9
to introduce his own music to America. Clearly Mahler was deluding himself 40
on this point, and disillusionment was not long in coming, although his 41R
582 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 reputation was now sufficient for him to be able to avoid the aggressive
2 responses that his music had encountered in Vienna.
3
4
The First Summer in Toblach
5
6 Mahler and Alma arrived in Cuxhaven, Germany, on 2 May 1908. Her
7 suspicion that she had bound her fate to that of an old man was confirmed
8 when she disembarked and a porter, offering to help her with her luggage,
9 remarked: ‘Your father need not bother.’ From there they travelled to Hamburg
10 and then to Wiesbaden, where Mahler had to conduct a performance of his
1 First Symphony. After ten days in Vienna he then took the train to Prague,
2 where a concert on 23 May provided him with an opportunity to spend time
3 with two young admirers, Otto Klemperer and Artur Bodanzky. Bodanzky was
4 later to work at the Met. Not until the middle of June could Mahler embark on
5 his summer holiday.
6 On fleeing from Maiernigg the previous summer, Mahler and Alma had
7 spent some time at Schluderbach, eight miles south of Toblach, which is the
8 highest point in the Val Pusteria and at the same time the watershed between
9 the Black Sea and the Adriatic. On this occasion they took rooms at the
20 Trenkerhof in Alt-Schluderbach, high on the mountainside between Toblach
1 and Schluderbach, a spacious and well-kept farm with a first floor that could
2 be rented in its entirety. The 1900 edition of Bruckmann’s illustrated travel
3 guide for Toblach and the Ampezzo Valley describes the ascent from the Val
4 Pusteria to an area popular with visitors and does so in glowing colours:
5
6 Since the opening of the railway in 1871, tourism has enjoyed an unsuspected
7 upturn throughout the whole of the Val Pusteria. Not only have tourists and
8 day-trippers discovered the natural beauty of the various valleys, descriptions
9 of which have drawn new armies of admirers every year, but visitors have
30 found in the Val Pusteria some wonderful locations for longer summer holi-
1 days, places between two thousand and six thousand feet above sea level that
2 have invited them to linger from spring to late autumn and that soon came
3 to enjoy a reputation as places to spend the summer inasmuch as the local
4 population has demonstrated a very real understanding in dealing with the
5 demands of foreign tourists.11
6
7 In 1887 Crown Prince Friedrich Wilhelm spent three weeks in Toblach,
8 contributing to the popularity of the place and, indeed, to that of the region as
9 a whole. But Bruckmann’s description also makes it clear why Mahler, in
40 search of peace and quiet, did not look for accommodation in Toblach itself
41R but away from the village, where the quiet Trenkerhof commanded a
wonderful view of the valley. A small composing house was also run up very 1
quickly, closer to the main building than any of Mahler’s previous huts. The 2
Trenker family, which still owns the property, was amazed at the size of 3
Mahler’s entourage. In the 1930s the landlord’s stepdaughter could still recall 4
the arrival of no fewer than three pianos, one of which was placed in the hut, 5
while the others were accommodated in the main building. Director Mahler, 6
as he was still known, rose at six each morning and set off for his hut, which 7
he additionally surrounded by a fence, a structure further raised in height 8
when a number of apprentices climbed over it. On earlier visits to the region, 9
including one in June 1906, Mahler had fallen in love with the countryside 10
around Toblach. According to Bruckmann’s travel guide, ‘fertile fields, green 1
meadows, light-barked larch forests alternating with darker spruce forests and 2
neat little farmhouses between them create a picture of loveliness.’ It was this 3
that Mahler liked. There was only one serious difference from the places where 4
he had spent all his previous summers: there was no real lake in which he 5
could bathe. In the light of his recent diagnosis, Mahler presumably no longer 6
wanted to risk placing undue stress on his heart by swimming, an activity that 7
had once been so important to him. 8
In general the summer of 1908 was overshadowed by the events of twelve 9
months earlier. Difficult though it may be for us to accept this today, Mahler 20
had been deeply unsettled by the diagnosis of a ‘compensated heart-valve 1
defect’. Several factors must be borne in mind here. Today such a diagnosis 2
would hardly occasion such a reaction, for an operation would replace the 3
damaged valve, and only the need to take blood-thinning agents would 4
remind the patient that they had undergone such an operation at all. But in 5
Mahler’s day this diagnosis was final: nothing could be done to repair the 6
damaged valve. He knew that heart disease was endemic in his family and will 7
have remembered that his mother was dead by the time she was fifty-two. He 8
had received his own diagnosis at the age of forty-seven and must have 9
wondered how much time he himself had left. He had always ignored his 30
illnesses and worked hard to toughen up a body not naturally capable of phys- 1
ical endurance, taking it beyond its natural limitations and forcing it into 2
submission. He now over-reacted to the diagnosis of 1907. Had he been 3
sensible, he would have told himself that up to the time of the diagnosis he had 4
not been substantially inhibited in what he could achieve, even if by the stan- 5
dards of the time he was already quite an old man. Like a child obliged to 6
watch something terrifying after successfully closing its eyes to the horror, he 7
reacted with a panic attack and a sensitivity to illness out of all proportion to 8
the facts. Not until 1910 did he regain his trust in his body, a long process that 9
began, hesitatingly, in the summer of 1908 and that would no doubt have 40
continued if it had not been interrupted by the profound shock of his 41R
584 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 discovery of Alma’s affair with Walter Gropius and the severe angina brought
2 on by the first performance of his Eighth Symphony in Munich.
3 Two letters that Mahler wrote to Bruno Walter during the summer of
4 1908 are an indication of his inner turmoil and sense of disorientation at
5 this time. We have already quoted from the earlier of the two, with its reference
6 to Mahler’s finding himself staring into the void. The second – it was probably
7 written slightly earlier – is less overtly dramatic in tone but certainly no
8 less moving. Mahler notes that he has not only found somewhere else to spend
9 the summer but that he has had to change his whole way of life, a way of life
10 hitherto bound up with his working method. He now realized more clearly
1 than ever that the long walks, the mountaineering and the long periods spent
2 swimming were not just intended to toughen up his body or to relax but
3 were the conditions that he needed to work, conditions that had all the attrib-
4 utes of an obsessional neurosis. Just as one artist might need the smell of
5 rotting apples, another a bottle of Rotspon and a third a neat row of twenty
6 well-sharpened pencils and file-card boxes, so Mahler needed an ambulant
7 alternative:
8
9 For many years I have been used to constant and vigorous exercise – roaming
20 about in the mountains and woods, and then, like a kind of jaunty bandit,
1 bearing home my drafts. I used to go to my desk as a peasant goes into his
2 barn, to work up my sketches. Even spiritual indisposition used to disappear
3 after a good trudge (mostly uphill).
4
5 And the same was true of physical indisposition: how often was Mahler not
6 able to master his migraines by means of a brisk walk! But this was now over.
7 Mahler admits that his hypochondria, previously kept under control, had now
8 been allowed free rein. He felt worse than in winter as the loneliness of his
9 Toblach refuge tempted him into auscultating his inner life – feeling his heart
30 and taking his pulse merely made him feel worse than he was, a point that
1 should have given pause for thought to the doctors who were treating him:
2 ‘Since I have been in the country I have been feeling worse than I did in
3 town.’ For the first time in his life, he went on, he wished that the holidays were
4 over – this was the worst thing that a man like Mahler could have said about
5 this summer. Even worse was the realization that there was nothing he could
6 do except work. The restrictions placed on him restricted his productivity,
7 which in turn had the effect of a drug withdrawal. The glorious scenery was
8 ruined for him now that it had become clear that until now he had been able
9 to enjoy it only when he knew that his work on a new piece had advanced to
40 the point where it could be worked over during the winter. He was now
41R painfully aware that his capacity for enjoyment was severely limited:
It is wonderful here. If only I could have enjoyed something like this once in 1
my life after completing a work! – For that, as you know for yourself, is the 2
only moment when one is really capable of enjoying things. At the same time 3
I am noticing a strange thing. I can do nothing but work. Over the years I 4
have forgotten how to do anything else. I am like a morphia-addict, or an 5
alcoholic, who is suddenly deprived of his drug. – I am now exerting the sole 6
remaining virtue I have: patience!12 7
8
If the context were not so depressing, we should be forced to smile at the 9
thought of Mahler praising patience as a virtue. 10
The terrible sense of bewilderment and disorientation did not last. The holi- 1
days began with visits from various Viennese friends who, after the Mahlers’ 2
lengthy absence in America, were naturally keen to see them again. Although 3
such visits were by no means unusual, Mahler found them on this occasion 4
extremely tiresome. But finally he found inspiration and made substantial 5
progress on Das Lied von der Erde. The sketches for the third movement are 6
dated 1 August, those for the first 14 August, for the fourth 21 August and for 7
the sixth 1 September. A letter to Carl Moll indicates that he had more or less 8
regained his balance and that he was even looking forward to a visit from his 9
in-laws. Even here, of course, self-interest played a role for he could now feel 20
less guilty at neglecting Alma. In a letter to his old friend from Hamburg, 1
Adele Marcus, he notes that he is feeling calmer and refers to a passage from 2
Goethe’s conversations with Eckermann to which we shall return in a moment. 3
To the extent that Mahler had no intention of returning to America before 4
the middle of November and because on this occasion he had no season to 5
prepare in Vienna, he could have extended his stay at Toblach. But the Toblach 6
idyll ended in early September because he needed to travel to Prague for the 7
first performance of his Seventh Symphony with the Czech Philharmonic, 8
followed five weeks later by the Munich première of the same work with the 9
local Tonkünstler Orchestra. Mahler left Toblach by the night train on 30
5 September and breakfasted at the Café Schwarzenberg, opposite the Café 1
Imperial, where he met Roller. He had lunch with Carl Moll and Bruno Walter 2
at Meißl und Schadn and left that same afternoon for Prague. The run-up to 3
the performance was an exceptionally happy time for Mahler. The orchestra 4
was generally well disposed to him, although their close links with Vienna 5
meant that some of their members had been adversely influenced by 6
colleagues in the Court Opera orchestra. As always, Mahler was at his most 7
relaxed when surrounded by his younger admirers, who on this occasion 8
included Walter, Bodanzky and Klemperer. Klemperer, who was then a 9
conductor at Prague’s German Opera, later recalled that Mahler had twenty- 40
four rehearsals, though this number is probably an exaggeration. He was 41R
586 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 amazed at Mahler’s way of working: after each rehearsal with the orchestra,
2 Mahler would take the parts back to his hotel room and make improvements.
3 His young admirers offered to help, but he preferred to do it all himself. They
4 often spent the evenings at Mahler’s hotel, and Klemperer recalled that, no
5 doubt as a result of the good progress that Mahler had made on Das Lied von
6 der Erde that summer, he was particularly relaxed and repeatedly made dismis-
7 sive jokes about his successor in Vienna, Felix von Weingartner, heedless of
8 who might be listening. Alma remembered things differently, and Mahler
9 emerges from her memoirs as highly strung and harassed, not least as a result
10 of his doubts about the instrumentation of his latest symphony – it should not
1 be forgotten that three years had elapsed since he had completed work on the
2 score: he must have wondered whether the symphony would still sound as he
3 had imagined it and if every detail in the score would stand up to his present
4 scrutiny. Klemperer also recalled Mahler speaking dismissively of Hugo Wolf:
5 he had dared to describe Wolf ’s song ‘Gebet’ (‘Herr, schicke, was du willst’) as
6 a success, prompting a black look from Mahler.
7 The most detailed account of the two weeks that Mahler spent in Prague is
8 the one left by William Ritter, a Swiss writer whose reminiscences, unlike his
9 articles and comments on Mahler’s works, are of considerable interest. Ritter
20 was seven years younger than Mahler, an arts journalist who wrote for French
1 and Swiss newspapers and who had been living in Munich since 1901. He had
2 attended the first performance of the Fourth Symphony in November 1901
3 and immediately fell under Mahler’s spell, following his career at first hand,
4 writing about him and eventually being accepted into the composer’s inner
5 circle. He reports on the chaotic rehearsals in Prague’s Exhibition Centre,
6 which doubled as a banqueting hall. Mahler seems to have borne all this with
7 an unusual degree of composure. The final rehearsal was attended by some of
8 the leading figures in Czech musical life, including Vítězslav Novák, Josef Suk
9 and Otakar Ostrčil. The actual performance was relatively successful, the two
30 ‘Nachtmusiken’ and the Scherzo being applauded. Indeed, the applause after
1 the second ‘Nachtmusik’ was such that in keeping with contemporary practice
2 any other conductor would have had to repeat it. The noisy finale was presum-
3 ably taken at face value and acclaimed, only the opening movement occa-
4 sioning some bewilderment. When Schoenberg heard Ferdinand Löwe
5 conduct the same work in Vienna over a year later, he wrote to Mahler, who
6 was by then in New York:
7
8 I had the impression of perfect repose based on artistic harmony; of
9 something that set me in motion without simply upsetting my centre of
40 gravity and leaving me to my fate; that drew me calmly and pleasingly into its
41R orbit – as though by that force of attraction which guides the planets in their
courses, which leaves them to go their own way, influencing them, certainly, 1
but in a manner so measured and preordained that there are never any 2
sudden jolts. 3
This may sound a little bombastic perhaps. Nevertheless, it seems to me to 4
express one thing which I supremely felt: I have put you with the classical 5
composers. But as one who to me is still a pioneer.13 6
7
For Mahler, one of the less agreeable aspects of the summer of 1908 was the 8
need to prepare for the forthcoming season at the Met. Above all, he was 9
discouraged by the prospect of having to work with the two ‘Italian gentlemen’. 10
A letter from the Met’s co-director, Andreas Dippel, reached Mahler in 1
Toblach in the middle of July. Dippel was himself in Europe and had met Gatti- 2
Casazza in Vienna. He had even hoped to travel on to Toblach to see Mahler, 3
but had to postpone the visit, which seems in the end not to have taken place. 4
In a long letter he informed Mahler about his meeting with Gatti-Casazza, a 5
letter that already anticipates some of the problems that lay ahead. It seems 6
that Mahler had previously made two demands that Dippel addressed in his 7
letter. The first concerned the appointment of the Italian conductor Francesco 8
Spetrino, whom we have already encountered at the Vienna Court Opera, 9
where he was responsible for works in the Italian repertory that Mahler 20
himself was not prepared to conduct and that Bruno Walter could not 1
shoulder on his own. Mahler was evidently so pleased with Spetrino’s work in 2
Vienna that he wanted him to join him at the Met. Dippel agreed, and Spetrino 3
was duly signed up from the start of the 1908/9 season. But it is clear from the 4
company’s annals that he left the Met at the end of the season, when Mahler’s 5
influence was starting to wane. It is easy to imagine that Gatti-Casazza and 6
Toscanini had no wish to see their bailiwick at the Met invaded by a conductor 7
favoured by Mahler. Mahler’s second demand was that Tristan und Isolde 8
should be newly staged in Roller’s Viennese sets and according to the concept 9
that he had evolved with his designer. It says much for his ambitions at the Met 30
that he was so disenchanted by what had been billed as a new production that 1
he suggested remedial action of a particularly intransigent kind. With this, 2
Mahler’s darkest forebodings were confirmed. He should have known that 3
Gatti-Casazza and, above all, Toscanini had harboured Wagnerian ambitions 4
of their own in Milan. 5
In 1895, even before taking up his post at La Scala, Toscanini had conducted 6
a performance of Götterdämmerung in Turin that was the first to use Italian 7
forces and had gone on to conduct Tristan und Isolde in Turin. He seemed deter- 8
mined to dazzle Italian audiences with his Wagnerian credentials: his first new 9
production at La Scala was Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in December 1898, 40
followed a year later by Siegfried and in December 1900 by Tristan und Isolde. 41R
588 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Toscanini could even be described as the prime mover in introducing Italian

2 audiences to the works of a composer previously known only for Lohengrin. In
3 short, Toscanini wanted to be more than just the greatest Verdi and Puccini
4 conductor of his day, an accolade that was already his: he also wanted to chal-
5 lenge all his rivals as a Wagnerian, a challenge that culminated in Bayreuth in
6 1930 and 1931, when at Siegfried Wagner’s invitation he conducted perform-
7 ances of Tannhäuser, Tristan and Parsifal. If Toscanini did not outclass the great
8 German conductors of the time, he was none the less a serious Wagnerian alter-
9 native to a conductor like Wilhelm Furtwängler. Mahler was unwilling and
10 unable to compete in the Italian repertory but now he saw himself faced with the
1 keenest of rivals in the field in which he felt himself most at home.
2 This, then, was the first of Mahler’s problems, a sheepish Dippel having been
3 forced to concede that nothing could come of a new Tristan under Mahler’s
4 direction and using Roller’s sets, for his co-director had already informed him
5 that he had bought the 1900 Milan sets and would be using them in New York.
6 Dippel claimed that there was nothing he could do in the face of a fait
7 accompli. Moreover, Roller had blotted his copybook by making what Dippel
8 regarded as exorbitant demands for the sets for a new production of Le nozze
9 di Figaro that Mahler was planning to stage at the Met in January 1909. But the
20 real sticking point came at the end of Dippel’s letter to Mahler. He reminded
1 his correspondent that he had agreed to share Wagner’s operas with Hertz and
2 Toscanini:
3
4 I think that you will not make it into a federal question if Toscanini conducts
5 a few Tristan performances before your arrival, in the Milanese mise-en-scène
6 familiar to him. It is generally known that for a foreigner, who wishes to show
7 that he can also conduct Wagner in addition to the Italian repertoire, it is
8 easier to make his debut with Tristan than with another opera, and that espe-
9 cially because of the soloists, with whom it is relatively simpler to come to an
30 understanding in such a work.14
1
2 This was a gauntlet thrown down to Mahler. It was true, of course, that he
3 could not take charge of the entire Wagnerian repertory at the Met and could
4 certainly not expect the company to schedule its Wagner performances to
5 coincide with his own brief sojourns in the city. During the previous season,
6 for example, Hertz had conducted performances of Die Walküre, Siegfried and
7 even of Tristan und Isolde, but it was a completely different matter if Toscanini
8 were to sink his claws into Tristan und Isolde, the very work with which Mahler
9 himself had made his debut, and if he were to do so, moreover, in new sets:
40 it would be like a visiting card from a new principal conductor, while
41R Mahler’s own performances the previous season would be made to look like
the swansong of a bygone age, especially since he had been refused a new 1
production of the work. Quite apart from any personal vanities and sensitivi- 2
ties, Mahler could not tolerate such a slight, which was only made worse when 3
Dippel offered him L’elisir d’amore and Don Pasquale by way of compensation. 4
If not downright brazen, such an offer was at least stupid and lacking in tact. 5
Was Mahler supposed to conduct Donizetti, while Toscanini was introduced 6
as Wagner’s new plenipotentiary? Even the more concrete plans for produc- 7
tions of The Bartered Bride and The Queen of Spades were hardly calculated to 8
make up for Toscanini’s Alberich-like theft of Wagner’s gold. In the same letter 9
Dippel also made it unmistakably plain that ‘a division of the German opera 10
from the Italian, that we had both expected, will not take place under the 1
regime that has been created’, leaving Mahler in no doubt that his days at the 2
Met were numbered. ‘One thing alone do I want, the end,’ he could echo 3
Wotan’s outburst: ‘And Alberich will see to that end!’ The prospect of his own 4
orchestra will have helped to sugar the pill. 5
But Mahler decided to show his teeth and demonstrate his old fighting 6
spirit. He refused to tolerate the affront that the foolish Dippel had inflicted at 7
Gatti-Casazza’s instigation, and in his reply he concentrated almost exclusively 8
on the Tristan affair: 9
20
It is inconceivable to me that a new production of Tristan should be put on 1
without my being consulted in any way, and I cannot give my consent. 2
Further, I expressly stated when the contract was being discussed, as you 3
yourself can witness, that I wished to keep in my hands for the ensuing season 4
those works which I had already rehearsed and conducted in New York. I was 5
given every assurance that this would be so, and it was only at your request 6
and desire that I abstained from having it put in writing in the contract. If 7
recently – out of consideration for the wishes of my colleague – I gave a free 8
hand to the new Director, it was with the express exception of Tristan. – I 9
took very special pains with Tristan last season and can well maintain that the 30
form in which this work now appears in New York is my intellectual prop- 1
erty. If Toscanini, for whom, though unknown to me, I have the greatest 2
respect, and whom I consider it an honour to be able to salute as a colleague, 3
were now to take over Tristan before my arrival, the work would obviously be 4
given an entirely new character, and it would be quite out of the question for 5
me to resume my performances in the course of the season. I must therefore 6
urgently request that it shall be reserved for me to conduct and not put in the 7
repertory until after 17th December.15 8
9
Mahler’s decisive intervention proved effective, and although Toscanini 40
made his North American and Met debut on 16 November, before Mahler 41R
590 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 returned to New York, it was in Aida, with an all-star cast that included Emmy
2 Destinn, Louise Homer, Enrico Caruso and Antonio Scotti. But Toscanini’s
3 decision to slip in a performance of Götterdämmerung on 10 December with
4 two of Mahler’s Tristan singers, Erik Schmedes and Olive Fremstad, looks like
5 an act of blatant provocation, even though Mahler had not yet conducted this
6 work at the Met. But at least it was not Tristan und Isolde. On this point Mahler
7 got his way, and it was not until a year later that Toscanini was able to conduct
8 this last-named work, by which time Mahler had already left the Met,
9 returning only for The Queen of Spades. Alma’s claim that Toscanini did indeed
10 make his New York debut conducting Tristan und Isolde, and that he spent the
1 rehearsal period making malicious remarks about Mahler, is untrue. She also
2 claims that she and her husband attended a performance of Tristan und Isolde
3 under Toscanini and found it full of ‘distressing’ nuances. Conceivably she was
4 referring to Toscanini’s Götterdämmerung in December 1908, although there
5 is no other evidence to support this claim. Conversely, we have Bruno Walter’s
6 testimony that after hearing Toscanini conduct Tristan und Isolde in
7 November 1909, Mahler exclaimed that ‘He conducts it in a manner entirely
8 different from ours, but his way is magnificent.’16 Toscanini, conversely, was
9 not so magnanimous. As an old man, he told an acquaintance that Mahler’s
20 Tristan und Isolde had had no passion, but he was tired and ill at the time. Even
1 more dismissive was another remark: Mahler was simply ‘crazy’.17 Mahler may
2 have reported a victory in this final skirmish of his career, but the war had been
3 won by the Italians. Toscanini remained at the Met until the summer of 1915,
4 and it was only the events in wartime Europe and his affair with Geraldine
5 Farrar, who tried to force him to leave his wife and children, that ended his
6 reign at the Met. No other great conductor has shaped the artistic fate of the
7 company since the days of Mahler and Toscanini.
8
9
Mahler’s Second Season
30
1 Mahler and Alma arrived back in New York for his second season on
2 21 November 1908. Although the general public may not have known it, all the
3 signs indicated that he would not be remaining at the Met for long. True, he
4 had announced at an early date that he would not be staying for ever at the
5 Met, but not even he could have imagined that he would be there for such a
6 short space of time. But there is no indication that the situation was a source
7 of any sadness. Ultimately the conditions at the Met had left him deeply
8 disillusioned, and his initial enthusiasm and belief that local taste was uncor-
9 rupted and that audiences were ready to listen to new and unfamiliar works
40 had quickly evaporated. The singers, admittedly, were outstanding, but the
41R orchestra could not compare with its counterpart in Vienna, and the produc-
tion values were below even those that Mahler found waiting for him in 1
Vienna in 1897. His attempts to remedy the situation had proved a failure, and 2
even in his own particular field – the Wagner repertory – he now found 3
himself facing a serious rival. To the extent that this rival was an ally of the new 4
director, Mahler no longer had a future at the Met. In the circumstances, his 5
musical commitment is remarkable. He conducted the revival of Tristan und 6
Isolde and three further performances; he also conducted Fidelio; and there 7
were two new productions: Le nozze di Figaro on 13 January 1909 and The 8
Bartered Bride on 19 February, the latter the first time that the work had been 9
heard in New York. (Chicago had staged the opera in Czech in 1893, but 10
Mahler opted for Max Kalbeck’s German version.) The cast of Le nozze di 1
Figaro included Marcella Sembrich as Susanna, who was shortly to bid farewell 2
to the company with a final gala performance, Emma Eames as the Countess, 3
Geraldine Farrar as Cherubino, Adamo Didur as Figaro and Antonio Scotti as 4
the Count. Musically speaking, it came up to the highest standards and was 5
well received by critics and audiences alike. And the same was true of The 6
Bartered Bride, which, given audiences’ unfamiliarity with the work, could not 7
have been expected. The cast included the matchless pairing of the Czech 8
soprano Emmy Destinn as Mařenka and the Berlin tenor Karl Jörn as Jeník, 9
though it is less clear how the Italian bass Adamo Didur coped with the 20
German dialogue as Kecal. Mahler, however, must have been delighted to 1
demonstrate his old love of Smetana’s music. 2
After only twelve weeks his second season at the Met ended on 26 March 3
1909 with a performance of Le nozze di Figaro. Meanwhile, his three concerts 4
with Damrosch’s New York Symphony Orchestra had taken place between 5
29 November and 13 December 1908. Here Mahler must have realized that his 6
victories in the pit of the Metropolitan Opera, however hard-won, could not 7
necessarily be repeated in the concert hall. Krehbiel smugly opined that the 8
third concert, comprising works by Beethoven, Wagner and Weber, was ‘more 9
inciting and exciting than satisfying’. The second of the concerts provided 30
Mahler with a chance to introduce his Second Symphony to American audi- 1
ences. Presumably he chose the Second in the knowledge that it was the most 2
popular and effective of his symphonies. And yet the performance fell short of 3
the high expectations that he had placed in the piece. Clearly it would be diffi- 4
cult to find the ‘fertile soil’ and ‘spiritual home’ for his works that he had 5
envisaged only recently: the ground was stonier and the home less hospitable 6
than he had imagined. Although he did not know the New York Symphony 7
Orchestra, it enjoyed a decent reputation, making his disappointment all 8
the greater. As he wrote to his Swiss supporter, William Ritter, ‘I am at 9
present busy rehearsing my 2nd, unfortunately with utterly inadequate forces. 40
America for the moment has no idea what to make of me; (in my opinion she 41R
592 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 has no idea of what to make of any art, and that has perhaps been ordained in
2 the cosmic plan).’18
3 Mahler’s comments are as acerbic as they are unequivocal: his disappoint-
4 ment at his experience at the Met can be heard resonating in these lines, while
5 his hopes of finding an orchestral alternative seemed destined to fail as well.
6 Nor can he have been under any illusions about the reception accorded to his
7 Second Symphony: at best his achievements at the Met inspired respect and
8 even civility, but many listeners were probably not even aware that he was also
9 a composer. And every conductor who wrote music at that time – and the
10 same is basically still true today – had to endure the reproach that he wrote
1 only Kapellmeister music. If W. J. Henderson, writing in the New York Sun,
2 was entirely positive in his assessment, albeit a little too anxious to please,
3 Lawrence Gilman in Harper’s Weekly trotted out all the old arguments:
4 Mahler’s music was not original; it lacked individuality and imagination; and
5 it lacked ‘that which no purpose can assure and no determination compel: the
6 wind of inspiration’.19 Mahler knew what was going on. He had already heard
7 such comments, whether spoken or unspoken. Even his own efforts, on which
8 he had mostly been able to rely in the past, had been insufficient to inspire a
9 wave of enthusiasm in the hearts of his listeners. But at least he could still place
20 his hopes in a better orchestra, the Mahler Orchestra, even though he must
1 have known that this would not change the situation in any substantial way. By
2 now he will have been thoroughly discouraged and realized the impossibility
3 of finding a spiritual home in America. The fact that he conducted only his
4 First and Fourth Symphonies, together with the Kindertotenlieder and his
5 arrangement of two of Bach’s suites, with the New York Philharmonic
6 says much for his profound sense of resignation. His inner departure from
7 New York began on 8 December 1908 with the American première of his
8 Second Symphony.
9 But Mahler still had his final hand to play. The plan to form an orchestra of
30 his own foundered on insuperable logistical and financial difficulties, and it is
1 an irony of musical history that it should be Toscanini for whom NBC created
2 a new orchestra in 1937, allowing him to make his legendary recordings of
3 operas and concerts. Between 1928 and 1936 Toscanini was also music
4 director of the New York Philharmonic: here, too, the Italian’s superior consti-
5 tution triumphed for he lived to be almost twice as old as Mahler. Back in
6 1908, the New York Philharmonic Society had fallen on hard times, and so the
7 Ladies’ Committee and a number of influential figures in the city’s musical life
8 decided to reorganize it and bring in new blood. Mahler’s association with the
9 orchestra was announced in mid-February 1909, his contract probably signed
40 at the end of March. He quickly joined in the search for new musicians and
41R even made enquiries of Bruno Walter in Vienna, asking him whether this or
that player from the Vienna Philharmonic or Konzertverein might be inter- 1

ested in travelling to New York – anxious to avoid ill feelings, he insisted that 2
the enquiry was strictly confidential. He conducted his first concert with the 3
old New York Philharmonic on 31 March and his second on 6 April. The 4
programme on these occasions comprised works by Schumann, Beethoven 5
and Wagner, and the reviews were very good and even euphoric. Here, at least, 6
there were grounds for a glimmer of hope. Although rumours were circulating 7
that Mahler would be conducting as many performances at the Met in 1909/10 8
as he had done the previous season, he had long since made up his mind to 9
decline any such invitation. But he was keen not to cause an open breach with 10
the company, and so he agreed to conduct Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, 1
a work that had been close to his heart since his acquaintance with the 2
composer in Hamburg in 1892/3. Indeed, the plan had already been adum- 3
brated in Dippel’s letter of July 1908. Staged in March 1910, it was the only new 4
production that Mahler agreed to conduct that season. 5
By early June he was back in Vienna, where he received a remarkable letter 6
from Engelbert Humperdinck containing an equally remarkable offer: Mahler 7
was to become the general administrator of a new Wagner Theatre in Berlin, 8
which was to be built in the Friedrichstraße along the lines of the Bayreuth 9
Festspielhaus. Humperdinck had been appointed president of the Great Berlin 20
Opera Society only a few weeks earlier, a society intended to provide an alter- 1
native to the old opera house on Unter den Linden, which was completely 2
over-subscribed and geared to the needs of the court. Mahler’s answer has not 3
survived, but it seems unlikely that he would have lent his support to a venture 4
intended to rival Bayreuth. Although his loyalty to Cosima Wagner was by no 5
means unconditional, there was no doubt of his devotion to Wagner and to his 6
life’s work. In the event, plans for a Wagner Theatre in the Friedrichstraße 7
came to nothing, and all that remained of the project was the later Deutsches 8
Opernhaus in the new Bismarckstraße in the western half of the city, the 9
forerunner of the present Deutsche Oper. 30
In all the turmoil surrounding him, Mahler was tossed to and fro between 1
hope and despair, and his feeling of being chained to the Met, where he some- 2
times conducted every two or three days, left him complaining that he was in 3
the eye of the storm. In another key letter to Bruno Walter, who was his closest 4
confidant during these months and evidently the beneficiary of confidences 5
more intimate than those he entrusted to his wife, Mahler reported that he still 6
felt himself to be the victim of a profound crisis whose roots lay eighteen 7
months in the past, even if its character had now changed. He now saw every- 8
thing in a new light, felt himself to be in a state of flux and would not be 9
surprised if he suddenly found himself in a new body, like Faust in the final 40
scene of Goethe’s drama, when the angels wrest Faust’s immortal soul from the 41R
594 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 clutches of Mephistopheles. Mahler seems to have felt like Faust shortly before
2 he is blinded: ‘My way has been to scour the whole world through. / Where was
3 delight, I seized it by the hair; / If it fell short, I simply left it there, / If it escaped
4 me, I just let it go. / I stormed through life, through joys in endless train, /
5 Desire, fulfilment, then desire again; / Lordly at first I fared, in power and speed,
6 / But now I walk with wisdom’s deeper heed.’ Of course, Mahler had not seized
7 every passing delight, and he was currently not walking with wisdom’s deeper
8 heed, but he had certainly stormed through life, composing and conducting. He
9 grants Walter an even deeper glimpse into his tormented soul:
10
1 How absurd it is to let oneself be submerged in the brutal whirlpool of
2 life! To be untrue to oneself and to those higher things above oneself for
3 even a single hour! But writing that down like this is one thing – on the next
4 occasion, for instance, if I now leave this room of mine, I shall certainly again
5 be as absurd as everyone else. What is it then that thinks in us? And what
6 acts in us?
7 Strange! When I hear music – even while I am conducting – I hear quite
8 specific answers to all my questions – and am completely clear and certain.
9 Or rather, I feel quite distinctly that they are not questions at all.20
20
1 Ever since his youth Mahler had thought about the meaning of life.
2 Fechner’s ideas, which had been exercising him at this time, no longer seemed
3 to be sufficient. He had always rejected materialism as conceived by Ernst
4 Haeckel, and, as we have already noted, books such as Hermann Lotze’s
5 Mikrokosmos were now more important to him. It is surely significant that it
6 was at about this time that he learnt to observe himself and to regard his soul
7 as the equal of his body – he had developed a particular interest in this
8 Faustian element in the summer of 1906, while he was working on his Eighth
9 Symphony, but many of his friends confirm that Faust was part of his perma-
30 nent reading and that he could quote whole sections from the play. Nor is it
1 mere chance that he now renewed contact with Siegfried Lipiner, whom he
2 had abandoned so abruptly in 1902. And so we find him writing to Bruno
3 Walter: ‘I can’t help thinking very often of Lipiner. Why don’t you ever write
4 anything about him? I should like to know whether he still thinks the same
5 way about death as he did eight years ago, when he told me about his very
6 peculiar views (at my somewhat importunate request – I was just convalescent
7 after my haemorrhage).’ And he ends the letter by asking Walter to give Lipiner
8 and Nanna Spiegler his warmest wishes. One thing above all is striking about
9 this letter of January 1909: by writing of a ‘tremendous crisis’, Mahler is
40 thinking along lines very different from those of six months earlier, when his
41R letter to Walter was marked by confusion and despair. On this occasion,
Mahler’s awareness of the crisis is associated – much to his own surprise – with 1
a cheerful serenity. It is not quietism, for it is only when he is listening to or 2
performing music that his questions are answered or no longer seem so impor- 3
tant. When he starts to brood on them, conversely, he continues to drift along, 4
clutching at every passing straw. But nor is it a longing for death, for he stresses 5
that he is more than ever in love with life and with the ‘sweet habits of exis- 6
tence’. At the same time he appears to observe the world’s hurly-burly with a 7
gentle smile and a shake of the head. His fifty years of storming through life 8
elicit a similar reaction. No doubt he was conscious of the fact that his commit- 9
ments in America were still far from over, but he had already started to move 10
on, a move that meant his mind was also turning to thoughts of death. This 1
was not new, of course – the previous year he had told Bruno Walter that he 2
had always known he must die – but he now seems to have been drawing 3
closer to a more self-evident and relaxed attitude to death, which had been 4
preoccupying his thoughts since the summer of 1907. 5
Between 19 and 30 April 1909 the Mahlers were in Paris, where preparations 6
were already under way for a performance of the Second Symphony planned 7
for April 1910. Once again Mahler looked up his old friends, Sophie and Paul 8
Clemenceau, Georges Picquart, who in a total reversal of his fortunes was now 9
his country’s minister of war, Paul Painlevé and Guillaume de Lallemand. Also, 20
Carl Moll had had an inspired idea: both in honour of Mahler’s work in Vienna 1
and in anticipation of his fiftieth birthday, he had proposed commissioning a 2
bust of Mahler from Auguste Rodin, the most famous sculptor of his age. A 3
portrait bust, generally made of bronze, cost forty thousand francs. Although 4
a man of means, Moll could not afford such a fee, but Clemenceau managed to 5
persuade Rodin of Mahler’s importance. Rodin had little interest in music and 6
although he had exhibited on several occasions at the Vienna Secession, he 7
apparently had only a vague idea who Mahler was. For Clemenceau’s sake he 8
agreed to reduce his fee to twelve thousand francs for a bronze bust and five 9
copies. In the event Rodin prepared several more for his own use, which 30
explains why copies of his highly expressive piece can be seen all over the 1
world (Ill. 30). Moreover, there are two slightly different originals, together 2
with a marble bust of a wholly different character, the sitter’s features hewn 3
from the marble block with a visionary intention that has nothing to do with 4
the likeness of a portrait, allowing Rodin to exhibit the piece as a figure from 5
the eighteenth century and even give it the title ‘Mozart’, a title by which it is 6
still known today. This is not as absurd as it may sound, for Rodin had told 7
Mahler’s companions that the latter’s head was a mixture of Benjamin 8
Franklin, Frederick the Great and Mozart. 9
Mahler had not previously sat for a painter or sculptor (Gallen-Kallela’s 40
sketch of 1907 does not count) and initially turned down the request but later 41R
596 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 allowed himself to be talked round by the claim that Rodin had been so
2 inspired by his features that he absolutely had to make a bust of him. (Mahler
3 apparently did not know that good money changed hands.) Mahler was
4 sceptical when he arrived for his first sitting but soon became interested in
5 Rodin and his working method, which, according to Alma, consisted not in
6 hollowing out a lump of clay but in applying layer upon layer of clay to a small
7 wooden base and then shaping it with his bare hands. Mahler spoke very little
8 French, whereas Rodin spoke no language apart from French, but the two men
9 soon seem to have reached an understanding, and when Mahler returned to
10 Paris the following April, he was keen that Rodin should attend his concert
1 and hear his Second Symphony, which the sculptor appears to have done.
2
3
A Reconciliation
4
5 By 1 May 1909 the family was back in Vienna – on this occasion Anna Moll had
6 returned with them from New York. They spent a number of extremely enjoy-
7 able weeks in the city, during which time Alma noted that Mahler was more
8 relaxed and looked younger than he had done for a long time. And for the first
9 time since 1907 he was susceptible to life’s more innocent pleasures. He also
20 busied himself with his plans for the New York Philharmonic and ensured that
1 the American violinist Theodore Spiering, who was currently working in
2 Berlin, was appointed its leader. In a fit of his old perfectionism he even
3 addressed the problem of the orchestra’s timpani. Above all, however, these
4 weeks in May saw a reconciliation between Mahler and Siegfried Lipiner and
5 with the latter’s circle, a reconciliation that was brought about by Bruno Walter.
6 Evidence for this comes from a letter that Mahler wrote to Alma from Toblach
7 on 13 June: ‘I’m enclosing the letter from Fritz [Löhr] to show you why I’m
8 making my peace with my old friends and acquaintances. Be so kind as to
9 support me in this. Let’s hope that all the joy and happiness it causes will reflect
30 on us – I know it will. For me it’s a great consolation to have straightened every-
1 thing out with Lipiner – and “to love as long as love can last”’.21 These lines
2 reveal an extraordinary lack of understanding of his wife and of human nature
3 in general, for Mahler must have realized that for Alma the severance of his ties
4 with Lipiner and the latter’s camarilla, as she saw it, was the great triumph of the
5 early days of her marriage. She loathed Lipiner – even in old age this hatred was
6 unabated. And now she was expected to help her husband mend this particular
7 fence? How well did Mahler really know his wife?
8 We do not know any further details about his reconciliation with Lipiner but
9 only that Walter, acting as a go-between, took Mahler to see Lipiner at the
40 Imperial Council Library where the latter was earning his living, practically
41R forgotten by the wider intellectual public. Mahler will not have found this an
easy step to take, for he always had difficulty admitting to his mistakes. But it 1
was presumably he who took the first step or at least persuaded Bruno Walter 2
to do so. It says much for his changed attitude to the world that he was willing 3
to pick up where he had left off more than seven years earlier. The break was 4
by no means one-sided, for Lipiner, too, was arrogant and overbearing, but, 5
unlike Mahler, he was additionally sensitive and vulnerable as a result of the 6
fact that after such a promising start his literary and philosophical gifts had 7
dried up and he was now completely ignored by the outside world. People who 8
failed to share his own delusions of grandeur had no chance of getting through 9
to him. Even at a much earlier date he and Mahler had argued over Wagner so 10
intransigently that for a whole year they had refused to speak to each other. It 1
makes sense, therefore, that it was Mahler who, from his position of superi- 2
ority, made the first move towards reconciliation. The relief that he clearly felt 3
is evidence of the fact that he had never really come to terms with the break. It 4
is evident that if he was driven back to Lipiner, it was because of his profound 5
insecurity and his inability to answer questions about the meaning of life and 6
death by means of music, including even his own music. It matters little that 7
Lipiner’s surviving writings do not really provide answers to these questions, 8
for what is important is that Mahler himself believed that they might. After all, 9
Lipiner was the only real philosopher among his closer circle of friends. And, 20
according to Bruno Walter, Lipiner fulfilled the expectations placed in him. 1
‘Trivial causes had separated the friends for years,’ he begins his explanation, 2
somewhat trivializing the true facts of the matter: 3
4
he now forcefully sought him out and demanded that this clear and lofty spirit 5
should share with him the certainty of the view of the world in which he found 6
peace. The joy with which Mahler spoke to me of those conversations will 7
always be to me a happy and touching memory. Lipiner put the essence of 8
these talks into a poem entitled ‘Der Musiker spricht’, and presented it to 9
Mahler on his fiftieth birthday. But even this source could not finally slake his 30
thirst. ‘What Lipiner says about it is wonderfully deep and true,’ he said to me, 1
‘but you have to be Lipiner to find certainty and peace in it.’22 2
3
Mahler received this poem the following summer and found it inspirational, 4
telling Walter that it was the finest poem ever written and henceforth carrying 5
it around in his wallet. It was Lipiner’s Nietzschean belief in the permanence of 6
our essential humanity even after death that was crucial to Mahler at this stage 7
in his life, when it was reinforced by insights gleaned from Goethe and Fechner. 8
The poem acquires additional significance from the fact that Mahler received it 9
only days before the worst crisis of his life, which was triggered by Alma’s affair 40
with Gropius: and yet even these lines were incapable of consoling him. 41R
598 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 This is not the place to discuss whether this poem is as magnificent as

2 Mahler thought. What caught his attention was undoubtedly the skilful and,
3 indeed, virtuosic mimicry of the language of Part Two of Faust on the one
4 hand and of Nietzsche on the other. But the poem’s underlying ideas must also
5 have appealed to Mahler, quite apart from the fact that he was flattered to think
6 that as a musician he had inspired a poem of this kind. Lipiner’s concern was
7 the power of the spirit of creativity that Mahler had recently invoked in the
8 first part of his Eighth Symphony, with its setting of Hrabanus Maurus’s
9 Pentecostal hymn. Lipiner’s counterpart to Hrabanus Maurus’s ‘creator spir-
10 itus’ is the ‘creative spirit’ which, powerful and violent, ‘glows’ in countless
1 spirits, a creative force that is also a ruling spirit and which even God Himself
2 worships because the human spirit, embodied here in the musician’s melody,
3 is man’s only way of approaching the deity. On this highest stage of human
4 consciousness, a kind of catena aurea is produced, a great round dance of the
5 spirit and, indeed, of spirits in general, stretching out into infinity – the same
6 round dance as that performed by the Chorus of Blessed Boys in the final
7 scene of Faust, where they are ushered in by Pater Seraphicus: ‘Rise then
8 higher: as you rise, shall / Growth unnoticed bless your throng. / As in pure
9 eternal wise shall / God’s own presence make you strong. / Thus sustained in
20 spheres supernal, / Spirits find their heavenly food: / Love revealed, the love
1 eternal, / Flowering in beatitude.’ Of course, Mahler did not receive Lipiner’s
2 poem until the summer of 1910, but, as Walter points out, there is no doubt
3 that it sums up the essence of the conversations that he had with Lipiner in
4 Vienna in May 1909. It comes as no surprise, therefore, to find that the entire
5 nucleus of this world of ideas can be discerned in the letters that Mahler wrote
6 to Alma in the summer of 1909.
7 On 9 June, Mahler took his wife and daughter and the latter’s governess to
8 the health resort of Levico near Trent, where Alma hoped to recover her
9 health, which continued to be a cause for concern. This was by no means the
30 first such visit to a spa, and her frequent periods of indisposition during her
1 marriage to Mahler are bound to give pause for thought. Since she lived to be
2 eighty-five, we must inevitably ask ourselves whether it was only organic
3 reasons that laid her up, often for weeks at a time, or whether it was the unsat-
4 isfying nature of her marriage that affected her in psychosomatic ways. There
5 are also repeated references to alcohol abuse, a problem that beset her
6 throughout her entire life. We do not know how the ascetic Mahler reacted to
7 this – there are only infrequent hints that he even noticed the problem at all.
8 This, at least, is the only possible interpretation of a line in a letter to his
9 mother-in-law expressive of his relief: ‘This time I can give you the best of
40 news about Almscherl. She is really blossoming – is keeping to a splendid diet,
41R and has entirely given up alcohol, looking younger every day.’23 There were
good reasons for the Levico cure: in March, Mahler had written to his father- 1
in-law from New York and ended his letter with the remarkable sentence, 2
‘Alma is very well. About her present state she has doubtless written to you 3
herself. She has been relieved of her burden. But this time she actually regrets 4
it.’24 In the absence of an alternative explanation, we must assume that Alma 5
had had a miscarriage or an abortion, which Mahler refers to with an extraor- 6
dinarily business-like coldness: in the light of the loss of their elder daughter, 7
a third child would surely have meant a lot to the couple. Whatever the answer, 8
it is clear from the phrase ‘this time’ that this was not the first such occurrence. 9
Alma spent four weeks in Levico. After leaving her there, Mahler travelled 10
straight to Toblach, and throughout the following weeks, letters were the chief 1
means of communication between them. As a result, this health cure produced 2
some of the most important and substantial letters that Mahler ever wrote to 3
Alma. Two in particular stand out, one containing his interpretation of the 4
final scene of Part Two of Faust, the other offering a detailed description of his 5
whole outlook on life. We have quoted from both of them elsewhere in this 6
volume. 7
But Alma had other concerns and other worries that could hardly be allevi- 8
ated by references to entelechy and the artist’s incessant productivity. At no 9
point in her life had she felt as lonely and isolated as she did during these 20
months. She, too, was still affected by the events of 1907 but in a different way 1
from Mahler. While he was wrestling with thoughts of death and the afterlife 2
and on the importance of his work as a composer, Alma, as so often, was more 3
down to earth. She turned thirty in 1909 and by the standards of the day was 4
no longer young. But nor was she old enough to give thought to her own 5
impending death. In spite of her various illnesses, she did not feel as if she were 6
about to die. While Mahler brooded on death, she thought about her failed 7
marriage, her lack of sexual fulfilment and her thwarted ambitions as a 8
composer. Following the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of his heart 9
disease, Mahler grew even more withdrawn than before. Alma, too, had 30
needed time to process all this, but she was basically healthier by nature and 1
nor was she distracted by hectic conducting duties or the isolation of the 2
composer. It seems that feelings of rejection returned in the summer of 1909 3
that were every bit as violent as those that had assailed her in the early weeks 4
of her marriage. Following the birth of her daughter Maria, she had felt that 5
the child did not need her and that she herself did not love the child in the 6
right way – today we would describe this as post-natal depression. But now 7
she had the same feelings with regard to her younger daughter, Anna: this 8
was the date at which mother and daughter first became estranged, a sense of 9
alienation from which Anna was to suffer all her life. Much later Alma was 40
sufficiently honest with herself to make the following entry in her diary: 41R
600 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Gustav gave her a loving wave. Was that it? I don’t know – but suddenly I
2 knew: this child must go . . . and at once. In God’s name. . . . Away with the
3 thought! Away with the accursed thought. But the child was dead a few
4 months later. Freud explains these desires as perverted fear . . . Gustav’s death
5 too – I wanted that. I once loved another and he was the wall over which I
6 could not climb.25
7
8 This is unequivocal. And it was around these thoughts that Alma’s mind grav-
9 itated during the four weeks that she spent in Levico, a period that undoubt-
10 edly sowed the seeds for the upheavals of the summer of 1910.
1 In her reminiscences Alma leaves us in no doubt about her mental state in
2 Levico:
3
4 I was in a state of profound melancholy. I sat night after night on my balcony,
5 weeping and looking out at the crowd of gay and happy people, whose laughter
6 grated on my ears. I longed to plunge myself into love or life or anything that
7 could release me from my icy constraint. We exchanged letters daily on abstract
8 topics. He got anxious about me and at last he came to see me.26
9
20 And yet even this brief visit began on a discordant note:
1
2 When he got out of the train I failed to recognize him. Wishing to look his
3 best he had gone to the barber at Toblach before he left, and he had been
4 given a close crop while he read the newspaper without giving a thought to
5 what was going on. The sides of his head were shorn as close as a convict’s
6 and his excessively long, thin face, deprived now of all relief, was unrecogniz-
7 ably ugly. I could not get used to the transformation and after two days he
8 sadly departed again.27
9
30 If Mahler was unsettled by this dispiriting visit, he succeeded in concealing it, for
1 none of his comments during these weeks gives anything away. As usual, he will
2 not have taken his wife’s ‘whims’ very seriously. He wrote to his mother-in-law:
3 ‘Almschi has been sending me thoroughgoing letters of lamentation, from which
4 I deduce that she is finding the cure very strenuous.’28 He had learnt nothing, and
5 the situation was to deteriorate far more before his eyes were opened. All his
6 other letters paint a picture of him as completely relaxed and cheerful. He asked
7 his mother-in-law to send him some honey, some ink for a fountain pen and a
8 key ring. With the help of his lawyer Emil Freund he negotiated a contract with
9 Emil Hertzka, the head of Universal-Edition, for his Eighth Symphony. And he
40 continued to make plans for his forthcoming season in New York. Among his
41R surviving letters is a cry for help addressed to Bruno Walter, whom he needed to
assist him in drafting a programme of twenty-four concerts with the New York 1
Philharmonic. Above all, however, he had completed Das Lied von der Erde and 2
made good enough progress on his Ninth Symphony. 3
Mahler’s joviality was neither forced nor superficial but was the result of a 4
mixture of profound seriousness and a newfound inner equilibrium, a state 5
that was to last exactly a year. The finest portrait of Mahler during this summer 6
of 1909 is the one painted by the music critic Ernst Decsey and published 7
within weeks of the composer’s death in 1911. Decsey was invited to visit 8
Mahler at Toblach: 9
10
‘Vita fugax’ [This fleeting life] . . . I can still hear the deep, metallic 1
voice pronouncing these words as the sun went down over the snow-fields 2
of Toblach, casting them in its reddish glow. It was one of his favourite 3
sayings and will remain in my memory for ever, for when he uttered it . . . vita 4
fugax . . . there was a hint of his desperation at not being able to check the 5
headlong rush of this fleeting life, at not being able to fill every hour of his 6
existence with the riches of his imperial mind, at not being able to turn every 7
moment into one of action. He was a man who was consumed by himself. A 8
fire glowed constantly within him; one never spent an hour with Gustav 9
Mahler in which it did not burst forth, in which one did not gain something 20
from him. This way he had of throwing himself into things, which gave his 1
life fulfilment even if his work remained unfinished, was not a passing mood, 2
it was his fundamental nature. 3
4
Decsey then goes on to report how, returning from a long walk, Mahler 5
exclaimed: ‘I get such pleasure from the world! How beautiful the world is! 6
How can any fool say: I am indifferent to it all. Anyone who says that is a clod. 7
Man is a marvellous machine, of course, but anyone who says that is a pile of 8
shit.’ ‘To be happy is a gift,’ Mahler said on another occasion. A path through 9
a field bathed in the evening light prompted the remark ‘What a story that path 30
has to tell!’ And finally he compared a motor car with a human being in justi- 1
fying his belief in a God of Creation.29 Mahler spent this summer drawing 2
breath: he felt a greater sense of mental balance, and his body, too, was working 3
better than it had been, now that he no longer paid so much heed to his 4
doctor’s orders. Decsey reports that the two of them took long walks together. 5
He seemed to have regained his strength. 6
In early October the Mahlers gave up their flat in the Auenbruggergasse. 7
Now that he had to spend longer periods in New York as a result of his 8
new contract with the New York Philharmonic and the summer months 9
would henceforth be spent in Toblach, there seemed no point in paying for 40
accommodation in Vienna. For shorter periods they could stay with the 41R
602 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Molls, but they also toyed with the idea of having a house specially built for
2 them either in Vienna itself or nearby. Alma, who was considerably more prac-
3 tical than her husband in such matters, packed up all their possessions and
4 placed them in storage. Mahler had mixed feelings about leaving the flat in
5 which he had spent such a key period in his life – he had moved into it with
6 Justine in February 1898. He then spent a few days with the Redlich family at
7 Göding in Moravia, where he put the finishing touches to Das Lied von der
8 Erde. During this time Alma and Anna both had their tonsils removed (if only
9 Mahler had had the same operation!). And at the end of September he trav-
10 elled to Amsterdam for the final time to conduct his Seventh Symphony. He
1 then went straight to Paris, where on 8 October he joined up with Alma and
2 Anna and had a number of additional sittings with Rodin. The Mahlers left
3 Cherbourg on 13 October for the third of their four visits to America.
4
5
The New York Philharmonic
6
7 The third season that Mahler spent in New York was the first one wholly
8 devoted to the newly reconstituted New York Philharmonic, the only exception
9 being his final project at the Met, a new production of Tchaikovsky’s The Queen
20 of Spades, of which he conducted only four performances. This was the first
1 time since he had ceased to run the Vienna Opera that he was a principal
2 conductor with wide-ranging responsibilities. When he had left Vienna, he had
3 not anticipated this, but the situation was now different. The Met had proved a
4 bitter disappointment, and the New York Philharmonic was his only clear alter-
5 native as a source of serious money. The orchestra had undergone far-reaching
6 changes. Of the 102 musicians who had made up its numbers in the spring of
7 1909, only fifty-six were still the same ones at the time of Mahler’s first concert
8 in the November of that year. Only two of the old woodwind players remained.
9 The new leader, Theodore Spiering, who was Mahler’s personal choice, guaran-
30 teed the new spirit of the orchestra. There was, however, a significant change
1 from Mahler’s working practices at the Met, for he now shouldered a far greater
2 burden than he had done at the opera, where he had conducted twenty-seven
3 performances during his first season and twenty-three during his second. Even
4 when we take account of the short time that he was in New York and throw in
5 the necessary rehearsals, we are still left with the impression that his commit-
6 ments during this period were as nothing when compared to those that he took
7 upon himself during his early years in Vienna, when he had the additional
8 burden of his administrative duties. But Mahler can hardly have planned for
9 what he had to take on in his third season in New York, and yet it was clear to
40 him that running an orchestra single-handedly was very different from working
41R on the conducting staff in an opera house.
Above all, the season was now substantially longer. During Mahler’s second 1
season at the Met, his first performance had been on 23 December, his last on 2
26 March – a total commitment of three months in total. But now his season 3
lasted from 4 November to 2 April, two months longer, and was originally 4
planned to comprise forty-three concerts, a number which in the event was 5
increased to forty-seven. During his second season, 1910/11, no fewer than 6
sixty-five concerts were planned, and of these he completed forty-nine 7
between early November 1910 and 21 February 1911, when his final fatal 8
illness took its toll. All in all, this was a workload reminiscent of his worst 9
excesses of over-exertion. A glance at his diary for January 1910 may give some 10
idea of this burden. The final concert of 1909 took place on New Year’s Eve, 1
after which Mahler had a few days’ rest before three more concerts on 6, 7 and 2
8 January. There were further concerts on 14, 16 and 17 January, the last of 3
these in Philadelphia. A new programme on the 20th was repeated on the 21st, 4
and yet another new programme on the 26th was repeated in Brooklyn two 5
days later. The month ended with a special concert on the 30th, giving a total 6
for the month of eleven concerts. While some of the programmes were the 7
same, there were also numerous rehearsals to conduct. There could be no 8
question of Mahler taking things easy. And yet, incomprehensibly, Alma gives 9
the impression in her reminiscences that it was all plain-sailing. Mahler occa- 20
sionally admitted that it was a strenuous schedule but repeatedly stressed that 1
he was up to it. And whereas in Vienna he had also had to shoulder a heavy 2
burden of administrative responsibility, he was able to concentrate in New 3
York on choosing the programmes and conducting the concerts. A man with 4
a seriously weak heart could not have handled this schedule, and the impres- 5
sion occasionally given by writers that Mahler was already dying by the end of 6
1909 is misleading if not downright false. 7
With Bruno Walter’s help, Mahler had ensured that the concerts were 8
extremely varied. Indeed, it soon turned out that they were too highly spiced 9
for conservative American tastes. They were divided into four different series: 30
eight normal subscription concerts that were repeated on the afternoon of the 1
next day; a cycle of six Beethoven concerts; a further series described, some- 2
what curiously, as ‘historical concerts’; and a series of five popular concerts 3
held on Sunday afternoons. A handful of these concerts were repeated, in 4
some cases outside New York. If we ignore the two concerts that Mahler 5
conducted with the ‘old’ Philharmonic Society in March and April 1909, the 6
concert with which he launched his incumbency on 4 November 1909 7
inevitably seems strange by today’s standards. Indeed, all the concert 8
programmes at the end of the nineteenth century and beginning of the twen- 9
tieth century seem strange in our eyes, although it is conceivable that in fifty 40
years from now, they will no longer look so odd. Central to the programme on 41R
604 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 4 November was Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony, preceded by the same

2 composer’s overture Die Weihe des Hauses and followed by Liszt’s Mazeppa
3 and Strauss’s Till Eulenspiegel. As such, it was typical of all Mahler’s New York
4 programmes, for Beethoven was his favourite ‘classical’ composer and Till
5 Eulenspiegel was his party piece in the modern repertory. Equally inconceiv-
6 able to modern tastes is the concert at which Mahler conducted all four of the
7 overtures for Leonore/Fidelio. The reviews were polite, noting that orchestral
8 standards had risen, even if they still fell short of the ideal. Only Mahler’s
9 critical nemesis, Henry Krehbiel, still found much to say: the conductor’s
10 approach to Beethoven was too fussily detailed for his liking, too concerned
1 with colour and bombast and too little interested in nobility and dignity. This
2 was the tone that Krehbiel was to adopt from now on.
3 At Mahler’s first ‘historical’ concert, the programme proved too much for
4 New Yorkers’ palate, even if their bewilderment was shown only in expressions
5 of polite reserve. It consisted of his controversial arrangement of Bach, a
6 Handel aria, Bach’s Violin Concerto in E major, excerpts from operas by
7 Rameau and Grétry and Haydn’s Symphony no. 104. Since eighteenth-century
8 music was almost never performed in the concert hall at this time in America,
9 the term ‘historical’ concert is understandable. Mahler’s Bach Suite was a
20 world première. When it appeared in print, it did so under the (German) title
1 ‘J. S. Bach: Suite from his Orchestral Works with Written-Out Continuo
2 Arranged for Concert Performance by Gustav Mahler’. Mahler had arranged
3 movements from the second and third of the four Orchestral Suites, allotting
4 the continuo part to an organ and prevailing on Steinway & Sons to modify
5 one of their pianos so that it sounded like a harpsichord. According to the
6 printed programme, ‘Mr. Mahler will play the Bach Klavier in the composi-
7 tions of Bach and Handel’. This ‘Bach Klavier’ was an unusual instrument
8 as far as the music lovers of the time were concerned, for in Mozart’s operas,
9 for example, the recitatives were accompanied on a modern piano. The critics
30 were baffled by the unusual programme, and there seems little doubt that their
1 reaction will have been shared by the audience, whose tastes were limited to
2 the period between Beethoven and Tchaikovsky. To have the conductor
3 conduct from the keyboard was also a novel experience, allowing Krehbiel to
4 claim that there was a lack of precision in the performance.
5 It would be wrong to suggest that Mahler’s first season as principal
6 conductor of the New York Philharmonic was a failure, for it was a major event
7 in the city’s musical life. Mahler was the most famous conductor in Europe
8 (Toscanini was still far from achieving this status), he had been a sensation at
9 the Met, however briefly, and he was now in the process of ushering in a
40 glorious future for an orchestra whose fortunes he had revived. This, at least,
41R is how his audiences viewed the situation, and so, too, did most of the critics.
And yet there were reservations that were to increase with the passage of time. 1
Neither the orchestra nor the audience, which was attuned to superficial spec- 2
tacle and glamour, could really warm to this austere Savonarola of music, 3
which is how many of them regarded Mahler. It is clear from radio interviews 4
given by members of the orchestra during the 1960s that almost all of them 5
were afraid of Mahler. The thin little man radiated a tremendous authority and 6
knew how to exert it whenever he was cross or annoyed. Latecomers were an 7
abomination to him, and he refused to put up with fidgeting or gossip during 8
his rehearsals. Even fifty years later one member of the orchestra could still 9
recall Mahler asking one of the double basses to play a particular passage on 10
his own since he suspected him of poor intonation. The man declared that he 1
was too nervous to do so. Mahler went on rehearsing. Half an hour later he 2
broke off again: ‘Are you still nervous?’ ‘Yes.’ The same conversation was 3
repeated thirty minutes later, at which point Mahler finally called it a day. At 4
the start of the next day’s rehearsal, Mahler asked the player again. By this 5
point he was a bundle of nerves. ‘I didn’t sleep all night and I’m still very 6
nervous.’ ‘You know, you have no business to play in a symphony orchestra,’ 7
retorted Mahler. ‘You should be playing in the back room of a saloon.’30 If 8
eyewitnesses are right when they claim that Mahler was far more mild- 9
mannered in New York than he had been in Vienna, it is easy to understand 20
the sort of reign of terror which, from an orchestral player’s perspective, he 1
must have exerted in Vienna. 2
But how did Mahler himself view his new place of work and his musicians? 3
We may recall how dismissive he was of the New York Symphony Orchestra. 4
He should now have been more satisfied, but he was not. He wrote to Bruno 5
Walter in the middle of December, after his first series of concerts: ‘My 6
orchestra here is the true American orchestra. Untalented and phlegmatic. 7
One fights a losing battle. I find it very dispiriting to have to start all over again 8
as a conductor. The only pleasure I get from it all is rehearsing a work I haven’t 9
done before. Simply making music is still tremendous fun for me. If only my 30
musicians were a bit better!’31 It was a sobering assessment after so many hopes 1
on all sides – this, then, was the Mahler Orchestra, assembled at his own 2
suggestion and tailored to his own needs. In fact the depressed tone of Mahler’s 3
letter to Walter may be explained in part by the fact that it was written in the 4
wake of the first American performance of his First Symphony at the third 5
subscription concert on 16 December 1909. It will be recalled that he had 6
conducted his Second Symphony in the city a year earlier, while Walter 7
Damrosch had already given the American première of the Fourth in 8
November 1904, and the Fifth had been heard in Boston in February 1906, 9
when the piece was performed no fewer than four times. In short, the First, 40
Fourth and Fifth Symphonies were familiar to audiences and critics, even if 41R
606 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 only from hearsay. The First was compared to the other two and found
2 wanting. All the critics, even the most well-meaning, revealed a fundamental
3 misunderstanding of Mahler’s music, complaining about its instrumentation,
4 its musical commonplaces and its lack of both beauty and expressive power –
5 all the old clichés. By now Mahler must have realized that he would never find
6 his artistic home in New York. All his dreams had been blighted by a prema-
7 ture frost, a depressing discovery that he none the less bore with remarkable
8 equanimity thanks to his newfound composure. ‘The day before yesterday I
9 did my First here! Apparently without getting much reaction’ – and that is all
10 that he had to tell Walter. Far more important for him was to revisit a work
1 from his past, and, eager to confess his feelings, he revealed his response to
2 Walter with rare immediacy:
3
4 All of these works give me a peculiar sensation when I conduct them. A
5 burning pain crystallizes: what a world this is that rejects such sounds and
6 patterns as something antagonistic! Something like the funeral march and
7 the storm that then breaks out seem to me like a burning denunciation of the
8 Creator. And in each new work of mine (at least up to a certain period) this
9 cry again and again goes up: ‘Not their father art thou, but their tsar!’ [This
20 favourite phrase of Mahler’s comes from Lipiner’s translation of Mickiewicz’s
1 ‘Todenfeier’.] That is – what it is like while I am conducting! Afterwards it is
2 all instantly blotted out. (Otherwise one just could not go on living.) This
3 strange reality of visions, which instantly dissolve into mist like the things
4 that happen in dreams, is the deepest cause of the life of conflict an artist
5 leads. He is condemned to lead a double life, and woe betide him if it happens
6 that life and dream flow into one – so that he has appallingly to suffer in the
7 one world for the laws of the other.32
8
9 On one point at least Mahler was more satisfied than he ever had been in
30 Vienna: ‘The audiences here are very lovable and relatively better mannered
1 than in Vienna. They listen attentively and sympathetically.’ But Mahler’s
2 prevailing mood was a mixture of estrangement and mounting homesickness.
3 He ends his letter by asking Walter to pass on his good wishes to all his friends,
4 foremost among whom he names Lipiner: ‘I am immensely looking forward to
5 the time when I can be together with everyone again! Oh that I may be granted
6 that for a span of time!’33 By this he meant a time ‘after America’, when he would
7 have earned enough money to spend the whole year in Vienna or its environs
8 and would be in regular contact with his younger and older friends, including
9 Lipiner and Friedrich Löhr, Albert and Nanna Spiegler, Bruno Walter and
40 Roller, Schoenberg, Zemlinsky and Berg, Carl and Anna Moll, Foerster, Adler
41R and the few critics who he felt understood him, namely, Richard Specht, Paul
Stefan and Julius Korngold. The fact that the idea of bringing his American 1
activities to an end sooner rather than later was no passing whim is clear from 2
a letter to Roller from early January 1910. Here he states specifically that if the 3
pressures on him continue as before he will remain in America no more than a 4
year and then return to Europe for good. For a time he toyed with the idea of 5
settling in the Netherlands, and it was not entirely in jest that he mentioned that 6
he and Alma had found a new game in choosing a place to live: Paris, Florence, 7
Capri, Switzerland and the Black Forest were all mooted. Shortly before his 8
death he did indeed begin to make plans for a property near Vienna, ‘where the 9
sun shines and beautiful grapes grow’, as he explained to Roller.34 10
Also at the start of 1910 Mahler suddenly found himself in the disagreeable 1
position of having to defend himself and Alma from his circle of friends in 2
Vienna, a situation that recalled the turbulent days of their engagement. He 3
had evidently written a letter to Guido Adler that is no longer extant but which 4
Adler interpreted to mean that Mahler’s life in New York was a picture of 5
unadulterated horror. Mahler clearly got wind of this. The picture peddled by 6
Adler to his Viennese friends is one of a conductor working harder than he 7
had ever done in Vienna, under conditions unworthy of him, and egged on by 8
Alma, who was allegedly interested only in leading an extravagant lifestyle and 9
flattering her social ambitions and egomania. Mahler used the relative peace 20
and quiet of New Year’s Day to defend himself against these charges. Nor did 1
he mince his words but began by defending his American engagement with the 2
argument that he needed conducting as a counterbalance to composition and 3
that the directorship of a concert orchestra was proving invaluable for instru- 4
menting his own works, an experience denied him in the opera house. There 5
is, however, something a little imbalanced about his rhetorical question ‘Can I 6
help it if Vienna chucked me out?’ Is this really how he now saw his departure 7
from the city? Nor, he went on, would his Viennese pension guarantee the 8
degree of comfort that he felt was his entitlement after nearly thirty years of 9
hard labour. ‘So I welcomed the chance of the American offer, which provided 30
me not only with an occupation suited to my tastes and abilities, but also with 1
a good salary that will soon enable me to spend what years remain to me in a 2
manner befitting one’s human dignity.’ He does not mention the various 3
sources of annoyance in New York: his dissatisfaction with the orchestra and 4
the lack of enthusiasm for his own works. What he does say, however, is that 5
Alma has been grievously wronged by all this gossip, for she was a loyal 6
companion who shared all his intellectual interests and a sensible, level- 7
headed housekeeper to whom he owed all the affluence and order in his 8
private life. Such language sounds as if it has been lifted straight out of a char- 9
acter reference. In the event, Adler appears not to have received this letter, for 40
Alma found the original among her husband’s papers after his death.35 41R
608 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Settling In
2
If Alma’s account can be trusted, then the Mahlers led more active social lives
3
during their third winter in New York than they had done on their previous
4
visits, Mahler himself apparently deriving a remarkable degree of pleasure from
5
the numerous dinner invitations that he received from the city’s leading families.
6
On one occasion they even spent an evening at the home of President Theodore
7
Roosevelt’s sister-in-law at Sagamore Hill, Oyster Bay. She showed them round
8
the President’s house, Roosevelt currently being away in Africa, pursuing his
9
favourite sport of big-game hunting. They also consulted a drunken medium,
10
Eusapia Palladino, who wore a peasant’s shawl round her head and made dark
1
prophecies about Mahler, claiming that he was in danger. Although they did not
2
know what to make of all this, the séance certainly gave them pause for thought.
3
At one point a mandolin flew through the air and slightly injured Mahler. This
4
was a period when theosophy and spiritualism were all the rage – at more or less
5
the same time Baron Schrenck-Notzing was making a similar impression on
6
Thomas Mann in Munich. At the home of Louisine Havemeyer the Mahlers saw
7
some of the art treasures that wealthy Americans were then able to acquire. The
8
anthropophobic eccentric Louis Tiffany asked Mahler whether he could observe
9
some of his orchestral rehearsals unobserved. By way of thanks he invited the
20
Mahlers to visit him at his home, a sign of special favour. His palatial residence
1
contained lighting effects of every kind. The Parsifal prelude was being played
2
on an organ – this was one work by Wagner that Mahler had never conducted.
3
Tiffany himself hovered in the background, surrounded by a pall of smoke from
4
the hashish to which he was addicted.
5
With a vague shudder of apprehension the Mahlers also had themselves
6
taken to Chinatown and an opium den. This sort of visit was fashionable at this
7
period as a kind of after-dinner entertainment, the detective who accompan-
8
ied the party with a loaded revolver merely adding to the sense of titillation.
9
The Chinese addicts could be seen on bunks and stretchers, sleeping off the
30
effects of their intoxication and reminding Alma of a baker’s shop with human
1
loaves. They also visited a Salvation Army hostel, where they heard a wheezing
2
harmonium and the eerie singing of men and women prepared to play the part
3
of repentant sinners in return for a cup of coffee and a roll. But it was the
4
Jewish quarter that repelled them the most. ‘Are these our brothers?’ Alma
5
asked Mahler. According to her reminiscences, he shook his head in despair, a
6
plausible reaction in the light of his earlier comments about the Jews he had
7
seen in Lemberg. There were also social and official engagements that gener-
8
ally went no further than a formal dinner, which had the advantage of ending
9
early, allowing the Mahlers to be home at a reasonable hour, while for the other
40
guests the night was still young.
41R
But these months also saw the emergence of closer links with a circle of 1
friends and acquaintances who included Joseph Fraenkel, the violinist 2
Franz Kneisel, a Viennese painter called Carl Hassmann, Ernest Schelling and 3
his wife, and Prince Paul Troubetzkoy, the brother of the famous sculptor 4
Wladimir Troubetzkoy and, according to Alma, a ‘wild, handsome Russian’ – 5
at this period she was becoming increasingly attracted to wild and handsome 6
men, especially if they were young. Other people with whom the Mahlers 7
became acquainted during these months were the journalist Carlo di Fornaro, 8
who had made a name for himself exposing abuses in the American penal 9
system; the English writer Poultney Bigelow, who had been friendly with 10
Wilhelm II before he became Kaiser, later forfeiting the latter’s sympathies by 1
writing a book that was critical of his former friend; and the American graphic 2
artist, Charles Dana Gibson, whose empty-headed socialite wife asked Alma 3
how such a beautiful woman could ever have brought herself to marry such 4
a hideous, old and altogether impossible man like Mahler. Alma does not seem 5
to have been particularly surprised that the woman’s response to all her 6
counter-arguments was a ‘contemptuous smile’. Whether Mahler really found 7
all this as insanely interesting as Alma claims must remain an open question, 8
but Mahler no doubt made an effort to put on a brave face as he knew that this 9
was one of the ways of ensuring that his young and voracious wife could bear 20
to remain in a world in which she was always going to feel a stranger. From this 1
point of view, Guido Adler was not entirely wrong. 2
There is no need to describe in greater detail the events of the rest of the 3
season. As we have already noted, Mahler’s programmes were exceptionally 4
varied, especially at the popular Sunday concerts, where a Bizet aria might rub 5
shoulders with the ‘Eroica’, Handel’s Largo with the Funeral March from 6
Götterdämmerung, with a Massenet aria and the Meistersinger Overture 7
thrown in for good measure. The other programmes were dominated by 8
Beethoven – a source of common ground for Mahler and his American audi- 9
ences. For him, Tchaikovsky’s symphonies were not on the same high level. 30
Still less was Rachmaninov’s Third Piano Concerto in which the composer 1
himself played the solo part. But Mahler must have been delighted to have 2
Ferruccio Busoni as the soloist in Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto. Busoni 3
was the only virtuoso of this time who was Mahler’s intellectual equal, and a 4
genuine bond of friendship sprang up between the two men. They had in fact 5
known each other for years, Busoni having performed under Mahler in Vienna 6
in 1899. In March 1910 Mahler conducted Busoni’s Turandot Suite in New 7
York, prompting the composer to write to his wife: ‘With what love and 8
unerring instinct this man rehearsed! Artistically, and humanly, it was both 9
gratifying and warming.’36 It was a touching coincidence that Busoni’s Berceuse 40
élégiaque was on the programme of the final concert that Mahler ever 41R
610 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 conducted. His delight in performing his own works was by now much dimin-
2 ished. But at the end of January he presented his Kindertotenlieder with Ludwig
3 Wüllner as the soloist. The reactions in the press ranged from respect to
4 open bewilderment. This time it was Henderson who was the most critical:
5 ‘Mr. Mahler feels but he does not create.’37 Mahler’s final production at the
6 Met, Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades, opened in early March, with Emmy
7 Destinn as Lisa and Leo Slezak as Hermann. This was the first time since
8 Vienna that he had worked with the waggish heldentenor. Never previously
9 staged in America, the work was politely received, but audiences failed to
10 warm to it, and after four performances it disappeared from the repertory until
1 1965. Mahler seems to have been in a sombre mood at the rehearsals and was
2 unusually stern with the singers and musicians. Although internationally
3 acclaimed, Emmy Destinn was so terrified of the conductor that she had to flee
4 from one of the rehearsals. Mahler conducted his fourth and final performance
5 of the work on 21 March. It was the last opera he ever conducted. The family
6 boarded the Kaiser Wilhelm on 5 April and set sail for Cherbourg, a crossing
7 that marked the end of Mahler’s penultimate season in New York.
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41R
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The Ninth Symphony 7
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AHLER’S NINTH SYMPHONY is shrouded in the myth of the late work – in 4
M this case the last work that the composer completed. By the time that
Bruno Walter and the Vienna Philharmonic gave its first performance in
5
6
Vienna on 26 June 1912, Mahler had been dead for over a year, although 7
respect for the dead certainly did not prevent some of the critics in the audi- 8
ence from dismissing the piece as inferior to the Eighth and complaining that 9
it was shallow and threadbare. In the case of the Eighth, Mahler had been 20
surprisingly forthcoming, making his silence in the case of the Ninth all the 1
more striking. His only comment on it – and it is remarkable for its neutral, 2
non-committal tone – comes in a letter that he wrote to Bruno Walter from 3
Toblach in August 1909, while he was busy working on the score. This was the 4
only time after the Eighth that Mahler completed an entire symphony of 5
comparable length in the space of a single summer: 6
7
I have been working very hard and am just putting the finishing touches to a 8
new symphony. Unfortunately my vacation is also nearly finished – and as 9
always I am in the tiresome position of having to rush back to town still quite 30
breathless from composing, and to start work again. Well, that just seems to 1
be my lot. The work itself (insofar as I know it, for I have been writing away at 2
it blindly, and how that I have begun to orchestrate the last movement I have 3
forgotten the first) is a very satisfactory addition to my little family. In it some- 4
thing is said that I have had on the tip of my tongue for some time – perhaps 5
(as a whole) to be ranked beside the Fourth, if anything. (But quite different.)1 6
7
When set alongside Mahler’s enthusiastic comments on his Eighth Symphony, 8
this sounds almost as if he were referring to an inferior piece, rather like a 9
father failing to find the necessary degree of enthusiasm for yet another addi- 40
tion to his family. None of Mahler’s own remarks would support the view that 41R
612 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 in the eyes of many of his admirers, it is his Ninth, rather than his Eighth, that
2 is his finest achievement. Alma claims that he used the word ‘symphony’ to
3 describe Das Lied von der Erde only as part of the work’s subheading and that
4 he refused to number it, so superstitious was he. Only on completing his Ninth
5 Symphony did he heave a sigh of relief. Inasmuch as Bruno Walter makes a
6 similar claim, we may well be inclined to believe Alma on this occasion,
7 although doubts about this version of events remain in order, or at least about
8 the extent to which Mahler intended his comments to be taken seriously.
9 The myth of the late work – and it is sufficient to recall Beethoven’s late
10 quartets and Bruckner’s Eighth and unfinished Ninth – also affects our percep-
1 tion and interpretation of the symphony. Or take a different example, Brahms’s
2 Four Serious Songs, which was the composer’s penultimate work. When he sets
3 the words from Ecclesiasticus, ‘O death, how bitter is the remembrance of thee
4 to a man that liveth in his possessions, unto the man that hath nothing to vex
5 him’, it is impossible not to think of the composer’s own death only a few
6 months later. Much the same has happened in the case of Mahler’s Ninth
7 Symphony, Paul Bekker setting the lofty tone in 1921: ‘An attritional song, not
8 really created for the ears of this world, it tells of the afterlife. Mahler himself
9 died because of it. His instinctive urge for the truth had been met. He had seen
20 God in that final revelation that it is given to us to encompass with our eyes
1 here on earth: God as death. The unwritten subheading of the Ninth
2 Symphony is “What death tells me”’.2 Bruno Walter supports Bekker when he
3 writes about the link between the final section of Das Lied von der Erde –
4 which Mahler had returned to and revised after completing his Ninth
5 Symphony – and the Ninth, which he demanded should be called ‘The
6 Farewell’, identifying the feeling of departure as the music’s motivating force.
7 The greatest temptation for any biographer or commentator on an artist’s work
8 is to invoke an intimate link between his life and works, and in the case of a
9 composer such a temptation is almost impossible to resist, especially when we
30 recall that both Walter and Bekker were authorities on the subject. If, on the
1 basis of the Ninth Symphony, we infer the sort of man that Mahler must have
2 been in the summer of 1909, then we are left with the picture of someone who
3 had already started to distance himself from the world as a result of the deeply
4 unsettling experiences of the summer of 1907 – and who was now a different
5 person, seemingly dematerialized, concerned only with thoughts of the after-
6 life and, in the face of his imminent death, taking his leave of all that he loved
7 in the world. Of course, the music of the Ninth Symphony and especially its
8 final movement can easily contribute to such an impression, especially because
9 there is no denying that as a result of the crisis of 1907, Mahler’s outlook on
40 the world had changed in far-reaching ways. And yet we need to mistrust such
41R short-sighted conclusions, for the reality of the situation was very different.
THE NINTH SYMPHONY 613
The impression given by Mahler during these summer months in Toblach in 1

1909 cannot be squared with the cliché-ridden picture of him that is suggested 2
by some writers. At the end of June we find him writing to his old friend Arnold 3
Berliner. At this date he was still on his own, as Alma was taking the waters at 4
Levico, and so he invited Berliner to visit him, offering him a good bed, lots of 5
books to read and plenty of free time. Although Mahler would of course be busy 6
composing during the morning, they could talk, eat and walk during the after- 7
noons and evenings: ‘It is marvellous here and is certain to restore you in body 8
and soul. I guarantee you bread and butter and sound boots for the entire rest 9
of your life. I shan’t even begrudge you ham!’3 During the day Mahler enjoyed 10
being on his own, but in the evening he missed his wife and daughter and was 1
annoyed by the noisy inhabitants of the Trenkerhof. Visitors were coming and 2
going all the time and included Oskar Fried, Gustav Brecher and Emil Freund, 3
with whom Mahler practised what for him was the fascinating technique of 4
deep breathing. Previously he used to complain about hordes of unannounced 5
visitors, but now he seemed genuinely pleased to see them. He wrote to his 6
mother-in-law and asked her to send him some ink for his fountain pen, some 7
peppermint oil and a jar of real honey – ‘not that disgusting liquorice syrup’ 8
served up by his housemaid. In a long letter to Alma he talks exclusively about 9
problems with the servants following the departure of Kathi, the parlourmaid, 20
who had never been able to get on with Mahler. Alma tended to side with her 1
servants in order to make common cause with them in her disagreements with 2
her husband, and she did so with Kathi, too, making Mahler so cross that he 3
wrote angrily to Alma to complain that she had served the Trenkerhof ’s own 4
butter rather than the better-quality Niederdorf variety. The Trenkers’ butter, he 5
complained, stank like liquid manure.4 In the light of all these details we are 6
bound to ask ourselves whether these are the letters of a composer who is no 7
longer of this world. If the music of the Ninth Symphony seems impossible to 8
square with this man, then this is because the links between life and art are 9
more complex than any dreamt up by conventional wisdom. 30
When judged by the ‘excesses’ of the earlier symphonies, the Ninth is a work 1
of classical restraint. It avoids extremes, reverts to four-movement form and 2
uses no voices or cowbells or hammer or immoderately large orchestra. Even 3
in terms of its length, it is by no means excessive by Mahler’s standards. But 4
within this classical restraint, which also finds expression in the work’s basic- 5
ally lyrical character and its interweaving of song and symphony, we find a 6
newly intensified expressivity, an expressivity within what is generally a low 7
dynamic range that emerges in the opening movement from the inarticulate 8
and the unutterable and which in the final movement slips back into the unut- 9
terable as it dies away. The very beginning of the opening Andante comodo is 40
unheard of in the most literal sense of that term. The cellos and two horns 41R
614 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 seem to enter from another world, hesitantly, gropingly and murmuringly, in

2 a rhythm that has been described by Michael Gielen as the ‘rhythm of death’
3 and that certainly suggests extrasystolic arrhythmia. Never before had Mahler
4 used such short musical ideas over such long periods, some of them little
5 more than a bar in length. The listener is reminded of someone waking up
6 from a troubled dream and muttering to himself, trying to articulate what he
7 has experienced before sinking back into silence and sleep. What Mahler
8 depicts here with unique immediacy is a crisis of music’s ability to speak. The
9 new music of the Second Viennese School is adumbrated here not only in the
10 actual articulation but also in the abandonment of classical forms such as first-
1 movement sonata form and variation technique which, however much he may
2 have tested them to their limits, Mahler had continued until now to regard as
3 binding. Further evidence of this development may be found in the weakening
4 grip of traditional tonality, notably in the third movement. But this is not the
5 place to discuss the much-debated question as to whether the Ninth is the last
6 work of the older type of music or the first work of the newer type.
7 The Ninth Symphony is more or less coeval with a famous text that is an
8 example of literary modernism and that suggests a certain shared experience.
9 Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s ‘Chandos Letter’ dates from 1902. In it a fictitious
20 Lord Chandos in Elizabethan England writes to his friend Francis Bacon and
1 describes his experience of losing the ability to string together coherent
2 thoughts and phrases. The abstract words that are needed to articulate opin-
3 ions decay in his mouth – he says – like putrid mushrooms. Everything disin-
4 tegrates, breaking down into ever smaller parts and refusing to be harnessed
5 together in a single concept.5 The term ‘crisis of language’ has frequently been
6 applied to this text but scarcely begins to do it justice. No doubt Hofmannsthal
7 was familiar with the debates about the crisis in language that were fashionable
8 at this period and that were prefigured by Nietzsche, playing a part in Viennese
9 empirio-criticism and finding particularly striking expression in Fritz
30 Mauthner’s Contributions to a Critique of Language in 1901/2. To this
1 Hofmannsthal adds a profound sense of crisis affecting not only our
2 consciousness but also our very existence, a crisis triggered in his own case by
3 the loss of the poet’s youthful ability to write verse with apparently instinctive
4 ease. Of course, there is a fundamental difference between Hofmannsthal’s
5 situation and that of the much older Mahler in terms of their physical and
6 mental lives, but each of them was responsive to the signs of a crisis that
7 affected not only their age in general but their individual lives in particular.
8 That Mahler’s own crisis had left him shaken to the very roots of his being
9 is clear from his letter to Bruno Walter in which he speaks of staring into the
40 abyss. That crisis continued to resonate in him, and the opening movement of
41R the Ninth Symphony is in part an attempt to give musical expression to these
experiences. Mahler also felt, no doubt, that the materials that he had hitherto 1
used to construct his worlds of sound were no longer sufficient to articulate 2
the experiences of the last two years. The opening movement is an expression 3
of this experience and poses a question that the final movement then attempts 4
to answer. It is not surprising that at the end of his letter to Lord Chandos, 5
Hofmannsthal suggests that his crisis may be surmounted by non-linguistic 6
means: ‘And the whole thing is a kind of feverish thinking, but thinking using 7
material that is more immediate, more fluent, more white-hot than words. It 8
is a kind of eddy – not the sort that seems to lead directly into the abyss in 9
the eddies of language but one that somehow takes me into myself and into the 10
deepest womb of peace.’6 As Elektra says, just before she collapses in the 1
triumph of death: ‘He who is as happy as we are should do but one thing: say 2
nothing and dance!’ Hofmannsthal was profoundly convinced that dance, 3
mime and music must come to the assistance of language and that they may 4
even replace it in order to end its crisis. From now on his own works were to 5
be influenced by this feeling. Unlike the Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von 6
der Erde, both of which are permeated by the spoken word, the ‘speechless’ 7
Ninth Symphony is the answer to Lord Chandos’s questions, and it provides 8
this answer in a more immediate, more fluent and white-hot way than 9
language itself could ever do. 20
Two themes soon break free in the opening movement, the first a lyrical 1
theme in the major, the second, closely related to it but more dramatic, in the 2
minor. But the dynamic level remains largely unchanged. No overarching 3
structures emerge, for the musical argument continues to be made up of very 4
small particles, albeit varied with extreme artistry but not in the sense of clas- 5
sical variation technique. Writers fail to agree on whether it is still possible to 6
identify the old elements of a sonata movement – exposition, development 7
section, recapitulation and coda – in this curious movement. Should the 8
utterly unique episode from bar 376 onwards be described as the end of the 9
recapitulation or as a trio? The impression that it creates is confusing and, 30
puzzlingly, that of a sinfonia concertante that is not of this world: flutes and 1
piccolo in their highest register and horns, trumpets and low strings perform 2
a shadow play that seems to be part of a surrealist’s dream. Neither the dreamer 3
nor the person to whom it is recounted seems able to understand it, for it fails 4
to produce a consistent meaning. Supported by only a handful of woodwinds, 5
the flute leads us upwards to dizzying heights, at which point the sound turns 6
yellow, thinning out to harmonics in the harp, strings and piccolo, no longer a 7
sound but merely the noise of scraping. This opening movement has some- 8
thing of a negative manifesto about it and seems to want to demonstrate that 9
traditional means can no longer be used for a symphonic argument. Each time 40
that the movement no longer knows how to go on, it attempts to fall back on 41R
616 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 material from which it believes it was developed, but like a falling moun-
2 taineer, it reaches out and grasps only the air, for the material from the begin-
3 ning of the movement is in itself already fragmented and no longer capable of
4 building up and supporting the musical argument.7
5 The second movement is ländler-like in character and from that point of
6 view appears familiar enough, but on this occasion the mood acquires an
7 implacable and brutal aspect, a mood intensified by the use of cinematic
8 straight cuts in which different dance modes and tempos are abruptly juxta-
9 posed by means of double bar-lines and changes in the tempo markings.
10 Striking a note of self-irony, Mahler himself once noted that his music needed
1 to embrace the trivial, but here the principle is relentlessly taken to its furthest
2 extreme, especially in the second waltz.
3 The third movement is a Rondo-Burlesque, and on this occasion it is the
4 burlesque element that is taken to its furthest extreme. The final fugue in
5 Verdi’s Falstaff begins with the words ‘Tutto nel mondo è burla’ (‘Everything in
6 the world is a joke’). This was a work that Mahler himself conducted, and even
7 though he had previously held Verdi’s operas in low regard, he admitted that
8 he had learnt much from the older Verdi’s art of knowing what to leave out.
9 The term ‘burlesque’ derives from Italian burla. (As a young man Mahler’s
20 friend and rival Richard Strauss had written a Burleske for piano and
1 orchestra.) It implies a musical joke, but in the Ninth Symphony the joke is
2 violent and malicious. Far too often Mahler’s music has been over-interpreted
3 and described as ‘music written on the eve of the First World War’ or even as
4 ‘music that anticipates genocide’. In much the same way numerous works of
5 literature have been said to look forward to catastrophes and disasters with
6 more prescience than politicians and cultural commentators. The biographer
7 admits to being sceptical about such ‘presentiments’. True, Mahler’s sympathy
8 with the downtrodden and humiliated is evident in his music, and he was infin-
9 itely more sensitive to stupidity and brutality, aggression and vulgarity than the
30 average person who embodies these qualities, but he did not anticipate the
1 First World War, and his deserters, marches and funeral processions do not
2 move ineluctably towards the firebreak of this conflict in particular but only of
3 war in general. Listeners who hear persecution and pogroms in Mahler’s
4 music are right to do so, but like all great music, it depicts the universal rather
5 than the historically specific. And yet the third movement of the Ninth has a
6 quality that seems to represent the exception that confirms the foregoing rule.
7 The auto-aggression of this raging whirlwind takes the mild irony of the
8 ‘Fischpredigt’ Scherzo from the Second Symphony and raises it to a level that
9 is barely tolerable.
40 Six months before his death Franz Schubert wrote an Allegro in A minor for
41R piano duet. In spite of its brevity (although it may have been intended as the
first movement of an unfinished sonata), it is one of the most disturbing works 1

from this period in his life. He or his publisher called it Lebensstürme (Life’s 2
Storms). In comparison, the third movement of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony is 3
like one of life’s tornados, depicting the course of the world, in all its empty 4
bustle, with an acuity found in no other movement that he wrote. It is hard not 5
to be reminded here of the long letter that Mahler wrote to Bruno Walter in 6
January 1909, reporting on the consequences of the great crisis of 1907 and his 7
resultant thirst for life but also his thoughts on death, thoughts he wanted to 8
discuss with Siegfried Lipiner: 9
10
How absurd it is to let oneself be submerged in the brutal whirlpool of life! To 1
be untrue to oneself and to those higher things above oneself for even a single 2
hour! But writing that down like this is one thing – on the next occasion, for 3
instance, if I now leave this room of mine, I shall certainly again be as absurd 4
as anyone else. What is it then that thinks in us? And what acts in us?8 5
6
This ‘whirlpool of life’ is at the heart of the third movement, but whereas the 7
letter describes it from the outside and adopts a sceptical and ironic tone, the 8
music captures our attempts to break free from it. Clearly Mahler had in mind 9
here a society moving increasingly rapidly and ever more blindly towards the 20
abyss – the movement, after all, is a harried march. Mahler could certainly 1
have been reminded of Loge’s words at the end of Das Rheingold: ‘Ihrem Ende 2
eilen sie zu, die so stark im Bestehen sich wähnen’ (‘They’re hurrying on 3
towards their end, though they think they will last for ever’). 4
The fourth and final movement is an Adagio that quickly assumed the char- 5
acter of a testamentary disposition – assuming that we do not reserve that 6
privilege for the opening Andante-Adagio of the unfinished Tenth Symphony. 7
This fourth movement is the quintessential Mahlerian Adagio. At the risk of 8
sounding crass, one could say that the listener who hears this Adagio and is 9
not moved on the very deepest level should abandon all further attempts to 30
come to terms with Mahler. He is lost to Mahler, just as Mahler is lost to him. 1
The basic building block of this movement is a very simple figure, a turn, a 2
type of ornament in which the main note alternates with its two auxiliaries a 3
step above and below. As such, this figure consists of no more than four notes, 4
the second and fourth of which are repeated. It was originally performed very 5
quickly, but in the hands of Bruckner and Wagner, for example, it became both 6
slower and more emphatic, expressive of the deepest emotion. The turn had 7
already provided the underlying character of ‘Der Abschied’ in Das Lied von 8
der Erde, at the beginning of which it is heard five times in succession on the 9
oboe, unforgettably memorable and incisive, first on C, then on D and then on 40
F, conjuring up the boundless loneliness of this valedictory moment. In the 41R
618 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Adagio of the Ninth, the turn occurs with even greater frequency and becomes
2 even more expressive, having already been heard in the first movement and at
3 the end of the third, where it constitutes one of those Mahlerian islands of bliss
4 in the midst of life’s whirlpool, while failing to achieve the status of a final
5 destination. Only in the final movement does this turn achieve this aim, but at
6 a price. Here Mahler harks back not only to Das Lied von der Erde but also to
7 the fourth of the Kindertotenlieder (‘Oft denk ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen’),
8 from which he reworks two decisive passages. The turn-based theme builds to
9 a fortissimo climax in the strings, after which the movement’s second subject
10 enters, ghost-like, in the highest register of the first violins. The contrabassoon,
1 cellos and double basses then add their voices in their lowest register. Here a
2 soul spreads wide its wings in order to span the void that has opened up and
3 that otherwise would be unbearable. The music then reverts to its opening
4 character, leading to a sense of uplift and a climax in bar 118, the sheer weight
5 of which could not have been foreseen. The turn motif returns in the fortissimo
6 trombones, which invest it with a power that is hard to credit, while the violins
7 insist on a high E flat in bar 168 that could – and should – provide the starting
8 point for a development in any direction apart from the one that actually
9 follows, namely, the complete extinction of the music over the space of the last
20 twenty-six bars.
1 Starting with the Adagissimo – in itself an extremely unusual tempo
2 marking – Mahler deploys what Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, in his analysis of
3 this final movement, calls ‘his whole arsenal of vocables expressive of grief ’:9
4 the chromatic three-note descent, the whole-tone step downwards, the semi-
5 tone step up and down and the turn. Following this expression of grief, there
6 is, however, no gesture of consolation, still less of affirmation. Following a
7 direct quotation from the fourth of the Kindertotenlieder (‘im Sonnenschein!
8 Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höhn’) played by the first violins with ‘heartfelt
9 emotion’, the music trickles away to a pianissisimo, before dying away
30 completely in the second violins, violas and cellos. As listeners we long for this
1 movement to end as soon as possible, but Mahler extends our agony, drawing
2 out the music to literally intolerable lengths – there are performances in which
3 the resistance of many listeners to the unbearable nature of this ending finds
4 expression in increasing restlessness. Normally the word ‘blood-curdling’ is
5 used only in the context of screams, but one is tempted to speak of a blood-
6 curdling dying away in the case of the present movement. Hans Heinrich
7 Eggebrecht has described this passage as follows:
8
9 In terms of its musical shape and message, the epilogue to the Ninth
40 Symphony is written into the Adagio and, indeed, into the symphony as a
41R whole from the very beginning: it is not the world that breaks in from outside
at the end but the ‘other world’ that is brought about and achieved by the 1
composition as the actual subject, a state of attainment identical with the 2
dissolution into silence and the ‘dying away’ of the subject.10 3
4
In his book Real Presences, George Steiner has ascribed to poetry, art and 5
music the ability to bring us into the most direct contact with things that do 6
not belong to us. It is the aim and privilege of the aesthetic experience to create 7
a continuum between temporality and eternity, between matter and spirit and 8
between the individual and the ‘other’, turning them into an enlightened pres- 9
ence. On one point Steiner even places music on a higher plane than poetry 10
and the visual arts. There is music, he writes, ‘which conveys both the grave 1
constancy, the finality of death and a certain refusal of that very finality’.11 As 2
an example of this transcendent power of music, Steiner cites the slow move- 3
ment of Schubert’s String Quintet – and who would contradict him? But those 4
listeners who also find this power in Mahler’s music, most notably in the final 5
movement of the Ninth Symphony, may feel that – in the words of the last of 6
the Kindertotenlieder – they are ‘in their mother’s house’. 7
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41R
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7 Crisis and Culmination
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(1910)
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4 Between Tobelbad and Toblach
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Mahler’s final summer began in the best of all possible moods, at least as far as
6
he himself was concerned. He seems to have been oblivious to the fact that
7
Alma was dissatisfied with her life as a wife and mother, although his eyes were
8
about to be brutally opened. The couple arrived back in Europe on 11 April,
9
looking forward to a week in Paris that would see a performance of the Second
20
Symphony at the Châtelet with the Orchestre des Concerts Colonne. They were
1
particularly keen to see their old friends and forge closer links with Mahler’s
2
French colleagues, but their plans began to unravel almost straightaway. One of
3
their first engagements was a formal dinner given by Gabriel Pierné, who had
4
just taken over the Colonne Orchestra from its founder, Édouard Colonne. A
5
native of Metz, Pierné had studied under Massenet and César Franck and made
6
a name for himself as an organist. Although it has now been forgotten, his
7
oratorio La Croisade des enfants enjoyed considerable success in the first decade
8
of the twentieth century. The other guests at the dinner included Debussy,
9
Dukas, Fauré and Alfred Bruneau, who was famous as a representative of natur-
30
alism in music and for his settings of Zola. In short, they were the crème de la
1
crème of French music of the period. Also in attendance were Paul and Sophie
2
Clemenceau. According to Alma, Mahler felt uncomfortable in this company.
3
Although he had conducted some of Debussy’s orchestral works and Dukas’s
4
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, he was never able to summon up much enthusiasm
5
for French Impressionism in music. By the same token, some of the younger
6
musicians in Paris felt a decided antipathy to German music. Their older
7
colleagues had grown up as the Wagnerian faithful, but the younger generation
8
bridled against the all-powerful influence of the Germans, and Wagner himself
9
had forfeited French sympathies with his egregiously anti-French outlook
40
during the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1.
41R
CRISIS AND CULMINATION 621
The chauvinistic attitudes that coloured French musical politics in the wake 1
of France’s defeat continued to simmer until boiling over in 1914, spectacularly 2
so in the case of Debussy. We know from Debussy’s reviews that he never 3
missed an opportunity to defend French music in the face of its Teutonic coun- 4
terpart. All of this helps to explain the great interest that has been taken in 5
Alma’s account of the performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony that he 6
conducted on 17 April: in her reminiscences she claims that much to Mahler’s 7
annoyance Debussy, Dukas and Pierné ostentatiously left the hall during the 8
second movement and that they complained afterwards that the music was too 9
Schubertian for their taste, and even Schubert, they went on, was too Viennese 10
and Slav for them. What is particularly remarkable about all this is that their 1
scandalous discourtesy is not mentioned in any other source. True, a lone voice 2
is said to have cried out ‘Down with German music’, but such a sensational 3
demonstration of dissent would surely have remained lodged in the memory of 4
other members of the audience. Moreover, we know that Dukas was a paragon 5
of courtesy and refinement. The previous evening Mahler had done him the 6
honour of attending a performance of his only opera, Ariane et Barbe-Bleu, at 7
the Opéra-Comique and made a point of congratulating him at the end of the 8
opening act. Here, too, Alma is clearly fantasizing when she claims that by the 9
end Mahler had been very bored, for it is unlikely that a listener who had 20
warmed to the opening act of this masterpiece would not have been even more 1
impressed by the second and third acts. It seems unlikely, then, that the sophis- 2
ticated Dukas, whom Mahler had treated so courteously and respectfully on the 3
16th, should have behaved so boorishly on the 17th. That Pierné was among 4
the boors is even more unlikely, for not only had he hosted the dinner in 5
Mahler’s honour, he was also the music director of the orchestra that had 6
extended the invitation to Mahler. He also conducted the first half of the 7
evening’s programme. A conductor who entrusts the baton of his own orchestra 8
to a colleague does not walk out on the following performance. 9
The only member of this group who could conceivably have committed such 30
an act of discourtesy was Debussy, a composer notorious for his abruptness and 1
asperity. Following the concert he is said to have commented to the Comtesse 2
Greffulhe, a famous Parisian beauty, ‘There you have your Mahler’, deliberately 3
mispronouncing the composer’s name as ‘Malheur’. He was undoubtedly one of 4
the most violently anti-Teutonic French musicians of the age. A friend recalled 5
that in August 1914, shortly after the outbreak of the First World War, he vented 6
his spleen on Germany and German music: 7
8
‘Ouf,’ he said with disgust, ‘those people drink whether they are thirsty or 9
not! Everything with them is ‘en gros’. A theme must be long, regardless of its 40
contents or value; the longer the better. Then another interminable episode 41R
622 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 and then another endless theme. Then, after sixteen quarts of beer, they
2 begin a development so long, so long, that there is scarcely room in this
3 house to hold it. Take, for instance, the symphonies of Mahler (which he, of
4 course, pronounced Mal-air), with its thousand voices and whips,
5 submarines and whatnot . . . Or Monsieur Strauss, who is clever in that he
6 knows how to write nothingness itself . . . Well, my friend, with it all, their
7 noise does not sound any louder than the finale to Beethoven’s Fifth,
8 produced by a small orchestra with only the addition of a contrafagott!’1
9
10 In short, Debussy is the only member of the group whom we could imagine
1 being capable of such a demonstration, and yet even in his case the few
2 surviving scraps of evidence point in contradictory directions, making it
3 difficult to know whether the incident took place at all, at least in the way
4 described by Alma. None the less, the anecdote has proved tenacious. Suffice
5 it to have drawn attention to this clash between German and French music.
6 Apart from this alleged scene, the concert was a success, even if – as in New
7 York – respect prevailed over enthusiasm.
8 From Paris the Mahlers travelled to Rome, briefly breaking their journey in
9 Vienna. Mahler had already visited Italy for a series of concerts in the spring of
20 1907, a tour that had caused him annoyance with the authorities in Vienna. In
1 Rome he was due to conduct three concerts with the same orchestra as before,
2 the Accademia di Santa Cecilia, although in the event only two took place.
3 Mengelberg had just conducted a number of other concerts with the orchestra
4 and had remained behind in the city in order to see Mahler. He had been very
5 dissatisfied with the standard of playing and advised Mahler to be stern with
6 them. Mahler did not need telling twice, and his rudeness towards the players
7 led to serious difficulties. Their numbers were depleted, several of their
8 colleagues having already left for a lucrative tour of Latin America, and the
9 demanding programme – Wagner, Strauss, Tchaikovsky and Mahler’s own Bach
30 Suite – suffered accordingly. According to Alma, Mahler laid into the players,
1 armed only with a dictionary, his Italian being to all intents and purposes limited
2 to ‘stupidità’ and ‘indolenza’. As a result, he found it necessary to cancel the third
3 concert, something he had never done before. Alma seems to have tried to
4 persuade him to abide by the terms of his contract, a stance which, to judge by a
5 surviving passage in their correspondence, led to an argument between them.
6 By 3 May the couple were back in Vienna, where Mahler was able to rest for
7 a few days. Otherwise his time was taken up preparing for the first performance
8 of his Eighth Symphony in September. He had completed the work in the
9 summer of 1906 but thanks to the difficulties of performing such a monu-
40 mental piece, to say nothing of his commitments in New York, he was seriously
41R behindhand with plans for its publication and performance. The vocal score
was not published until the end of April 1910, the full score not until late 1
January 1911, by which date the first performance had already taken place. Emil 2
Hertzka of Universal-Edition had assured Mahler that vocal scores for the 3
soloists and choral parts would be ready by the beginning of 1910. Mahler’s first 4
concrete mention of a performance comes in a letter he wrote to Emil Gutmann 5
from New York in the autumn of 1909. It was to be another year before the 6
performance finally took place, but the demands were immense from both a 7
musical and a logistical point of view. Not only was this the first time that 8
Mahler had written anything on this scale but the choir and soloists, too, were 9
faced with unusual demands, although the challenges faced by the orchestra 10
were not substantially greater than those posed by the earlier symphonies. That 1
the performance went ahead in the face of Mahler’s misgivings and prevarica- 2
tions is due to the Munich impresario Emil Gutmann. Readers may be 3
surprised to discover that Mahler was initially opposed to the performance. But 4
his experiences in the past had led him to think that it was better to forgo a 5
performance than to have to make do with one that was bad or merely 6
mediocre. And if Gutmann had not been able to overcome all of Mahler’s objec- 7
tions with his unflagging enthusiasm, then the latter would have been denied 8
the greatest triumph of his life and would not have heard the work at all. 9
Gutmann was born in Vienna but from 1906 ran a concert agency from the 20
Theatinerstraße in Munich. He had promoted the first performance of the 1
Seventh Symphony in the city in October 1908, a performance that Mahler 2
had given in the Odeon-Saal with the Kaim Orchestra, which was named after 3
its founder, Franz Kaim, but which was disbanded in 1908, only to be recon- 4
stituted almost immediately as the Munich Tonkünstler Orchestra. By the date 5
of the first performance of the Eighth Symphony it had been renamed yet 6
again as the Konzertverein Orchestra. It is now known as the Munich 7
Philharmonic. Gutmann, who was last heard of in an asylum in the 1920s, was 8
therefore running an enterprise that was still very recent and in which contacts 9
and connections were no less important than they are today, but he was soon 30
successful, otherwise he would not have been asked to organize a festival of 1
music that lasted for half the year and that was held in conjunction with 2
the 1910 Munich Exhibition. The extensive complex of exhibition halls on the 3
Theresienhöhe had been built in 1907 and even included a small theatre, the 4
Munich Artists’ Theatre. In 1908 there had been a gala concert under Mottl 5
in the Odeon and the traditional Mozart and Wagner festivals in the 6
Residenztheater and the Prinzregententheater. The plans for 1910 were even 7
more ambitious, not least because the events now coincided with the ten-year 8
cycle of the Oberammergau Passion Play – it was hoped to attract pilgrims 9
from Oberammergau to Munich, although in this the organizers were disap- 40
pointed. The October Festival was also celebrating its centenary. The largest of 41R
624 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the exhibition halls was turned into a concert hall (it still exists) and was
2 intended to facilitate the performance of monumental works like Mahler’s
3 Eighth Symphony, which was rumoured to suffer from gigantomania. There
4 were also art exhibitions and a visit from Max Reinhardt’s German Theatre
5 from Berlin. The musical events began with a commemoration of the centen-
6 ary of Schumann’s birth and continued with a series of concerts featuring the
7 symphonies of Beethoven, Brahms and Bruckner with the Konzertverein
8 Orchestra under its principal conductor Ferdinand Löwe – Löwe was a
9 Mahlerian, although Mahler held him in low regard as a conductor. A number
10 of choral concerts were followed at the end of June by a week-long Strauss
1 Festival, with gala performances in the Prinzregententheater and concerts
2 with the Vienna Philharmonic. The festival was to culminate with the world
3 première of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony on 12 September, with a repeat
4 performance the following day.
5 Mahler’s letters to Gutmann, together with a sketch that Gutmann wrote,
6 admiring Mahler’s organizational skills, reveal the extent not only of the
7 composer’s involvement in the preparations but also the impresario’s commit-
8 ment to the realization of this exceptional project. In fact their relationship was
9 initially soured by Gutmann’s insistence on promoting the piece as the
20 ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, a marketing ploy designed to drum up interest in
1 the work. It is a title that has stuck. Mahler defended himself vigorously against
2 such a stratagem, repeatedly complaining in his letters about a Barnum &
3 Bailey mentality – a reference to the largest American circus of the time.
4 Gutmann duly dropped the name, a decision made all the easier by the fact
5 that it had already served its purpose. In planning the rehearsals, he met all of
6 Mahler’s demands, and one is bound to admire the obstinacy and even the
7 implacability with which the composer insisted on these requirements, for it
8 was, of course, in Gutmann’s interests to keep the number of the rehearsals to
9 a minimum in order to save costs. Time and again in his letters Mahler threat-
30 ened to abandon the whole affair – and he would never have allowed a
1 performance to go ahead with another conductor after he himself had intro-
2 duced all his previous works to the world. And in the unlikely event of Mahler
3 permitting another conductor to take over, Gutmann would undoubtedly have
4 felt that without the legendary conductor from Vienna, who now had a second
5 home in New York, the whole affair would have been somehow incomplete.
6 Mahler’s main concern was that the choirs would not be ready in time,
7 for ordinary choirs and ordinary chorus rehearsals were inadequate for what
8 he had in mind. Moreover, the exceptional size of the exhibition hall required
9 exceptional forces, making Gutmann’s nickname of the ‘Symphony of a
40 Thousand’ an accurate reflection of the number of performers needed,
41R especially the choirs, which totalled 850 singers in all. Add the number of
orchestral players and the soloists, and the total was not far short of a thou- 1
sand. The Riedel-Verein of Leipzig and the Singverein of the Gesellschaft der 2
Musikfreunde in Vienna both provided 250 singers, while the children’s 3
chorus was made up of 350 children from the Central Singing School in 4
Munich. (Nowadays there are rarely more than fifty or sixty children involved 5
in performances of the Eighth.) Mahler fussed and fretted over all this with 6
tireless attention to detail. But he was also concerned to engage the right 7
soloists, for he was well aware of the demands that he was placing upon them, 8
especially the tenor, whom he originally envisaged as a Wagnerian heldentenor 9
with the necessary power and penetration. There were times when he consid- 10
ered using two tenors, one for each half. Although he had admired Heinrich 1
Knote in New York, he was not convinced that Knote was up to the musical 2
demands of the first half. He wrote off Leo Slezak without further ado, 3
knowing that Slezak would have neither the time nor the inclination for such 4
an assignment. In the end Mahler’s choice fell on Felix Senius from Berlin, a 5
singer whose appearances were limited to the concert hall but with whom 6
Mahler seems ultimately to have been satisfied. Histories of the Munich 7
Philharmonic proudly refer to this performance as the most important ever 8
given by the orchestra, but its chroniclers invariably omit a remark that Mahler 9
made in January 1911, when he told Gutmann that ‘the Munich orchestra has 20
treated me in most unfriendly fashion’.2 1
But Mahler still had to get through a summer that was to shake him to the 2
very foundations of his being. The present writer admits with some hesitation 3
to having difficulties with the events of these months, not so much because the 4
surviving evidence is poor or because what happened is beyond the scope of 5
human experience and understanding. Rather, these events depict our ‘hero’ in 6
such a desperate and hopeless situation, a character who, for all his contradic- 7
tions, was none the less a great man but who seems simply to fall apart. If it 8
were not for the unfinished Tenth Symphony, which reveals Mahler at the very 9
peak of his abilities and powers of concentration, for all that this summer’s 30
events left their mark on almost every page of the score, one might be tempted 1
to assume that it was a breakdown that also affected his powers of creativity. 2
That this was not the case provides us with at least a modicum of reassurance 3
in a tangled skein of events that shows a man completely derailed after having 4
apparently only recently come to terms with the shock of 1907. After the death 5
of his daughter and the diagnosis of his heart valve defect, this was the third of 6
the hammer blows from the Sixth Symphony. And even if as a composer he 7
had removed that blow, as a man he could no longer avoid it. 8
We have already examined the problematical nature of the Mahlers’ 9
marriage. Although Alma’s account of this summer of 1910 conceals more 40
than it reveals, other sources leave us in no doubt about what actually 41R
626 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 happened. Her reminiscences of Mahler and her volume of memoirs were both
2 written on the basis of her diaries and letters and present a prettified picture of
3 reality, but those passages that escaped her censorship are already sufficiently
4 revealing. Two remarks in particular allow us to suspect what was going on
5 beneath the surface. In her autobiography, she writes that ‘this strange
6 marriage with Gustav Mahler – this abstraction – had left me inwardly a virgin
7 for the first ten years of my conscious life. I loved Mahler’s mind, but his body
8 was vague to me’. And in her reminiscences of Mahler she writes about the
9 height of the crisis in 1910: ‘I knew that my marriage was no marriage and that
10 my own life was utterly unfulfilled.’3 The young Alma was a highly sensual
1 creature but sexually inexperienced, and her first physical contact with her
2 future husband was a fiasco. If this initial fiasco was followed by ‘joy upon joy’,
3 this phase was to give way in turn to an insidious attenuation of the so-called
4 pleasures of marriage. It is one of the principal delights of the age in which we
5 live to take a prurient interest in the sex lives of the famous, but the present
6 writer is interested in this aspect of the Mahlers’ marriage only to the extent
7 that it can throw light on decisive phases and events in Mahler’s life. All the
8 signs point to the fact that Mahler lost interest in his wife and that his libido
9 was directed instead towards his career as a conductor and his work as a
20 composer. Freud later confirmed this, but he could do so only because Mahler,
1 who was normally puritanically taciturn in such matters, told him so. This
2 basic tendency on Mahler’s part to abstain from sexual relations with his wife
3 must have been considerably increased after the disastrous summer of 1907,
4 when the death of his daughter, the diagnosis of his heart valve defect, which
5 made his latent hypochondria immeasurably worse, the concern to compose
6 even more quickly in the face of his uncertain life expectancy and his nervous-
7 ness about the unpredictable burden of work awaiting him in New York,
8 will all have contributed to a further loss of libido, thereby reinforcing a
9 pre-existing tendency.
30 We have already quoted passages describing Alma’s horror of her husband
1 and her infinite sense of distance from him. Indeed, she even confirms this in
2 her memoirs. At the same time, however, she repeatedly stressed her love for
3 Mahler, suggesting a permanent state of simultaneous attraction and repulsion.
4 That she never really loved or understood Mahler’s music was something that
5 she herself admitted on more than one occasion, even if she then repeatedly
6 denied it as if shocked by her own admission. She was deeply hurt by the fact
7 that in adopting the role of her mentor he dismissed the very thing that she
8 herself held dearest in her life, namely, her ambitions as an artist and more espe-
9 cially as a composer. She could not tell that the exaggerated praise heaped
40 on her gifts by men such as Max Burckhard and Gustav Klimt was designed
41R to obtain her favours but took everything at face value. Even the insanely
infatuated Alexander Zemlinsky, who was far more honest in his criticisms, had 1
discovered how sensitive she could be. It was this unhappy combination of 2
several factors that made her marriage such a disaster: her long-standing scep- 3
ticism towards a man whom she regarded as old and not especially attractive 4
and who, as her friends had predicted, had proved sickly and whom she always 5
regarded as a Jew (her anti-Semitism never entirely deserted her, for all that it 6
was repeatedly suppressed), together with Mahler’s superior attitude, which, 7
although unintended, merely added psychologically to the age difference 8
between them; the channelling of his energies into his work; and, finally, his 9
partial, if never total, lack of sexual interest in his wife. When Alma refers to her 10
husband’s conversation with Freud, she mentions not only Mahler’s fixation on 1
his ‘stricken’ mother and his wish to rediscover her imago in his wife but also a 2
fixation of her own: ‘I too always looked for a small, slight man, who had 3
wisdom and spiritual superiority, since this was what I had known and loved in 4
my father.’4 This is a convincing self-diagnosis when we recall Mahler and Franz 5
Werfel but far less so when we include Gropius and Kokoschka. But it is 6
doubtful whether Alma had already gained this insight by the summer of 1910. 7
Alma’s diaries, whether from the time of her marriage or later, tell a rather 8
different story. Here we read of an ugly scene, only the first half of which 9
found its way into her memoirs, the remainder having been censored. We have 20
already mentioned how she had to stand by and watch two female singers at 1
the opera billing and cooing with Mahler, whereas as soon as he returned 2
home, he was the detached and weary husband who demanded to be looked 3
after. According to her diary, Mahler tried to fondle her when he returned 4
home, but she thrust him away, telling him that he disgusted her. ‘The next day 5
we had it out in the Stadtpark. He said he felt clearly that I did not love him. 6
He was right. After what happened, everything in me was cold.’5 Shortly after- 7
wards she felt that she did indeed love him, but outbursts such as this were far 8
from passing storms. We can well imagine the doubts that assailed Mahler – 9
almost certainly from the very outset: after all, we recall his sombre reflections 30
on whether autumn should chain itself to spring. The sheer force of his break- 1
down when he discovered his wife’s affair with Gropius was due in part to the 2
fact that it merely confirmed long-standing fears that he had never been able 3
to resolve. In 1905 there was another scene in which Alma freely admitted that 4
she had always found Mahler’s smell ‘unsympathetic’, to which he replied: 5
6
‘That is the key to a lot – you have acted against your nature.’ How right he 7
is, I alone know. He was a stranger to me – in many ways he remains a 8
stranger to me and, I believe, will always do so. And I have already suffered 9
so much because of this. And that is why there is so much that I cannot 40
understand – or sometimes, if I could, it drives me away from him. That, 41R
628 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 knowing this, we can continue to live together?! Duty? Children? Habit? No

2 – I know that I really love him and that at present I couldn’t live without him.6
3
4 Alma was nothing if not honest, an honesty that she forfeited only in the case
5 of her affair with Walter Gropius, which she hid from the world until Mahler
6 was dead. Her comments here are revealing. But what are we to make of her
7 reference to Mahler’s ‘unsympathetic’ smell, which she claims played a role
8 only during her engagement and the early part of her marriage? How is this
9 related to the ‘disgust’ that she felt after the birth of their first daughter? We can
10 only speculate on whether the foetor judaicus was subliminally involved here,
1 the claim that the Jews smelt different being one of the bases of anti-Semitism.
2 And what about the sentence that ends this revealing entry: ‘He’s taken so
3 much from me that his presence is now my only support.’ To be dependent on
4 someone who had allegedly taken everything from her must have struck her
5 as deeply traumatizing. It is entirely logical, therefore, that we find the first
6 signs of yearning during this summer of 1905. These months in Maiernigg
7 were hot, and Alma had nothing to do but copy out Mahler’s music. Otherwise
8 she felt listless, driven only by sensuality. She could yearn only for a man, she
9 commented at the time, but she did not have one.
20 Even more eloquent are some of the diary entries made long after Mahler’s
1 death. An oppressive dream that Alma had at the height of her affair with
2 Oskar Kokoschka could hardly be more revealing – or macabre. It is a scene
3 that could come straight out of Ken Russell’s film about Mahler, although it
4 apparently escaped his notice. Alma and Kokoschka are in bed in a ship’s
5 cabin, with the dying Mahler beneath them. The ship’s doctor advises them to
6 find another cabin as the body will soon start to smell. They leave the cabin in
7 search of an alternative but after wandering around for some time they find
8 themselves back at their starting point. By now, however, the dead Mahler has
9 disappeared. The physical loathing of Mahler and the smell of his body has
30 here become the worrying smell of his corpse, and the sexual embrace with the
1 lover who was able to meet Alma’s needs after Gropius assumes the form of a
2 gesture of contempt for the dying Mahler but at the same time is prevented
3 from taking place until the corpse has disappeared. The situation could hardly
4 be clearer. Time and again Mahler plays an important role in Alma’s diaries,
5 the frequency of his appearances in no way reduced by the passage of time.
6 Again and again she asks her old question of fate: was she right to marry a Jew?
7 Readers who may be surprised that in spite of – or because of – her marriage
8 to Franz Werfel, Alma continued to be exercised by anti-Jewish feelings will
9 find from her diaries that she never gave up her prejudices in this regard, even
40 though she may largely have airbrushed them out of her published texts. On
41R one occasion she notes that the Jews had brought the Aryans the spirit but in
return devoured their hearts, on another that it was possible to have relation- 1
ships with Jews but that one should never marry them. Following her experi- 2
ences with Gropius, Kokoschka and Werfel and her discovery that Kokoschka’s 3
and Werfel’s sexual predilections bordered on the perverse, she realized that 4
there was a connection between a man’s importance and his morbid sexuality. 5
Although her comments on Mahler may be less extreme than her remarks on 6
the other men in her life, it is significant that she describes him as psychologic- 7
ally impotent. He had been able to possess her only when he caught her 8
unawares during the night. From the outset they had had separate bedrooms, 9
so that during the final years of their marriage she had simply locked her 10
bedroom door, a decision he evidently accepted without demur. 1
The locked bedroom door is the key to a disastrous marriage. Alma clearly 2
never asked herself whether it is possible to describe someone as psychologic- 3
ally impotent who is none the less capable of consummating a marriage and 4
whether a locked bedroom door is not likely to make the problem worse. In 5
the summer of 1910 a young, Aryan, gifted and good-looking architect by the 6
name of Walter Gropius beat at this locked door. He was by no means the first 7
young man who restored Alma’s faith in her physical attractiveness. Pfitzner, 8
too, had worshipped her, but although she had held him in high regard as a 9
creative artist, he was not the man to awaken her slumbering sexuality in spite 20
of the fact that, as Zemlinsky had shown, not all such men needed to be heroes. 1
Although the pianist and conductor Ossip Gabrilovich was Jewish, he was 2
good-looking in his way, a wild young Russian who had studied the piano with 3
Anton Rubinstein and who was a year older than Alma. He also worshipped 4
Mahler. During the summer or winter of 1907 the couple drew closer together, 5
a point that Alma stresses in her diaries, where she notes the link with her 6
daughter’s death and the way in which she felt broken, sick, ugly and old in 7
consequence. Gabrilovich was the first man in a long time to tell her that he 8
loved her. In her memoirs Alma admits that she became emotionally involved 9
with him. While Mahler was working, the couple gazed out of the window at 30
a moonlit meadow and exchanged a kiss – according to Alma, it was no more 1
than this. Each time they saw each other, their feelings were rekindled. Much 2
later in New York, Gabrilovich is said to have taken his leave of Alma by 3
playing a Brahms Intermezzo. Mahler, who had already retired for the night, 4
had apparently been suspicious and eavesdropped on their conversation, 5
afterwards asking Alma to explain herself. She claims that she had a clear 6
conscience and was able to defend her actions, even though, as she admits in 7
her memoirs, she was close to suicide. On that occasion she was able to 8
suppress her urges and desires, but Gropius changed all that. 9
It needs to be said at the outset that Alma’s account of the events that took 40
place in Tobelbad and Toblach is designed to mislead the reader. At no point 41R
630 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 does she admit that she slept with Gropius or that their relationship continued
2 until Mahler’s death and that it was later resumed. As a result, her reminis-
3 cences are of only limited use here, while her memoirs dismiss this episode
4 even more cursorily. (The German editor, Willy Haas, excised it completely,
5 whereas the American edition at least retains a reference to it.) At the time that
6 he met Alma, Gropius was far from being the famous architect that he was
7 later to become. Still only twenty-seven, he was four years younger than Alma,
8 an age difference that must have flattered her. He had studied architecture in
9 Munich and his native Berlin and spent some time working for the great
10 Jugendstil artist and theatre reformer Peter Behrens. Gropius had just set up
1 his own business in Neu-Babelsberg.7 By the spring of 1910 he was exhausted
2 from running that business and also suffering from the effects of a persistent
3 chill. His doctor advised him to take the waters at Tobelbad. Writers have
4 repeatedly confused Tobelbad with Toblach. Tobelbad is in fact near Graz, and
5 it was to Tobelbad that Mahler took his ailing wife on 1 June 1910, together
6 with their daughter Anna and the latter’s English nanny. The following day he
7 returned to Vienna in order to organize the preliminary rehearsals for his
8 Eighth Symphony. Alma had scarcely unpacked her suitcase when she met
9 Gropius for the first time on 4 June. She would soon be thirty-one and was no
20 longer the most beautiful young woman in Vienna, but she was still attractive,
1 now somewhat fuller of figure, a buxom beauty, voluptuous and imposing, a
2 schoolboy’s dream in frills and furbelows. Not until she turned forty did she
3 start to look her age and her face and figure turned pudgy, a process evident
4 from photographs of the period. In 1910 she had largely reduced her alcohol
5 intake, which had threatened to rise to dangerously high levels, and this will
6 have added to her attractiveness. It is clear from photographs that the twenty-
7 seven-year-old Gropius was slim and relatively tall, with intensely piercing
8 eyes and a moustache that made the age difference less apparent. He had
9 already had the occasional affair, but Alma was undoubtedly the first genuinely
30 impressive woman in his life, a thoroughbred of a woman. Gropius’s biog-
1 rapher, Reginald Isaacs, notes that his subject invariably became involved with
2 women who were either married or in some way unavailable, which he attrib-
3 utes to an over-developed mother fixation. It is a diagnosis amply confirmed
4 by the immoderately intimate letters that Gropius wrote to his mother. She too
5 was a powerful woman – Isaacs thinks it significant that her son was drawn to
6 other emotionally strong women.8
7 The doctor who was treating Alma and presumably Gropius, too, intro-
8 duced the pair to each other. Alma gives the impression that Gropius was a
9 young madcap who, much to her surprise, fell in love with her, but the truth of
40 the matter is that for both parties it was a coup de foudre of a kind that Alma
41R had not known since her adolescence, certainly not with her husband. On the
day of their first meeting, they had supper together, then went for a walk, 1
before sitting by a stream and talking well into the night. In the course of the 2
next few days, nature took its course, as writers of the turn of the century 3
might have put it. Alma and Gropius had time to allow their affair to develop, 4
for it was not until 30 June that Mahler returned: the lovers had three and a 5
half weeks together, although the affair cannot have been easy to hide in a tiny 6
resort, where Alma was still the wife of the director of the Vienna Court Opera 7
and where they were under the constant scrutiny of Anna, the child’s nanny 8
and the prying eyes of the spa doctors and various other visitors. 9
As always, Mahler was completely self-absorbed, although not so much that 10
he was not unsettled by Alma’s increasingly infrequent news. She had never 1
been a great correspondent, and Mahler had often had occasion to complain 2
about her laziness. When she did write, her large and unwieldy handwriting 3
filled the pages so quickly that the content of her letters was in no way reflected 4
in their length. Whether or not it was an unfortunate coincidence, it is striking 5
that shortly after leaving Alma, Mahler wrote to say how much he would enjoy 6
spending some time in an out-of-the-way place like Tobelbad, calm and free 7
from care and relieved of the need to work. ‘That’s something we’ve never done 8
together!’ he truthfully noted.9 But, as always, such ideas quickly faded. Mahler 9
could not seriously imagine a life in which he could idle away his time. On his 20
way back from Tobelbad, he visited a monastery, perhaps one of the places he 1
had in mind as a retirement home before the couple finally bought a plot of 2
land at Semmering. In a further letter he attempted to put Alma’s mind at rest. 3
She had evidently asked him whether he still found her attractive. At remark- 4
able length he sought to reassure her that he had just found her particularly 5
youthful-looking, a claim that rather contradicts the whole point of her visit to 6
Tobelbad. Back in Vienna for rehearsals with the chorus of the Musikverein, he 7
took time off to visit a little castle at Pöchlarn, a trip on which he was accom- 8
panied by Carl Moll, the surgeon Josef von Winter and the latter’s wife, 9
Josefine. Josefine kept a note of the outing and records that Mahler was in the 30
best of moods, enjoying a meal of ham and eggs followed by apples and nuts. 1
He then travelled to Leipzig to work on his Eighth Symphony with the chorus 2
of the Riedel-Verein. There is something distinctly unsettling about the way in 3
which Mahler kept writing to Alma during this period, expressing his love 4
with peculiar forcefulness. He knew nothing, of course, about Gropius, but he 5
must have sensed that his love for his wife and, more especially, her love for 6
him needed rekindling as a matter of some urgency. As a result his letters 7
reveal a wholly unprecedented enthusiasm in the way in which he looks 8
forward to a life of comfort with Alma and to seeking out an idyllic country 9
house for when they return to Europe for good. He must have felt that in their 40
eight years of marriage the needs of his much younger wife had been 41R
632 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 neglected. But he certainly did not suspect that it was already too late. He even
2 did something that Alma insisted he had never brought himself to do: he asked
3 his father-in-law to obtain a tiara for Alma, which she received on her next
4 birthday – the fact that Mahler mistook the date may or may not be significant.
5 Around 20 June, while he was rehearsing in Munich, Mahler became
6 uneasy. Alma’s letters were becoming increasingly monosyllabic and sibylline.
7 ‘After yesterday’s sad letter,’ he began on 21 June, ‘I’m worried not to have heard
8 from you at all today. Are you concealing something from me? I keep sensing
9 something between the lines.’10 She was indeed hiding something from him,
10 and Mahler, his reputation as an insensitive egomaniac notwithstanding,
1 noticed this very clearly. At the same time he wrote to his mother-in-law, ‘I am
2 so perturbed by Almschi’s letters, which have such a peculiar tone. What on
3 earth is going on?’ He asked her if he should travel to Tobelbad rather than
4 Toblach, as planned.11 By 25 June, however, he could bear it no more and
5 telegraphed Alma to announce that he would be coming to Tobelbad to see
6 her. But, mindful of the shock he had given her in Levico, he promised not to
7 visit the barber’s first. He told her how much he was looking forward to seeing
8 her, that he was exhausted and that he had strained a muscle in his upper arm,
9 something he had never previously done, although such problems are not
20 uncommon with conductors. His heart, however, was fine. He left for Styria on
1 the 30th. How Alma received him we do not know. Nor do we know how
2 Mahler reacted to the atmosphere between them. But it looks as if he left again
3 two days later, suspecting nothing and travelling directly to Toblach, where he
4 was wanting to make a start on his Tenth Symphony. Although it may seem
5 odd that he spent his fiftieth birthday alone in Toblach, this is not a reflection
6 of his isolation but was his express desire. He never marked his own birthdays,
7 which he regarded as a waste of time and energy. He had also asked people not
8 to send him cards or presents, although letters and telegrams arrived by the
9 score. He seems not to have been angered by this.
30 We do not know when he received his finest birthday tribute, the festschrift
1 that was soon to become his epitaph and which he nowhere mentions in
2 writing. When Paul Stefan had first raised the idea with him, he had expressed
3 his concern that it might do him more harm than good. It was not one of those
4 collections of articles traditionally given to academics to mark their birthday
5 or retirement. Rather, Stefan had had the idea of producing a portrait of
6 Mahler by means of a series of dedicatory essays. (We have already referred to
7 Schnitzler’s contribution.) The frontispiece was a photograph of Rodin’s
8 marble bust of Mahler, while the final image was the Knight from Klimt’s
9 Beethoven frieze, a portrait based on Mahler, albeit not in a literal sense. A
40 series of more general pieces opened the volume and were written by Guido
41R Adler, Gerhart Hauptmann and the pianist and composer Conrad Ansorge.
Angelo Neumann and Max Steinitzer provided portraits of Mahler as a young 1

theatre conductor. But the bulk of the volume was devoted to Mahler’s years in 2
Vienna and the list of contributors reads like a veritable who’s who of promi- 3
nent figures in the city’s cultural life. Surprisingly, perhaps, the most authori- 4
tative contribution is the one by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, who was far from 5
being a member of Mahler’s circle of friends or a part of the city’s musical life, 6
and who never made any other public statements on the subject. None the less, 7
a previously unpublished letter from Mahler to Hofmannsthal, probably 8
written at the time of his departure from the Court Opera, indicates that 9
Hofmannsthal had joined in the general manifestations of friendship and 10
admiration by giving him a present, presumably one of his own books. But 1
Mahler’s letter appears to have led to no further dealings between the two men: 2
3
My dear Herr von Hofmannsthal! I should like to have shaken your hand in 4
person, which is why I have kept delaying my thanks for your kind gift from 5
one day to the next. But now – as generally happens, everything that one 6
should and would like to do finally builds up – I can thank you only by letter, 7
but I should like to express the hope that we may often meet in future. Two 8
such fellows should really not keep walking past each other. And so I hope to 9
see you after the holidays – at your own place or at mine! Your most devoted 20
servant, Gustav Mahler.12 1
2
Hofmannsthal’s contribution to Stefan’s volume makes one regret all the more 3
that the two men had no further contact: 4
5
Where there is a mind, there is an effect. Wherever it is activated, it comes 6
into conflict with matter; it is opposed by inertia, inadequate understanding 7
and sheer misunderstanding, but it overcomes them, and it is the atmosphere 8
surrounding this struggle that is interesting: such interest does not need to be 9
added here. A chaotic, truly heterogeneous entity assumes a rhythmic form, 30
sometimes even involving convulsions; the hostile and dull elements come 1
together in a particular relationship, reacting to each other in ways that could 2
hardly have been predicted, and the art lover will note with delight, the 3
philistine with astonished reluctance that a living whole can develop from 4
many dead elements but only, of course, through the miracle of a creative 5
mind. Such a drama was Gustav Mahler’s directorship of the Vienna Opera.13 6
7
The final section of the volume was devoted to fellow composers. While 8
Richard Strauss and Max von Schillings offered platitudes rather than detailed 9
assessments, and Max Reger contributed a page of music (a contribution all 40
the more remarkable in that there is no evidence of any closer contact between 41R
634 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the two men), the pieces by Bruno Walter and the critic Georg Göhler are
2 notable for their profound and affectionate understanding. In short, a finer
3 tribute has never been offered to a composer. This volume and the first
4 performance of the Eighth Symphony are eloquent testimony to the fact that
5 after twenty-five years of struggling with a hostile world Mahler had entered
6 the memory and awareness of his age in ways that would never be forgotten.
7
8
Confusion
9
10 It is not entirely clear when Alma left Tobelbad for Toblach, but it must have
1 been around 15 July. She had had several more weeks in which to enjoy the
2 state of euphoria occasioned by her love of Gropius, for he too had remained
3 in Tobelbad, the spa treatment for twenty-seven-year-olds lasting a remarkable
4 length of time at this date. The disaster was triggered by the impassioned letter
5 to Alma that he addressed to ‘Herr Director Mahler’ or ‘Herr Gustav Mahler’
6 and that arrived on 29 July. Writers continue to puzzle over whether Gropius
7 ‘made a mistake in the stress of emotion’, as Alma puts it with disdainful
8 reserve, or whether he intended the letter for Mahler. In his biography of
9 Gropius, Reginald Isaacs offers an important clue when he notes that Gropius
20 not only took up with married or attached women but always felt an urge to
1 make contact with their husbands. Alma and Gropius had agreed that he
2 would send his letters to Toblach poste restante and address them, fairly trans-
3 parently, ‘A. M. 40’. In old age, Gropius assured Mahler’s biographer Henry-
4 Louis de La Grange that it was all a mistake on his part.14 But one aspect of this
5 whole disastrous affair remains puzzling. Mahler was generally not at home
6 when the postman arrived, and so Alma would place his letters on the piano
7 in the Trenkerhof, so that he would see them as soon as he came in, hence her
8 description of him sitting down at the piano on opening the letter and asking
9 ‘What is this?’ with a voice choked by emotion. Alma must surely have recog-
30 nized Gropius’s handwriting as this can hardly have been the first letter that he
1 wrote to her in the two weeks since they had been together in Tobelbad. At the
2 very least the postmark ‘Tobelbad’ could have told her who the letter was from.
3 She was bound to assume the worst if her young lover was writing to her
4 unsuspecting husband. She could at least have opened the letter and on discov-
5 ering its contents have spirited it away. That it was not a confession intended
6 for Mahler is clear from Alma’s reaction to Gropius, but it is equally clear that
7 Mahler cannot have read the letter from beginning to end. It evidently
8 contained references to the sex that the lovers had had together. After
9 collecting two later letters from Gropius from the post office, she wrote to him
40 on 31 July:
41R
I fetched two letters from you yesterday. A. M. 40 – everything in order. Now 1

I understand what happened the day before yesterday less and less. The only 2
thing that makes me believe that you deliberately addressed your letter to 3
Herr G. Mahler is the passage in today’s letter: ‘Did your husband not notice 4
anything? Tell me everything, I shall always understand you correctly!!’ 5
Otherwise I should have to assume that you were confused, which is what I’d 6
rather do . . . – Since it has come out more or less by accident & not as the 7
result of some open admission on my part, he’s lost all trust, all faith in me! 8
Just think – the letter in which you wrote openly about all the secrets of our 9
nights of love was addressed to: Herr Gustav Mahler – Toblach – Tyrol. Is 10
that what you really intended? And he almost read it. With febrile yearning I 1
await your letter, in which you must clear all this up. I hope that you can say 2
something to save yourself & me.15 3
4
Mahler had evidently not read the whole of Gropius’s letter and had failed to 5
reach the passage in which he had referred explicitly to the sexual pleasures 6
that he had enjoyed with Alma – presumably Alma tore the letter from his 7
hands or he refused to read any further. Although the letter has not survived, 8
we can imagine that it would have begun with an expression of endearment. 9
Be that as it may, it is conceivable not only that Gropius deliberately addressed 20
the letter to Mahler but also that Alma deliberately placed it on the piano in 1
the hope of resolving the issue. But she cannot have known what would 2
happen next. And she evidently hoped to avoid any further confrontation by 3
asking Gropius not to come to Toblach, albeit in vain. He wrote. ‘Your letter 4
makes me horribly anxious for you both. No tragedy! I’ll go out of my mind if 5
you don’t call me to come over. I want to justify myself before you both and to 6
clear up the mystery!’16 7
Alma was inwardly torn and confused. The wild despair with which Mahler 8
now assailed her with tokens of his love and with his profound dismay seems 9
to have caught her off-guard. If she had been hoping to provoke a response 30
with her affair, she had succeeded beyond all measure. This at least would 1
explain her mounting uncertainty: ‘For my part I am now experiencing some- 2
thing that I had not thought possible. Namely, that Gustav’s love is so bound- 3
less – that my remaining with him – in spite of all that has happened – means 4
life to him – and my leaving – will be his death. . . . Gustav is like a sick, 5
magnificent child.’ It is more than likely that in writing this, she was repeating 6
Mahler’s own words. She then asked Gropius how he imagined what might 7
happen next: ‘What would happen if I . . . decided on a life of love with you. 8
Oh – when I think about it, my Walter, that I should be without your love for 9
my whole life. Help me – I don’t know what to do – what I have the right to.’17 40
In spite of the fact that Alma begged Gropius not to travel to Toblach, there 41R
636 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 was no stopping him. He told her that he wanted to comfort her and to be
2 comforted in turn. It is strange to think of the young adulterer wanting to offer
3 comfort. To Alma? To Mahler? Although no longer a child, he seems to have
4 reacted to this difficult situation in a not entirely mature way.
5 Gropius arrived in Toblach some time around 5 August. Alma claims to
6 have seen him standing beneath a bridge and to have told Mahler, who
7 responded by saying ‘I’ll go and bring him along myself.’ Mahler apparently
8 went down to the bridge and found Gropius, although it is unclear how he
9 recognized him. He brought him back to the farm, leading the way with a
10 lantern, and then left the couple alone together. In the American edition of her
1 memoirs, Alma writes that Gropius had already asked Mahler to give up his
2 wife. During their discussion, Mahler paced up and down in his room, where
3 two candles had been lit and a Bible lay open on the table. ‘Whatever you do
4 will be right,’ he said. ‘Make your decision!’ But, as Alma adds, ‘I had no choice’.
5 Clearly she felt that there was an element of emotional blackmail in Mahler’s
6 comment and that his very life hung on her decision.18 The next morning she
7 took Gropius to the station and remained with Mahler. The draft of a letter
8 from Gropius to Mahler has survived. Whether or not Mahler received it is
9 unclear. ‘Unfortunately we had very little to say to each other – it pains me that
20 I can only hurt you. At least let me thank you for the generosity with which you
1 met me and allow me to take your hand one last time.’19
2 But how did Mahler himself react to these events, which robbed him of his
3 clarity of vision and peace of mind at least as much as the events of 1907, when,
4 to quote his own expression in his letter to Bruno Walter, he had been left
5 staring into the abyss? No letter has survived similar to the one that he wrote
6 to Walter. He was always reserved by nature and reluctant to allow others to
7 share in his sufferings and pleasures. Even as a young man he had few people
8 to whom he would open up, Friedrich Löhr being the only significant example
9 at this time. Later Siegfried Lipiner and Bruno Walter seem to have fulfilled a
30 similar function, whereas Natalie Bauer-Lechner was his confidante only in
1 matters relating to music. But it is one thing to speak of the death of a daughter
2 and a diseased heart, another to admit that one’s wife has been unfaithful and
3 one’s marriage is a failure. Certainly he could never have confided in friends
4 like Lipiner, who would have seen in his admission a validation of their basic
5 mistrust of Alma. And Bruno Walter was too much of a substitute son and a
6 young supporter to be drawn into such a confession. Such crises are not
7 discussed with much younger people, however intimate they may otherwise
8 be. Perhaps it would have been possible for Mahler to talk about what had
9 happened after one or two years, but such a luxury was not to be granted him.
40 It seems, then, as if he spoke to no one about what had taken place. Above all,
41R it looks as if Mahler may have discussed his marital problems with Freud and
even have touched on their sexual component, but that he never said anything 1
to Freud about Alma’s affair with Gropius. Anna Moll also knew about the 2
affair and thus became an accomplice. And it seems likely that Carl Moll was 3
aware of what was going on. Conversely, we do not know whom Gropius told 4
about his affair. It is distressing to see how completely isolated Mahler was in 5
the greatest crisis of his life. Our only information about his reaction to it is to 6
be found in part in Alma’s reminiscences, which as always remain unreliable 7
and on this occasion cannot even be corrected by reference to other surviving 8
sources, and in part in Alma’s letters to Gropius and the brief notes and poems 9
that Mahler placed on his wife’s dressing table or pillow during this period in 10
August 1910. 1
Alma used the new situation to settle old scores. Everything that had been 2
building up in her over the years now poured out in long walks with Mahler, 3
triumphantly aware, as she now was, that she finally had his attention. 4
According to her later reminiscences they would walk along beside each other, 5
weeping aloud for days at a time. They then summoned Anna Moll, who 6
enjoyed the trust of both of them. In her memoirs Alma writes that she now 7
realized that she could never leave Mahler and told him so, a confidence that 8
left him overjoyed. Always jealous, he had none the less not reckoned on the 9
fact that Alma’s flirtatious nature could ever produce such results. All his 20
former misgivings now struck him as justified and all too true. Like Othello, 1
he could have told himself that he had ‘not those soft parts of conversation / 2
That chamberers have; or for I am declined / Into the vale of years – yet that’s 3
not much – / She’s gone. I am abused, and my relief / Must be to loathe her. O 4
curse of marriage, / That we can call these delicate creatures ours / And not 5
their appetites!’ At the same time – as she admitted in her memoirs – Alma 6
kept from Mahler the fact that her love for him had cooled. What kept her with 7
him, she explained, was her sense of responsibility and the fear that he would 8
not survive her loss. What she did not say was that she can have had only a 9
vague idea of what life would be like with Gropius, who was a complete non- 30
entity when compared with Mahler. It seems unlikely that they discussed the 1
problems with their sex life – for a puritan like Mahler, this was never a subject 2
that he could mention, and presumably he hoped that it was not an issue for 3
Alma – and we must never lose sight of the fact that men born in the nine- 4
teenth century commonly held the view that a woman had few sexual impulses 5
of her own beyond motherhood and obedience to her husband. It is unclear 6
whether Mahler ever knew that Gropius had given Alma the sort of sexual 7
pleasure that Mahler himself had never been able to do. It is not even clear 8
whether Mahler realized that his wife had had sex with Gropius, but he must 9
at least have suspected as much. On Alma’s side there was no doubt about the 40
importance of finding sexual gratification with Gropius. The lack of inhibition 41R
638 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 that we encountered in her adolescent diaries will also have overwhelmed

2 Gropius and left him reeling. Alma was largely innocent of the prudishness of
3 the upper middle-class women of her day – one wonders whether Gropius was
4 aware in advance of the primal force of her femininity. She wrote to him at the
5 end of August, blaming her husband for all her ailments, including her prob-
6 lems with her heart and gall bladder:
7
8 I feel that for my heart and all my other organs nothing is worse than
9 enforced asceticism. I mean not only sensual desire, the lack of which has
10 turned me prematurely into a detached, resigned old woman, but also the
1 continuous rest for my body . . . Now I am in bed . . . I am with you so
2 intensely that you must feel me.20
3
4 It is unlikely that any of this came out in the long conversations that took place
5 between Alma and Mahler. She was prevaricating, as is understandable. Cer-
6 tainly, she was by no means certain at this time that she would remain with
7 Mahler. Her letters to Gropius speak of a life spent together in sexual fulfil-
8 ment: ‘When will the time come when you lie naked next to me at night, when
9 nothing can separate us any more except sleep? . . . I know that I only live for
20 the time when I am wholly yours.’ Dated early September, this letter was signed
1 ‘Dein Weib’ – ‘your wife’. For Alma, sex and motherhood were inseparable, on
2 which point she was still a child of her time: ‘My Walter, I want your child –
3 and I’ll cherish it and care for it until the day when, without regret but secure
4 and calm, we can sink into each other’s arms, smiling and for ever. Write to me,
5 Walter, whether you still feel this as strongly today as you did a month ago.’21
6 Mahler and his fate play no part in this picture of intoxicated happiness and
7 vision of the future. When Alma refers to a time in which she could exist for
8 Gropius alone and cherish his child until she and her lover were united, she
9 was clearly looking forward to a time when her old and ailing husband was no
30 longer alive. A divorce was never an option for Alma.
1 In his own way, Mahler wrestled with the angel, reacting as a child might
2 have done. Normally his eyes remained dry, but now he could not stop crying.
3 The doors between their separate bedrooms were now left open so that he
4 could hear the sound of his wife’s breathing. Or he would appear like a ghost
5 at her bedside, causing her to start up in alarm. More than once he lay on the
6 floor of his composing hut, crying – this was how Alma found him when she
7 went to fetch him for lunch. On one occasion he fainted. Alma’s account of this
8 incident dates from the end of August, not from the height of the crisis. Like
9 the rest of the family, he had caught a sore throat from the child’s nanny – a
40 harbinger of the serious attack of angina that affected him in Munich. Alma
41R found him lying on the ground outside his bedroom, a lit candle beside him.
He recovered only slowly from this attack, but three days later he left for 1
Leiden for his meeting with Freud. 2
Mahler’s notes and poems for Alma are our most accurate reflection of the 3
events of this period. The picture that we can see in this mirror comes 4
perilously close to a case of personality dissociation. Space does not permit a 5
detailed account of these documents, which are in any case undated, making 6
it impossible to be sure of their chronology. They include lines such as the 7
following, committed to paper in a state of some agitation: 8
9
My darling, my lyre, 10
I am possessed by dark spirits; they have cast me to the ground. Come and 1
dispel them. Abide by me, my rod and staff. Come soon today, that I may rise 2
up. Here I lie prostrate and await you; and silently I ask whether I may still 3
hope for salvation, or whether I am to be damned.22 4
5
Another note seems to have been written by way of a reaction to Alma’s assur- 6
ance that she would not leave him. Although her claim that she still loved him 7
seems implausible, he was clearly sufficiently desperate to accept it at face 8
value: ‘Beloved! I slept wonderfully, but not for a moment did my senses 9
slumber. Never again shall I lack that blissful certainty: she loves me! These 20
words are my life’s essence. If I may no longer speak them, I am dead.’ 1
Although Mahler himself presumably never intended it, comments like these 2
placed his wife under the most enormous pressure. The tension that he felt at 3
this time even finds expression in verse: 4
5
Holdeste! Liebste! 6
Mein Saitenspiel! 7
Und mein Sturmlied! 8
Du Herrliche! O könnt ich Töne finden – 9
mein stammelnd Seufzen Dir in Worten künden! 30
Mein Athem ist – mein Wesen nicht mehr meins! 1
Nicht ich mehr – ich bin von mir selbst geschieden 2
– nicht eher kann mich Himmelsruh befrieden 3
als bis ich trunken deines süssen Weins! 4
5
Der Lenz hat mich und dich zu sich bezwungen. 6
Ich gab mich gleich, nicht hab ich erst gerungen 7
Ich starb – wie gern – und süss küsst er mich wach! 8
Die Töne brausen – wüthen mir im Herzen 9
die heissen Worte flammen – Hochzeitskerzen – 40
Es strömt mein Wesen dir in’s Brautgemach! 41R
640 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 [Fairest, dearest one, / My lyre, / My storm-song, / You wondrous being! What

2 music could I write / Whose words conveyed to you my mortal plight? / My
3 breath, my very being is not mine! / No longer one, my self and I are driven
4 forth – / And find no rest in heaven nor on earth, / Until they’ve slaked their
5 thirst with your sweet wine. / The springtime forced itself on our alliance, / I
6 yielded instantly, without defiance. / I died – how gladly – and its kiss restored
7 my life. / The notes fly high, my heart beats quicker – / The words, like
8 wedding candles, burn and flicker – / My very being flows to you, my wife.]
9
10 On one occasion Mahler kissed his wife’s ‘little slippers’ a thousand times.
1 Elsewhere he coins increasingly outrageous variants on Alma’s pet names, finally
2 producing such Dadaist forms as ‘Almschilitzili’ and ‘Almschilitzilitzilitzi’, which
3 he then proceeds to use on frequent occasions. Matter-of-fact contemporaries
4 will say that Mahler was merely making a fool of himself, but his biographer is
5 bound to see in all this a case of ego regression tending towards infantilism, for
6 this is exactly how children express themselves, crying uncontrollably, throwing
7 themselves on the ground, kissing slippers and using diminutive forms of words
8 such as ‘Almschilitzilitzilitzi’, together with all the other childish stammerings:
9 one reads this with a mixture of dismay, emotion and pity. This is how children
20 react when the object of their love threatens to withdraw, but adults, too, can
1 react in this way when they lose control of the ego and the fear of loss and lone-
2 liness risks gaining the upper hand. The text of Mahler’s note referring to the
3 slippers would seem to suggest that Alma shared his bed in order to calm him
4 down: ‘You took mercy on me.’
5 The reference to ego regression is not intended to sound dismissive, and
6 such a process never arrives out of the blue. The more perceptive of Mahler’s
7 friends and acquaintances repeatedly drew attention to the fact that this
8 austere genius also had a pronounced element of childishness about him that
9 they noted with astonishment and bewilderment precisely because it was so
30 difficult to square with the public image of the imperious dictator and
1 implacable prophet of art. The conductor Oskar Fried observed that ‘he would
2 retreat into his impenetrable spiritual shell, a child enduring mortal disap-
3 pointments and bewailing his divine origins’.23 For his part, Richard Specht
4 commented that ‘He was really a great child. . . . He was spontaneously
5 trusting or suspicious, like a child. . . . Most of all, he craved love as a child
6 does. He needed love, understanding, tenderness as few others do.’24 We must
7 remember that psychoanalysts working in the field of artistic creativity have
8 long believed that this creativity is inconceivable without a certain amount of ego
9 regression. The ego regresses to a more primitive stage such as sleep, imagina-
40 tion, intoxication and psychoses in which it is weakened, but it can also be
41R observed in the case of various kinds of creative activity. In his pioneering
work on illusion and dreams in Wilhelm Jensen’s Gradiva, for example, Freud 1
showed that the daydream, with its great feats of imagination, has clear analo- 2
gies with artistic creativity in general. In the daydream the ego regresses to a 3
more primitive state of imagined wish fulfilment and gives other forces a freer 4
rein than is permitted by the waking state, with its censorship controls. 5
Mahler’s behaviour during the greatest crisis of his life strikes us as both 6
strange and at the same time all too familiar. 7
Ernst Kris built on Freud’s ideas and used them as the starting point for a 8
psychoanalytical theory of artistic creativity. In Kris’s view, the ego – and 9
without a powerful ego, artistic achievement is inconceivable – manipulates 10
the phenomenon of regression in the sense that it adapts it to its own ends, 1
facilitating the controlled regression that triggers creative forces and ideas 2
before regaining the upper hand in the actual creative process. In this way Kris 3
distinguishes between the inspirational phase in which controlled regression is 4
permitted and the working-out phase, when the ego has to regain control.25 5
Mahler’s behaviour during a crisis that was all the more dangerous in that the 6
crisis of three years earlier had yet to be properly processed should not be 7
taken to mean that a seriously narcissistic individual simply carried on like a 8
child. Rather, a genius whose psychological make-up involved a certain degree 9
of ego regression and whose childish characteristics had been noted long 20
before this crisis and accepted as part of his personality, merely behaved in a 1
way that conflicted with the demands of the social mores of his age. 2
And there is something else that needs to be mentioned to complete our 3
picture of the events that unfolded at the Trenkerhof in Alt-Schluderbach in July 4
and August 1910: Mahler’s rediscovery of his wife’s songs. In her reminiscences, 5
she gives the impression that she went for a walk with Anna and on her return 6
heard her songs, long locked away, being played on the piano. Mahler had appar- 7
ently then come out to greet her with the words: ‘What have I done? These songs 8
are good – they’re excellent. I insist on your working on them and we’ll have 9
them published. I shall never be happy until you start composing again. God, 30
how blind and selfish I was in those days!’26 Alma dates this incident to the time 1
after Mahler’s return from Leiden, but it is clear from her letters to Gropius that 2
it in fact took place on 9 August. This is not the place to discuss the artistic 3
merits of Alma’s songs, not least because there are other, albeit contradictory, 4
studies available. Susanne Rode-Breymann has summarized all the arguments in 5
favour of a positive assessment and made a compelling case for them, while Jörg 6
Rothkamm has tried to show that Alma did not revise them on her own but 7
received substantial help from Mahler, who gave these fourteen surviving songs 8
the form in which they have come down to us. He warns against overestimating 9
Alma’s abilities and tends to see Mahler himself as their co-composer.27 In 40
advancing this view, Rothkamm draws on the unpublished correspondence 41R
642 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 between Alma and Gropius – a thousand or so letters have survived, and some
2 of the important ones have been cited in the foregoing pages. It seems that Alma
3 was by no means exaggerating when she wrote retrospectively about Mahler’s
4 enthusiasm. In fact, she seems, rather, to have downplayed his response. And so
5 we find her telling Gropius on 14 August 1910: ‘Only now shall I really have
6 something from G. – he wants to read difficult works with me – he’s already
7 playing music.’ A day later we read: ‘The most ardent desire of my life has again
8 become clear to me. G. wants to spend his life encouraging me in my work.’ And
9 even more astonishingly:
10
1 My joy is now the love and admiration that G. is devoting to my music. He
2 plans to devote his future life to this alone, and I, who had already doubted in
3 such happiness, can scarcely believe it. He plays nothing else all day long and
4 says they are simply inspired. – Well, to be honest, I knew that my things are
5 ‘good’ – and if I have dragged my children around with me in secret for the
6 last eight years – I still knew that they were a success – and simply believed it
7 was a woman’s lot to have to renounce all this happiness when I got married.
8
9 And that was not all:
20
1 For me, it is a bridge back to life. Suddenly I’m in love with the world once
2 again. . . . Gustav lives for these songs – his own works are ‘a matter of indif-
3 ference’ to him – he plays them to himself as soon as I am out of the room
4 and finds in them a clearer expression of my whole being than when he talks
5 to me in person.
6
7 Alma implies that it was Mahler himself who said that his previous nine
8 symphonies and the tenth, on which he was then working, were a matter of
9 indifference to him, and we can well believe her when she writes that this is
30 what he said. Most astonishingly of all, she herself seems to have taken these
1 remarks seriously. Anyone who were to claim today that Mahler’s nine
2 symphonies are a matter of indifference next to Alma’s fourteen songs would
3 merely make himself look foolish. A shooting star cannot be compared with a
4 planet. In her reminiscences, Alma, too, refers to this overestimation of her
5 talents. This does not mean that her songs are worthless. They deserve to be
6 performed, for they reveal an astonishing sense of atmospheric values, of the
7 subtleties of their word-setting and even melodic inventiveness. In short, they
8 are the work of a talented composer, not the sort of genius revealed in a single
9 one of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. Anyone who claims that Alma could
40 have enjoyed a great career as a composer but was brutally prevented from
41R doing so by her husband is on very shaky ground.
There is no denying that Mahler’s response to his wife’s talent was not only 1
very foolish, it was also wrong. As Jörg Rothkamm has written: 2
3
We must be careful not to transfer to Alma herself the undeniably impressive 4
artistic potential of the people who gravitated towards her in the course of 5
her life. Of course she was inspired by them, albeit not to the extent that she 6
herself inspired and supported other artists. For a life as a composer she 7
lacked mainly the intransigent will and compulsion to write music and the 8
tenacity to complete a large-scale work.28 9
10
Alma knew exactly what set her apart from Mahler, and in a letter that she 1
wrote to Gropius from New York in November 1910 she admitted that 2
‘Everything he does, he does so completely – so comprehensively – you can 3
really learn from this how one should live.’29 Did Mahler himself really believe 4
that all his own works were worthless next to his wife’s songs? Clearly he 5
wanted her to believe it. They were sacrifices offered up to Aphrodite, and they 6
certainly had an effect. His self-abasement contributed to the fact that she at 7
least found it easier to live with him and was able to continue with her 8
marriage, albeit with the constant prospect of one day being able to live with 9
Gropius, either after divorcing her husband or after his death. But it also has 20
to be said that Alma found Gropius too immature as a person and too undis- 1
tinguished as an architect to be able to provide her with the lifestyle to which 2
she was accustomed. This is clear from a further letter that she wrote to him 3
from Toblach in August 1910: ‘I must now see if I can put up with this life at 4
least until I can call you or, rather, until you call me. Until you are ready and 5
can stand on your own two feet in the world, so that I can follow you with 6
every happiness and you do not need to be afraid to take me home.’30 The 7
picture that Alma subsequently painted of a painfully rebuilt marriage is false, 8
for she merely put off the prospect of a life with Gropius, treating the present 9
situation with dilatory indifference and delaying a final decision. Fortunately 30
Mahler interpreted the situation differently, at least for the present, and it must 1
have seemed as if his sacrifices had paid off. 2
It is impossible to offer a final verdict on the whole terrible confusion of 3
these weeks in Tobelbach and Toblach, which left all three participants 4
profoundly shaken, Mahler most of all. It is no secret that Alma has always 5
been criticized by Mahler’s supporters, starting with Lipiner and continuing 6
down to the present time. We have already had occasion to quote from the 7
malicious accounts of Canetti and Adorno, a malice offset by the affection that 8
Adorno’s teacher, Alban Berg, felt for Alma. We have also quoted from the 9
review of the German edition of the correspondence between Mahler and 40
Alma by the German writer Hans Wollschläger, who did not have a single 41R
644 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 good word to say about Alma and who referred to her pompous and hare-
2 brained conversations, the queasy dilettantism of her compositions and her lazy
3 vacillation between submission and domination – this is strong stuff.31 Nor
4 does he sidestep the difficult question about Alma’s complicity in Mahler’s
5 death: both Canetti and Adorno believed that she had murdered her husband,
6 although neither was fully familiar with the facts of the Gropius affair.
7 Wollschläger went even further: ‘Mahler’s death agony began not in 1907 with
8 the diagnosis of his bad heart, which Alma, fully aware of what she was doing,
9 did everything in her power to exaggerate, but in August 1910, with the letter
10 which Gropius even in old age claimed he had wrongly addressed “by mistake”’.
1 Wollschläger was right to assert that Mahler’s death can be traced back to
2 August 1910, but it began with the throat infection that he caught from Anna’s
3 nanny. This time it was not one of his usual sore throats but a serious illness, that
4 was not recognized as such, leading to a collapse that he effortfully overcame in
5 order to make the journey to Leiden. It then returned with unprecedented force
6 in early September, obliging him to take to his bed before he could find the
7 strength to resume rehearsals of his Eighth Symphony. We have already
8 discussed the medical connection in our chapter on Mahler’s various illnesses:
9 his basic condition was such that it was only a question of time before one of his
20 numerous infections affected his already damaged heart. This could have
1 happened at any time. In the event, it was the two bouts of infection in August
2 and September 1910 that prepared the ground for the streptococcal attack to
3 which he ultimately succumbed. To what extent this powerful psychological
4 shock undermined his physical health is unclear. It is a question that raises the
5 issue of psychosomatic links that cannot be established more than a century after
6 the event and of which the actors themselves were only dimly aware. There is
7 some truth to the serious reproach levelled at Alma by Wollschläger and others
8 like him, but it is difficult to know how to evaluate it in relation to Mahler’s phys-
9 ical condition. Nor is it possible to identify any specific moral guilt on Alma’s
30 part. Should she have spared him all this? She knew, of course, that he was not
1 well but she could not know how precarious his health in fact was.
2 Throughout the spring and early summer of 1910 Mahler was busier and at
3 the same time more relaxed than he had been since 1907. He had survived the
4 heart diagnosis of three years earlier and showed every sign of improving. As
5 his recent season in New York had demonstrated, his capacity for work was
6 almost completely restored – certainly he himself saw things in this light. Alma
7 cannot have had the impression that in embarking on her affair with Gropius
8 she was delivering the fatal blow to a man who was already dying. If she felt
9 that Mahler would not survive their separation, this did not mean that he
40 would die if she left him and that she herself would be to blame for his death,
41R but simply that he could not envisage life without her. There is not a scrap of
evidence to suggest that even Mahler himself felt that he was dying during the 1
summer of 1910. Alma does not deserve the moral opprobrium of posterity for 2
embarking on an affair with Gropius. After eight years of a frustrating 3
marriage she believed that she deserved it. The foundations of that marriage 4
had been shaky from the outset, and for that she cannot be held entirely 5
responsible. Autumn had chained itself to spring, the over-ripe to the imma- 6
ture. No blessing could accrue to such a match. Mahler ignored Hans Sachs’s 7
maxim in Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, justifying his renunciation of the 8
younger Eva: ‘My child, I know a sad tale about Tristan and Isolde: Hans Sachs 9
was wise and wanted none of King Marke’s happiness.’ One does not have to 10
worship Alma blindly to realize that she did not murder her husband. A quite 1
different question is the matter of her continuing affair with Gropius and the 2
lies that this entailed – but by then Mahler was already dying. Emotionally 3
speaking, he never really recovered. Alma spent the rest of her life feeling 4
guilty, and she paid for her passion not least by the fact that her marriage to 5
Gropius was a fiasco. This also explains the macabre cult of the dead Mahler 6
that characterized her life – Canetti saw only the most negative aspect of this. 7
In February 1919 her son Martin, who was born while she was still married to 8
Gropius but whose father may in fact have been Werfel, fell critically ill – he 9
died soon afterwards. In her diary an agitated Alma noted that although 20
Kokoschka and Werfel were gifted men, they were no more than ‘microbes’ 1
beside Mahler: ‘I suddenly know with terrible clarity that I love Gustav and 2
only Gustav, and that since his death I have always been seeking and have 3
never found – and never will.’32 4
It is a mark of genius that even in extreme situations the person in question 5
is still able to work, as Mahler did while organizing the first performance of his 6
Eighth Symphony with iron resolve and even starting work on his Tenth. 7
Gropius had been gone for only a few days when Mahler returned to his 8
composing hut, Alma’s reassurance that she would remain at his side appar- 9
ently restoring his creative powers. Even so, he was shaken to his very founda- 30
tions. The fragility of his mental state is clear from lines that he wrote for Alma 1
on the music manuscript paper intended for his Tenth Symphony: ‘For my 2
dearest one, / My absent, omnipresent friend: / The time has come, the quill is 3
in my hand – / Yet the idea continually eludes me. / To me the staves are like 4
some desert land, / Their five straight lines a mirage that deludes me. / For still 5
I am as dazzled by that light / Which shone on me at Aphrodite’s sight.’ The 6
Anacreontic garb in which these lines are dressed finds altogether more 7
disturbing expression in the famous scribblings in the short score of the Tenth 8
Symphony. ‘Tod! Verk! Erbarmen!! O Gott! O Gott! Warum hast Du mich 9
verlassen? Dein Wille geschehe!’, we read in the short score of the third move- 40
ment. The word ‘Verk’ has caused a certain amount of mystery, but it appears 41R
646 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 from a sketch now in the Bavarian State Library that it is an abbreviation of

2 ‘Verkündigen’ and refers to the Todesverkündigung, or Annunciation of Death,
3 in Act Two of Die Walküre, Mahler evidently drawing an analogy between the
4 encounter of Brünnhilde and Siegmund and his own situation.33 The lines may
5 therefore be translated: ‘Death! Annunciation! Have mercy! My God, my God,
6 why hast thou forsaken me? Thy will be done!’ On the title page of the second
7 Scherzo we read ‘The Devil dances it with me! Madness, seize me, accursed
8 that I am! Destroy me, that I may forget I exist, that I may cease to be, that
9 I . . .’. At this point the line breaks off, although we may imagine it continuing
10 with words such as ‘ever existed’ or ‘may perish’. At the end of this same move-
1 ment Mahler has written: ‘You alone know what it means. Ah! Ah! Ah!
2 Farewell my lyre! Farewell / farewell / farewell / farewell / ah! ah!’ And at the
3 end of the final movement, Mahler has added the words: ‘To live for you! To
4 die for you! Almschi!’
5 In a series of conversations about Mahler’s symphonies that he held with the
6 critic Paul Fiebig, the conductor Michael Gielen expressed a widespread
7 unease at these effusive comments, which he said made him feel uncomfort-
8 able. ‘If he had added anything like this at the time of the First Symphony, I
9 would have accepted it, but here it amounts to a kind of exhibitionism that I
20 find simply embarrassing.’34 But exhibitionism is a wilful externalization of
1 something that would have been better kept hidden. Mahler was no exhib-
2 itionist, but we ourselves have become voyeurs who have to deal with the fact
3 that these self-revelations have been put into circulation. These ‘springtime
4 cries of a servant from the depths’, to quote from a poem by Brentano, were not
5 intended for public scrutiny, not even for Alma. Conversely, the surprising
6 dedication of the Eighth Symphony was intended to be seen by Alma: ‘To my
7 dear wife Alma Maria’, a dedication added at the very last minute to the vocal
8 score of the work. Mahler had never planned this. Rather, it was a spontaneous
9 expression of the panic that had seized him. Here, too, he was trying to placate
30 a capricious goddess – Mahler called her Aphrodite – with sacrificial gifts. It is
1 not exhibitionism when a tormented soul commits its distress to paper.
2 Readers seeking an example of exhibitionism may care to consider the young
3 Elias Canetti’s account of a visit that he paid to Alma in the early 1930s:
4
5 Less than six feet from her stood the vitrine in which the score of Mahler’s
6 unfinished tenth symphony lay open. My attention was called to it, I stood
7 up, went over and read the dying man’s cries of distress – it was his last work
8 – to his wife, his ‘Almshi [sic], beloved Almshi,’ and more such intimate,
9 desperate cries; it was to these most intimate pages that the score had been
40 opened. This was no doubt a standard means of impressing visitors. I read
41R these words in the handwriting of a dying man and looked at the woman to
whom they had been addressed. Twenty-three years later, she took them as if 1
they were meant for her now. From all who looked at this showpiece she 2
expected the look of admiration due to her for this dying man’s homage, and 3
she was so sure of the effect of his writing in the score that the vapid smile on 4
her face expanded into a grin. She had no suspicion of the horror and disgust 5
I felt. I did not smile, but she misinterpreted my gravity as the piety due to a 6
dying genius, and since all this was happening in the memorial chapel she 7
had erected to her happiness, she took my piety as one more homage to 8
herself.35 9
10
On 25 August, Mahler, by now more or less over his angina but still emotion- 1
ally fragile, set off for Leiden for his repeatedly postponed consultation with 2
Sigmund Freud. To quote Brentano: 3
4
Weh der Raum wird immer enger, 5
Wilder, wüster stets die Wogen, 6
Herr, o Herr! ich treib’s nicht länger, 7
Schlage deinen Regenbogen. 8
9
[Woe, the space is getting smaller, wilder and more desolate the waves. Lord, 20
O Lord! No longer can I bear it. Span the heavens with your rainbow.] 1
2
3
Freud and Mahler’s Sufferings – A Stroll through Leiden
4
Even before Alma had arrived in Toblach from Tobelbad, Mahler had suffered 5
an upsetting experience in his composing hut, as he later told Bruno Walter. 6
Startled by a vague noise, he had looked up from his desk and seen something 7
‘frightfully dark’ burst through the window. He had jumped up, appalled, and 8
found himself facing an eagle that seemed to fill the whole room. (In another 9
version it is a smaller bird of prey.) The bird quickly vanished, but Mahler had 30
scarcely recovered from his initial shock when a crow that had been pursued 1
by the eagle flew out from under the sofa and made good its escape, also 2
through the window. Mahler had always been horrified at these manifestations 3
of nature red in tooth and claw, and now such a demonstration intruded upon 4
his compositional work, and the incident left an indefinable impression on 5
him.36 During the spring of that same year Freud had developed an interest in 6
another bird of prey, a vulture, which he believed had visited the infant 7
Leonardo da Vinci as he lay in his cot. In fact the artist remembered the 8
bird as a kite, but Freud mistakenly translated Leonardo’s nibio as a vulture. 9
The vision served as the starting point for a far-reaching investigation into the 40
artist’s latent homosexuality and intellectual curiosity and, more generally, the 41R
648 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 suppression of our physical urges, sublimation and questions of neurosis and

2 artistry. As such, the essay is arguably Freud’s most important contribution to
3 the psychoanalysis of the creative artist in general.37 We do not know whether
4 Mahler told Freud about his own experience with an eagle when he met him
5 for a consultation in Leiden at the end of August 1910.
6 The first six months of 1910 had been a particularly trying time for Freud. At
7 the end of March the Second International Psycho-Analytical Congress had
8 taken place in Nuremberg, when simmering conflicts had broken out in unex-
9 pected ways. Sándor Ferenczi had tried to weaken the influence of the Viennese
10 contingent by proposing Zurich as the group’s future centre and Carl Gustav
1 Jung as its president. The Viennese members, led by Alfred Adler and Wilhelm
2 Stekel, had opposed a move manifestly designed to limit the perceived prepon-
3 derance of Jews in the movement, but they were unable to prevent Jung from
4 being elected the association’s president, something that Freud expressly
5 supported. As we know, this presidency was short-lived, but Freud could not
6 have known this at the time. A visit to southern Italy was planned as a diver-
7 sion, and Freud chose Ferenczi as his travelling companion, for he preferred to
8 undertake these journeys without his family in tow. But before the two men left
9 Paris on 1 September, Freud could look forward to a pleasant few weeks
20 relaxing in the Netherlands. The North Sea was chosen as the rest of the family
1 was only a day’s journey away in Hamburg, where Freud’s mother-in-law,
2 Emmeline Bernays, was seriously ill. She died at the end of October.
3 Freud left Vienna for the Netherlands in the middle of July, initially visiting
4 The Hague, then moving on to Noordwijk, where he stayed at the Noordzee
5 Guest House. It was presumably here that he received Mahler’s first telegram,
6 asking for a consultation. The date of this initial approach cannot be estab-
7 lished with any certainty, but it is unlikely to have been before Mahler found
8 out about his wife’s affair: it was this that triggered a move that cannot have
9 been easy for Mahler to make. This does not mean that Mahler – an earlier
30 remark expressing his scepticism about psychoanalysis notwithstanding – may
1 not already have thought of consulting Freud in the belief that the latter could
2 help him to come to terms with the events of 1907. Freud normally had no
3 time for such enquiries while he was on vacation, but in Mahler’s case there
4 were several reasons to be less squeamish: both men were from Jewish families
5 from the same part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Freud from Moravia,
6 Mahler from the border between Bohemia and Moravia; both had a love-hate
7 relationship with Vienna, where they had both encountered resistance aplenty
8 and suffered many a personal attack; both had achieved a good deal in the face
9 of opposition, Mahler more than Freud, who was never actually offered a
40 professorial chair; and both were now nationally, even internationally,
41R acclaimed. Although Freud felt little interest in music as opposed to literature,
the visual arts and archaeology, he was none the less sympathetic to Mahler’s 1
work in Vienna. There is no evidence that they had met previously, and 2
although the tight-knit nature of Vienna’s cultural world might tempt one to 3
question this claim, the very different circumstances of their lives make it at 4
least plausible. Both men hated the local cultural scene, with its coffee shops, 5
invitations and balls, and both were completely absorbed in their work. Freud 6
never attended the opera or concerts, and Mahler did not frequent the 7
company of psychoanalysts. Even such kindred spirits as Freud and Arthur 8
Schnitzler had taken years to forge any contacts, Freud avoiding any meeting 9
out of what he called ‘fear of meeting his double’. 10
It is unclear who advised Mahler to seek out Freud. The latter’s biographer, 1
Ernest Jones, thought that it was the Viennese psychoanalyst Richard 2
Nepallek, who was close to the Molls and who had helped the Mahlers at the 3
time of their crisis in 1907. But it seems more likely that the idea came from 4
Bruno Walter, who had undergone treatment a few years earlier, at a time 5
when Freud was by no means the first port of call for artists and intellectuals. 6
He has left an amusing account of his experience in his memoirs. Neuralgic- 7
rheumatic pain in his right arm having reached the point where it called his 8
whole professional career into question and all traditional treatments having 9
proved ineffectual, Walter consulted Freud, expecting to be questioned about 20
sexual aberrations in infancy, but instead he was asked whether he knew Sicily. 1
On answering ‘no’, Walter was told to take the night train to Italy and forget 2
about his arm and his work. Walter did as he was told, and although the 3
journey was not in itself enough to cure him completely, he managed to get rid 4
of the symptoms after a period of only a few months.38 5
Freud responded to Mahler’s telegram by proposing a date, which Mahler 6
turned down by return of post. The whole performance was repeated three times, 7
Freud no doubt seeing in it an example of some obsessional neurosis. He then 8
announced that he had to return to Paris at the end of August, thereby placing 9
Mahler under greater pressure to reach a decision. Mahler himself had to be in 30
Munich in early September to prepare for the performances of his Eighth 1
Symphony, and in October he was returning to New York to fulfil his commit- 2
ments as music director of the Philharmonic Society. As a result, the only small 3
window of opportunity was the final week of August, when Freud would be in 4
Leiden, staying with his colleague Jan Rudolf de Bruine-Groeneveldt, which is 5
why he suggested Leiden as a place to meet. Mahler’s links with the 6
Concertgebouw and with colleagues such as Diepenbrock and Mengelberg meant 7
that for him the Netherlands was a less exotic travel destination than it was for 8
Freud. The result was a meeting which by any standards was exceptional, initially 9
at the hotel where Freud was staying and then in the course of a walk through the 40
streets of the town, a stroll lasting several hours. Thanks to the letters and 41R
650 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 telegrams that Mahler, in a state of some agitation, sent to his wife during this
2 period, we can date these events with some accuracy: he left Innsbruck on 25
3 August, arriving in Cologne the next day and returning to Austria on the 27th. In
4 other words, his consultation with Freud can only have taken place on the after-
5 noon of the 26th or the morning of the 27th – as we shall see in a moment, Freud
6 recalled that it was during the afternoon that he met Mahler.
7 If Mahler consulted Freud, it was not because of a bad arm. Not all writers
8 who have described this meeting as significant or meaningful have been aware
9 of just how momentous and memorable it was. Imagine, instead, a meeting
10 between Freud and Karl Kraus. Although Kraus was regarded as an interesting
1 case in Freud’s circle, a single remark from Kraus along the lines of his famous
2 dictum that ‘psychoanalysis is the disease whose cure it purports to be’ would
3 have been enough to put an end to the thought of any further consultation. Or
4 what about Freud and Klimt, Schiele or Kokoschka? No such encounter took
5 place. Or Freud and Hofmannsthal? In spite of the psychopathological back-
6 ground of Elektra, the two men were never in contact, and even as late as 1908
7 Hofmannsthal was still describing Freud as a vain and narrow-minded medi-
8 ocrity. In the case of Schnitzler, his contacts with Freud remained friendly but
9 distant. Mahler was the only eminent figure from legendary turn-of-the-
20 century Vienna to have any close contact with Freud, even if that contact lasted
1 less than a day. Nor is it really possible to speak of Mahler as a patient, even
2 though Freud himself used the term ‘analysis’ when referring to their meeting.
3 In short, it was an extraordinary encounter between the Napoleon of the
4 musical scene of Vienna and New York and the Goethe of psychoanalysis. One
5 might expect that such a momentous meeting would have left a mass of source
6 material, but there are in fact only a few brief accounts of it, all of them
7 vitiated by having been written long after the event.
8 Nearly a quarter of a century later, one of Freud’s pupils, Theodor Reik,
9 asked his mentor about the encounter, prompting Freud to reply on 4 January
30 1935: ‘I analyzed Mahler in Leyden for a whole afternoon in the year 1912 (or
1 1913?)’ – Freud was clearly wrong on this point, and evidently he no longer
2 recalled the year of Mahler’s death:
3
4 If I may believe reports, I achieved much with him in that time. He felt he
5 needed to see me because his wife was at that time rebelling against the with-
6 drawal of his libido. In highly interesting probings through his life we laid
7 bare his love conditions, in particular his Holy Mary complex (Mother fix-
8 ation). I had plenty of opportunity to admire this man of genius’s capacity for
9 psychological understanding. No shaft of light was thrown at the time on the
40 symptomatic façade of his compulsive neurosis. It was as if one was digging
41R a single deep tunnel through a puzzling building complex.39
The second account is taken from Ernest Jones’s biography of Freud. He too 1
picked up the idea of a ‘Mary complex’, claiming that Freud went on to say to 2
Mahler: 3
4
‘I take it your mother was called Marie. I should surmise it from various hints 5
in your conversation. How comes it that you married someone with another 6
name, Alma, since your mother evidently played a dominating part in your 7
life?’ Mahler then told him that his wife’s name was Alma Maria, but that he 8
called her Marie! 9
10
There follows the famous and oft-quoted remark of Mahler’s that is said to 1
offer an explanation for the juxtaposition of emotional depth and vulgarity in 2
his compositions, a juxtaposition that he said ruined everything. (It may be 3
questioned in parentheses whether Mahler really expressed himself in this 4
way.) As a child, he explained, he had witnessed a painful scene between his 5
brutal father and his mother. In his despair he ran outside, where the song 6
‘Ach, du lieber Augustin’ was being played on a barrel organ.40 Jones’s whole 7
account needs to be treated with more circumspection than has been the case 8
until now, for it rests on a comment that Freud made in person to Marie 9
Bonaparte in 1925, thirty years before Jones set down his recollections of it in 20
print. A single error is enough to raise doubts about its reliability. While it is 1
true that Mahler initially wanted to call his fiancée Marie, in the end he stuck 2
to Alma and its numerous derivatives. Essentially, however, this version tallies 3
with Freud’s much more authentic account in his letter to Theodor Reik. 4
The third account is that of Alma in her reminiscences, where she adds a 5
further detail in the form of a remark that she reproduces as direct speech. 6
Freud had allegedly reproached Mahler: ‘How dared a man in your state ask a 7
young woman to be tied to him?’ And Freud is said to have gone on: 8
9
‘I know your wife. She loved her father and she can only choose and love a 30
man of his sort. Your age, of which you are so much afraid, is precisely what 1
attracts her. You need not be anxious. You loved your mother, and you look 2
for her in every woman. She was careworn and ailing, and unconsciously you 3
wish your wife to be the same.’41 4
5
Alma can only agree with Freud, which in itself raises a question over the accur- 6
acy of her quotation, adding that Mahler was reassured by these explanations 7
but refused to accept Freud’s conclusion that he was suffering from a mother 8
fixation. This contradicts the accounts of both Freud himself and Ernest Jones, 9
for it is impossible to identify a mother fixation if the person undergoing 40
analysis is not prepared to acknowledge it himself. Freud, however, specifically 41R
652 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 claimed that ‘We laid bare his Mother fixation’ – and he is unlikely to have
2 been using the royal ‘we’ here.
3 In his writings Freud often referred to his patients in coded form, and it
4 seems strange that he would not also have mentioned Mahler, who was by far
5 the most famous object of his analysis. Curiously enough, no previous writer
6 has thought of looking for traces of Mahler in Freud’s published writings, and
7 yet such a search proves unexpectedly fruitful. In 1918 Freud published a
8 series of three essays on the psychology of love that had initially appeared
9 separately. The first was published in 1910 under the title ‘A Special Type of
10 Choice of Object Made by Men’, the second in 1912 as ‘On the Universal
1 Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’.42 Both essays contain analo-
2 gies with the case of Mahler. In the first, these parallels are undoubtedly
3 weaker and must in any case rest on coincidence as the piece was evidently
4 written before Freud left for his summer vacation in 1910, but in the second
5 they are far more striking. Both essays deal with the issue that was at the very
6 heart of Mahler’s own problems, namely, an immoderate mother fixation and
7 the transfer of the image of the careworn, ailing mother to the wife.
8 But the parallels go even further. In his study of the choice of object made by
9 men, Freud includes among the ‘necessary conditions for loving’ that of the
20 ‘injured third party’: in other words, the man in question chooses as the object
1 of his love not a woman who is free but one on whom another man can ‘claim
2 right of possession’. From this point of view, Walter Gropius would have been an
3 ideal case for study. But Mahler represents a less intense form of this condition,
4 for he had told Alma before they became engaged: ‘If only you had had a love
5 affair or were a widow, it would be all right.’43 Symptomatic of the second
6 precondition is its close connection with jealousy, for only then does the man’s
7 passion reach its full height and the woman acquires her ‘full value’: Mahler’s
8 reaction to Alma’s affair with Gropius is a good example of this type of symptom.
9 Freud traces all these different types of behaviour back to a single source:
30
1 The object-choice which is so strangely conditioned, and this very singular
2 way of behaving in love, have the same psychical origin as we find in the loves
3 of normal people. They are derived from the infantile fixation of tender feel-
4 ings on the mother, and represent one of the consequences of that fixation.
5 . . . In our type, on the other hand, the libido has remained attached to the
6 mother for so long, even after the onset of puberty, that the maternal charac-
7 teristics remain stamped on the love-objects that are chosen later, and all
8 these turn into easily recognizable mother-surrogates.44
9
40 It is sufficient at this point to draw attention to the fact that when Mahler first
41R got to know Alma, not only did he want to call her Marie after his mother, but
he was also disappointed that she did not look to have suffered very much. He 1
complained about this to his mother-in-law, prompting the worldly-wise and 2
at the same time prophetic reply: ‘Don’t worry – that will come.’45 3
Until such time as any evidence emerges to show that Freud reworked the 4
manuscript of this essay before it appeared in print in the autumn of 1910, we 5
must accept the foregoing parallels as no more than remarkable coincidences. 6
But this is no longer possible or necessary in the case of the second essay, ‘On 7
the Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, which first 8
appeared in 1912 and which deals with ‘psychical impotence’ – the very same 9
diagnosis as the one proposed by Alma in the unpublished passage from her 10
diary that we quoted a moment ago. Freud, of course, had expressed himself in 1
more general terms in his letter to Reik and had spoken of a ‘withdrawal’ of 2
Mahler’s ‘libido’. Jones expresses this same idea more directly when he claims 3
that following his conversation with Freud, Mahler regained his sex drive. As 4
the most general pathogenic reason for ‘psychical impotence’, Freud singles out 5
an ‘incestuous fixation on mother or sister, which has never been surmounted’. 6
In this context it will be recalled that from the early 1890s to the time of his 7
marriage in 1902, Mahler shared his apartment and invariably went on holiday 8
with his sister, Justine, who was eight years younger and who self-sacrificingly 9
ran his household and forwent any family life of her own. She was apparently 20
incapable of marrying until her brother had begun his affair with Alma 1
Schindler – the fact that she got married on the very next day is significant. 2
There is absolutely no reason to think that there was an incestuous relation- 3
ship between Mahler and his sister, but an element of unconscious fixation 4
may none the less have played a role here. 5
For Freud, the love lives of such people remained divided, a division that 6
finds expression in art in the dichotomy of sacred and profane love: 7
8
Where they love they do not desire and where they desire they cannot love. 9
They seek objects which they do not need to love, in order to keep their 30
sensuality away from the objects they love; and, in accordance with the laws 1
of ‘complexive sensitiveness’ and of the return of the repressed, the strange 2
failure shown in psychical impotence makes its appearance whenever an 3
object which has been chosen with the aim of avoiding incest recalls the 4
prohibited object through some feature, often an inconspicuous one.46 5
6
Following the emotional upheavals of 1907 Mahler had devoted all his ener- 7
gies to his work as a composer – after all, it was not a case of writer’s block that 8
he wanted to discuss with Freud. His desire embraced the depths of animate 9
nature, thoughts of death and immortality as mediated by his reading of 40
Goethe and Fechner and his conversations with Lipiner. It was certainly not 41R
654 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 directed at his wife, for all that he continued to love her. But, following the
2 hammer blows of the past three years, she now bore the marks of careworn
3 suffering that Mahler had missed for so long. Now, however, this feature
4 reminded him all too palpably of his mother.
5 It seems clear Freud was later given information that persuaded him that his
6 conversation with Mahler had helped his patient. At all events, Mahler was
7 spared any further buffetings during the months that remained to him, even if
8 only because he never discovered that Alma was secretly continuing her affair
9 with Gropius. During his train journey back to Austria, he wrote her a poem
10 whose literary merits need not detain us but which deserves to be quoted here
1 for what it tells us about the most brilliant person whom Freud ever analysed
2 in person. Not only is it an unusual and spontaneous reaction to a psychoan-
3 alytical conversation with the father of psychoanalysis, it also attests to
4 Mahler’s subjective belief that after only a single afternoon this remarkable
5 encounter between the two men had produced a positive result – whether this
6 is in fact possible is contested more vigorously than ever by the opponents of
7 psychoanalysis:
8
9 Nachtschatten sind verweht an einem mächt’gen Wort,
20 Verstummt der Qualen nie ermattend Wühlen.
1 Zusammen floss zu einem einzigen Akkord
2 Mein zagend Denken und mein brausend Fühlen.
3
4 Ich liebe Dich! – ist meine Stärke, die ich preis
5 die Lebensmelodie, die ich im Schmerz errungen,
6 O liebe mich! – ist meine Weisheit, die ich weiss,
7 der Grundton, auf dem jene mir erklungen.
8
9 Ich liebe Dich! – ward meines Lebens Sinn
30 Wie selig will ich Welt und Traum verschlafen,
1 O liebe mich! – Du meines Sturms Gewinn!
2 Heil mir – ich starb der Welt – ich bin im Hafen!47
3
4 [The nightmare’s dispelled by force of persuasion, / Dispersed are the
5 torments of self-contemplation, / In one single chord my hesitant notions /
6 Converge with the power of searing emotions. / ‘I love you!’: three words that
7 support and maintain me, / Life’s melody rising from sorrow and pain. / O
8 love me! – three words that I know, that sustain me, / The bass-note to each
9 and to every refrain. / ‘I love you!’: three words that remain what I live for. /
40 With joy will I forfeit the world all around. / O love me! – you that tempests
41R blew ashore! / Bless me – dead to the world – my haven found.]
By way of a postlude, it is worth adding that at an auction held by Sotheby’s of 1

London in May 1985, two of the objects on offer were letters from Freud. The 2
first was dated 23 May 1911 and was written within days of Mahler’s death. It 3
was addressed to Mahler’s lawyer, Emil Freund, and reads: 4
5
Dear Dr Freund, 6
Since I have discovered from the newspapers that you are dealing with the 7
estate of Director Mahler, I take the liberty of rendering my statement of 8
account with the deceased, which amounts to 300 crowns. This is based on a 9
consultation with him that lasted several hours and took place in Leiden (the 10
Netherlands) in August 1910, to where I travelled from Noordwijk a. Z. in 1
response to his urgent summons. Your most devoted servant, Prof. Dr Freud. 2
3
Sotheby’s estimate for this invoice was £3,000–5,000. The second letter was a 4
typewritten note, signed by Freud and acknowledging receipt of the three 5
hundred crowns from Emil Freund ‘for medical services rendered’.48 6
7
8
Munich and the First Performance of the Eighth Symphony
9
Mahler travelled to Munich on 3 September for the final rehearsals for the first 20
performance of his Eighth Symphony. Physically he had still not fully recovered 1
from the throat problems that had plagued him all summer, and psychologically, 2
too, he was still somewhat frail, in spite of Alma’s assurances and Freud’s diagnosis 3
and advice. Alma followed her husband to Munich a few days later, a delay 4
that he filled by writing her three long letters that demonstrate the tremendous 5
energy he was still capable of generating. Several times he refers to himself as a 6
‘schoolboy’ awaiting his ‘Saviour’: 7
8
Freud is quite right: this utter dependence on you has always been latent in 9
me, you have always been my light and the centre of my universe. Admittedly, 30
the inner light that shines over us all, and the consciousness of sanctity – no 1
longer diminished by inhibitions – heightens these sensations infinitely. What 2
torment, what pain that you can no longer reciprocate them. But just as love 3
always engenders love, fidelity always wins through to fidelity, and as long as 4
Eros remains the master of men and gods, I too shall succeed in winning back 5
what was once mine, in regaining the heart that once beat for me and can 6
indeed be united only with mine on its journey towards God and serenity.49 7
8
The editors of these letters are right to speak of Mahler’s total submission. At 9
this point Mahler suffered a further bout of throat infections and this time he 40
took to his bed at the Hotel Continental, no longer dismissing the illness with 41R
656 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 the ease with which he had done in the past but summoning a doctor as he
2 needed to be fully recovered by the time that the rehearsals resumed. The
3 doctor decided against swabbing his throat but prescribed a new type of medi-
4 cine designed to reduce the inflammation. For his part, Mahler wrapped
5 himself in blankets collected from the rest of the hotel, hoping to sweat out the
6 infection, a treatment that had helped him in the past. For three hours he lay
7 prone, sweating profusely. Emil Gutmann called to visit him and turned white
8 as a sheet, fearing that the two concerts would be jeopardized. He helped by
9 wiping Mahler’s face with a towel. On 4 September Mahler was still seriously ill
10 in bed, and the first rehearsal was scheduled for the morning of the 5th. What
1 he went through, physically and mentally, is hard to describe. His final letter to
2 Alma before she left for Munich finds him vacillating between euphoria and
3 animal fear as to whether she really loved him. Time and again he had to hear
4 her assurances, which provided him with what he called ‘joy without rest’, a
5 phrase taken from Goethe’s poem ‘Rastlose Liebe’ (‘Restless Love’). Since Alma
6 was lying, she will have offered this assurance only reluctantly.
7 Between 5 September and the final rehearsal on the 11th Mahler more or
8 less pulled himself together, although there are many eyewitness accounts
9 from friends who came to Munich for the performances and who, not having
20 seen him for a year or more, were shocked at his appearance: he looked drawn,
1 there were signs of the facies hippocratica, his erect bearing was no longer in
2 evidence, his face was as white as a sheet, his eyes were unnaturally bright, and
3 he had lost the little extra weight that he had put on in America, leaving him
4 looking emaciated, a picture of wretchedness. Lilli Lehmann was aghast at
5 what she saw and could barely sit through the second half of the performance,
6 so upsetting did she find the whole experience. Gutmann wrote of his admira-
7 tion for the magnificent way in which Mahler, in spite of everything, remained
8 in command of the massed forces on the platform and kept firm control of the
9 logistics of the undertaking as a whole. In the course of the preliminary
30 rehearsals in Vienna, Leipzig and Munich he had welded the choruses together
1 to form a homogeneous whole and initiated the soloists into the unusual chal-
2 lenges of their parts. Now they had to be combined with the orchestra.
3 Mahler’s technique consisted in giving each group the feeling that it was on its
4 own contribution that the success or failure of the whole exercise depended
5 and that it therefore had to concentrate on its own particular task. The indi-
6 vidual groups were to leave it to him to bring them together as a single entity.
7 When a trumpeter had great difficulty with an exposed top C, Mahler
8 explained that this was no ordinary top C but a cry, a vital function of music
9 that finds expression in this trumpet, and with that the problem was solved.
40 Mahler enjoyed a particularly close working relationship with the 350 children
41R in the chorus. As his daughter Anna later recalled, he took them seriously,
while evincing an attitude towards them that was loving, involved and yet 1
humorous. A Viennese journalist reports that at one of the final rehearsals 2
Mahler sat down on his conductor’s chair, cupped his hands together and 3
called a cheerful ‘Good Morning’ to the children, which they echoed equally 4
cheerfully. 5
Together with five other halls, the vast space had been built in 1907 for the 6
1908 Munich Exhibition. It was a structure of iron, reinforced concrete and 7
glass, and the hall was filled with light during daytime hours. The podium, 8
which may be seen in photographs of Mahler rehearsing the symphony, was 9
necessarily huge. Not even today’s large concert platforms can accommodate 10
more than five hundred performers, whereas here space had to be found for 1
twice that number. Roller drew up a series of designs showing how the plat- 2
form should be divided into sections with rostra and steps in order to avoid 3
having the performers all on the same level, an arrangement impossible for 4
acoustical reasons and also because of the sightlines. Mahler not only refused 5
to have the work promoted as his ‘Symphony of a Thousand’, he also declined 6
to sanction the publication of an explanatory introduction, and so it was not 7
until the following year, when Mengelberg conducted the work in Berlin, that 8
Richard Specht was invited by Universal-Edition to write such a guide. 9
While Mahler was working like a madman, Alma invited Gropius to 20
Munich – and here the moral imperative starts to take effect. She met him by 1
the back door of the Hotel Regina, where he was staying, and probably also in 2
the hotel itself. Mahler began rehearsals on Monday 5 September and with two 3
exceptions held two rehearsals a day, partly in the main exhibition hall and 4
partly in the Tonhalle in the Türkenstraße. The final public rehearsal took 5
place on the morning and afternoon of Sunday 11 September, with the first 6
performance on the Monday evening and a repeat performance on the 7
Tuesday. Otto Klemperer attended the rehearsals and helped Mahler in various 8
ways, at least to the extent that the latter was prepared to accept assistance. But 9
Klemperer had to leave before the actual performance in order to conduct 30
Lohengrin in Hamburg. He later recalled how accommodating Mahler had 1
been in dealing with his own work: 2
3
The soloists and the orchestra were there, but not the choir. Even so, it was 4
wonderful. I must say that for the first time I felt that I was in the presence of 5
a great composer. But he was still not satisfied with the scoring. During 6
rehearsals he kept making small changes. He would say, ‘No, take this for two 7
clarinets, or this alone, or this louder or softer.’ Some years before he died, he 8
said, ‘The trouble is I cannot orchestrate.’ He was never satisfied. He always 9
wanted more clarity, more sound, more dynamic contrast. At one point 40
during the rehearsals for the Eighth Symphony he turned to some of us in the 41R
658 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 auditorium and said, ‘If, after my death, something doesn’t sound right, then
2 change it. You have not only the right but the duty to do so.’50
3
4 It was almost alarming to see all the prominent figures who, genuine or soi-
5 disant, streamed into the Munich Exhibition Hall on that Monday evening in
6 September 1910. In addition to various members of the house of Wittelsbach,
7 Paul Clemenceau and his wife had come from Paris, together with Auguste
8 Rodin and the composers Camille Saint-Saëns and Paul Dukas. Strauss was
9 there, of course. (A selection from his works had been one of the earlier high-
10 points of the festival). Other composer-colleagues were Alphons Diepenbrock,
1 Max von Schillings and Max Reger, also, strangely enough, Nietzsche’s
2 friend the composer Heinrich Köselitz (‘Peter Gast’). And so, too, were Lilli
3 Lehmann, Siegfried Wagner from Bayreuth, Max Reinhardt, Arnold Berliner
4 and the critic Oskar Bie from Berlin, and the conductors Willem Mengelberg
5 and Leopold Stokowski. Pfitzner seems to have been prevented from attending
6 by his new position in Strasbourg. But it was Vienna that fielded the largest
7 delegation: Anna von Mildenburg and her husband Hermann Bahr and
8 Anton Webern, the tenor Erik Schmedes, Kolo Moser, Carl Moll, Alfred Roller
9 and Bruno Walter. Zemlinsky had attended some rehearsals, and possibly the
20 first performance. Franz Schalk was present, having conducted some of the
1 rehearsals in Vienna, albeit not to Mahler’s satisfaction as he had meddled with
2 some of his tempos. Schalk sought repeatedly to champion Mahler’s cause,
3 both during the composer’s lifetime and after his death. Other members of the
4 audience included Thomas Mann, who did not have far to come, although it
5 seems that one of Mahler’s closest friends, the writer Gerhart Hauptmann, did
6 not attend. Arthur Schnitzler, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Stefan Zweig,
7 often mentioned as being present, were definitely not in Munich. Last, but not
8 least, Walter Gropius was in the audience.
9 Bruno Walter recalled the rehearsals and the performance:
30
1 Those were great days for us who shared in the rehearsals of the Eighth. The
2 hand of the master controlled the vast array without apparent effort. All
3 concerned, including the children, who adored him at once, were filled with
4 a solemn elevation of mood. What a moment it was, when at the zenith of his
5 career, and, little as we knew it, soon to be called from us by the hand of fate,
6 he took his place amid the applause of the thousands filling the vast auditor-
7 ium, in front of the one thousand performers – above all at the point where
8 the Creator spiritus, whose fire inspired him, is called on and a thousand
9 voices utter the cry expressing his whole life’s longing – Accende lumen
40 sensibus, infunde amorem cordibus! As the last note died away and a storm of
41R applause surged towards him, Mahler stepped up to where, at the top of the
platform, the chorus of children stood. He went along the line shaking their 1
outstretched hands as they cheered him. This tribute of love from the young 2
filled him with hope for the future of his work and gave him deep joy. 3
During rehearsals his friends had anxiously noted many signs of physical 4
weakness. But at the performance he seemed at the height of his powers. The lift 5
of his spirit gave his tired heart its old vigour. This was, however, the last time 6
he conducted a composition of his own; he never heard his last two works.51 7
8
Mahler had never known such an enthusiastic response from an audience or 9
from his fellow performers. As he himself will have realized, an essential part in 10
his own reaction must have been played by his ability to control the sheer mass 1
of sound and the vast resources for which the work is scored – that element of 2
the piece which Adorno, hesitating between scepticism and admiration, termed 3
a ‘giant symbolic shell’. Conversely, Mahler was probably unaware of the uned- 4
ifying discussion that arose in the newspapers of the time, wondering whether 5
such a hypertrophic work was not in fact typical of ‘Jewishness in music’ – the 6
sort of ‘effects without causes’ that Wagner had complained about in Meyerbeer. 7
But even if he had been aware of it, Mahler would hardly have allowed himself 8
to become worked up by these comments by his ‘superiors’. 9
Far more important to Mahler was undoubtedly the token of gratitude that 20
he received from Thomas Mann, who was able to meet the composer in person 1
for the first time after the concert. A few days later he wrote to Mahler: 2
3
My dear Sir, 4
I was incapable of saying, that evening in the hotel, how deeply indebted 5
to you I was for the impressions of 12th September. It is an imperative neces- 6
sity to make at least some small acknowledgement, and so I beg your accept- 7
ance of the book – my latest – which I send you herewith. 8
It is certainly a very poor return for what I received – a mere feather’s 9
weight in the hand of the man who, as I believe, expresses the art of our time 30
in its profoundest and most sacred form. 1
It is but a trifle. 2
Perhaps it may afford you tolerable entertainment for an idle hour or two. 3
Yours sincerely, 4
Thomas Mann52 5
6
The book was Royal Highness. It is unlikely that Mahler read it as he had little 7
time for contemporary literature. Moreover, Mann’s suggestion that it might 8
entertain Mahler ‘for an idle hour or two’ will hardly have whetted his curiosity 9
for the whole concept of ‘an idle hour’ was alien to him, and he had never felt 40
the need for ‘entertainment’. 41R
660 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 The Mahlers returned to Vienna on 14 September 1910 and stayed with the
2 Molls. They were due to return to New York in the middle of October.
3 Meanwhile, rumours had begun to circulate in Vienna that Mahler would be
4 returning to the Court Opera. Weingartner’s days there were numbered – he
5 left in February 1911. If a revival of Cornelius’s Der Barbier von Bagdad is
6 regarded by historians as the most important event that took place during the
7 whole of Weingartner’s regime, then – regardless of one’s respect for this
8 undervalued work – we can hardly be under any illusion about the standing of
9 this period in the Court Opera’s history. According to newspaper reports of the
10 time, there was even a discussion between Montenuovo and Mahler, but there
1 is no evidence that such a meeting took place, and Mahler himself always
2 dismissed the report as a canard. He had no wish to return to the post of
3 director, although it is conceivable that he would have considered a position as
4 a guest conductor when he returned from New York and that such a position
5 would not have been without its attractions if he had chosen to live in Vienna
6 or its immediate surroundings. But when it became clear that the next director
7 would be Hans Gregor, who took up his post on 1 March 1911, the matter
8 resolved itself, for Mahler had heard only the most unfavourable reports about
9 the director designate. Instead he turned his attentions to buying a house near
20 Vienna as a kind of retirement home, a plan that he had been entertaining for
1 some time. The contract was signed by Emil Freund on 3 November, by which
2 date the Mahlers were already back in New York. Under its terms Mahler paid
3 forty thousand crowns for Farm no. 17 at Breitenstein on the Semmering. The
4 sellers were Josef Hartberger Junior and Maria Hartberger.
5 During all this upheaval, Mahler also took steps to ensure the livelihood of
6 Arnold Schoenberg: in August he sent him eight hundred crowns, in early
7 October he bought three of his paintings, an anonymous acquisition that
8 Schoenberg found out about from Webern only after Mahler’s death, and
9 Mahler attended the final rehearsal for a performance of Schoenberg’s String
30 Quartets opp. 7 and 10, which the Rosé Quartet performed to mark the
1 opening of an exhibition of Schoenberg’s paintings. Both Schoenberg and
2 Zemlinsky were once again invited to supper with the Mahlers. According to
3 Alma, it was on this occasion that Schoenberg said to her: ‘I promise you never
4 to argue with Mahler again. From today on he can shout at me as hard as he
5 likes. I shall never take offence. My mind is made up. And it is because I love
6 him.’53 Mahler spent part of this period revising his Fourth Symphony and
7 correcting the proofs of the Eighth. The couple then left Vienna separately,
8 planning to meet up again on board the Kaiser Wilhelm II. Mahler travelled to
9 Berlin, where he saw a number of his friends, including Oskar Fried, before
40 boarding the ship in Bremen. Alma left two days earlier, presumably with the
41R excuse of calling on the couple’s friends in Paris, but in reality for very different
reasons. This was her last opportunity to see Gropius before she returned to 1
America, and she planned the meeting with great precision and sophistication: 2
3
Rendez-vous would be Munich. 4
I’ll be leaving on Friday 14 October at 11.55 on the Orient Express from 5
Vienna. My bed is no. 13 in the second sleeping car. I’ve not yet been into 6
town and so I don’t know your answer. I’m writing on the off-chance. I’d 7
advise you (if you’re coming) to book your sleeping-car ticket in the name of 8
Walter Grote from Berlin – G[ustav] is leaving two days later and may ask to 9
see the list. Please answer as soon as possible. A. M. 50.54 10
1
Gropius boarded the train in Munich – it was the last time that he saw Alma 2
before Mahler’s death. 3
4
5
6
7
8
9
20
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
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9
40
41R
1
2
3 35
4
5
6
7 The Fragmentary Tenth Symphony
8
9
10
1
2
3
4 in 2000 of a recording of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony by
5
6
W ITH THE RELEASE
the Berlin Philharmonic under Sir Simon Rattle in what the packaging
described as ‘a performing version of Mahler’s draft, prepared by Deryck
7 Cooke, in collaboration with Berthold Goldschmidt, Colin Matthews and
8 David Matthews’, a debate that had been going on for eighty years appeared to
9 have been settled: Mahler’s Tenth Symphony had finally come of age. And now
20 that a leading Mahlerian such as Michael Gielen has overcome his initial scep-
1 ticism and taken this version into his repertory, its widespread acceptance is
2 assured, ensuring its victory over other performing versions. The protracted
3 history of this fragment and attempts to complete it is too complex to be exam-
4 ined in detail here,1 but what is important is that not even the opening move-
5 ment has come down to us in the sort of condition in which Mahler performed
6 his other symphonies, nor even in the state in which he left the Ninth
7 Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde, neither of which he lived to perform.
8 Not even the publication in 2003 of the sketches that now form part of the
9 Moldenhauer Archives in the Bavarian State Library alters this fact. To date
30 there have been at least six attempts to produce a performing version on the
1 basis of this heterogeneous material. During her lifetime Alma Mahler
2 approached both Schoenberg and Shostakovich, asking whether they would be
3 willing to undertake such a challenge. As early as 1924, Ernst Krenek, who was
4 for a time her son-in-law, had collaborated with Franz Schalk and Alexander
5 Zemlinsky on a performing version of the first and third movements that
6 Schalk conducted in Vienna in the October of that year. By the 1950s there was
7 something of a race to complete these disparate drafts, a race ultimately won
8 by the English musicologist Deryck Cooke. In his foreword to the published
9 edition, Cooke refuses to describe his version as a reconstruction or a comple-
40 tion but as a glimpse into Mahler’s workshop, and yet the wider public has
41R come to regard this version as Mahler’s Tenth – after all, who reads the small
THE FRAGMENTARY TENTH SYMPHONY 663
print in a score or a programme booklet? But listeners who now have a chance 1
to hear the third movement, with its portentous title of ‘Purgatorio’, certainly 2
have food for thought even if they are not familiar with the complex genesis of 3
this version. That it lasts less than four minutes is an indication of the fact that 4
Mahler’s purgatories could be short and painless. And yet the impression given 5
by publishing houses, record companies and performers that something 6
authentic and finished is being presented is more than problematical. 7
Mahler began work on his sketches for his Tenth Symphony in Toblach 8
between 6 and 17 July 1910, in other words, between his fiftieth birthday and 9
Alma’s arrival from Tobelbad. And he put them to one side on 3 September, 10
without ever returning to them. Instead, his time was taken up with the 1
exhausting preparations for the first performance of his Eighth Symphony and 2
planning his season of concerts in New York, his journey to America and the 3
frantic activity bound up with this season, which was brought to a premature 4
end by the onset of his final fatal illness. Clearly he had no opportunity – or he 5
did not look for an opportunity – to take out his sketches again after 3 6
September.2 The catastrophic events of the summer of 1910 left clear traces on 7
them. But in order to avoid any misunderstandings, it needs to be stressed that 8
neither the conception of the symphony nor the resultant sketches are a 9
‘response’ to the events that overwhelmed Mahler in July and August 1910. 20
Rather, they predate those events. Even so, these events are reflected in the 1
sketches and caused Mahler to break off work on the score, and may even have 2
discouraged him from elaborating them in the course of his final winter. It is 3
unnecessary to repeat the heart-breaking comments that Mahler added to the 4
sketches – even quoting them once is arguably once too often. But they suggest 5
that during the final months of his life he lacked the emotional strength to take 6
out these sketches again. This was a task that was to be left to a later age. 7
There will perhaps continue to be conductors who are content to perform 8
only the opening Adagio, just as there are conductors who still perform Berg’s 9
Lulu in its two-act version, rather than in the three-act version completed by 30
Friedrich Cerha. (In every other way, the two cases are barely comparable.) 1
This opening movement is by far the most fully worked out part of the 2
score, especially in terms of its instrumentation. It is an uncommonly impres- 3
sive Adagio, but one that reveals more ‘moderate’ features when compared 4
with the Adagio of the Ninth Symphony and, as such, is more firmly 5
embedded in the great tradition of the symphonic Adagio, notably the Adagios 6
of Bruckner – not only his incomplete Ninth Symphony but also the opening 7
movement of his Third. Melancholy and meditative in character, the first 8
subject-group is vaguely reminiscent of the opening of Act Three of Tristan 9
und Isolde, but we do not know whether Mahler intended this as a homage to 40
one of the gods of his youth and whether he might have toned it down in the 41R
664 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 final version of the piece, but there is no doubt that the spare textures of the
2 sketches would have been more densely harmonized: at one point in the
3 sketches for this movement he writes the word ‘polyphonic’. But however
4 impressive this movement may be from a melodic and atmospheric point of
5 view, it would not have remained as it is in the sketches – this arte povera was
6 not Mahler’s last word on the subject. If there is a reason for performing this
7 movement, it is to acquaint ourselves with one of the most disturbing of
8 Mahler’s creations, disturbing precisely because of the stark contrast that exists
9 between its innovative language and its initially retrospective character.
10 I am thinking in particular of the famous nine-note chord that buries its way
1 into our consciousness in bar 206 and again in bar 208: to paraphrase Mahler,
2 the world had heard nothing like it, at least the world in which his harmonic
3 language had operated until then. Seeming to come from another world, a
4 powerful tutti chord in A flat minor erupts into an adagio passage that restores
5 the mood of the beginning. From this chord there develops a wind chorale that
6 draws attention to itself by dint of its unusual dissonances – it sounds like a
7 Bruckner chorale groping its way towards atonality. Starting in bar 203 from a
8 sustained A in the violins, a new chord is built up in four steps, culminating in
9 the nine-note chord in bars 206 and 208, a chord that has nothing to do with the
20 functional harmony that Mahler had embraced hitherto and that cannot be
1 explained by that traditional harmonic language. Initially we hear only the a′′ in
2 the first violins, then the five-note chord G sharp-B-D-F-A, before the C sharp
3 is added in the bass and C-E flat-G above it. At no previous point in Mahler’s
4 output had it been possible to predict this emancipation of the dissonance.
5 The consequences of this nine-note chord for his subsequent output must
6 remain the object of speculation. While it would be wrong to abandon our
7 former scepticism concerning any alleged link between Mahler’s life and music,
8 there does seem to be a legitimate explanation for this unprecedentedly bold
9 harmony in that it may well be inspired by the catastrophic events that unfolded
30 in Toblach during the summer of 1910. The chord was evidently added to the
1 first movement only when Mahler was already working on the sketches to the
2 final movement, for it is only here that the whole passage appears in its initial
3 form. Mahler evidently wanted to use so powerful a passage in the opening
4 movement, too, and to create an overarching structure, hence his decision to add
5 it to the earlier movement as well. The connection between Alma’s infidelity and
6 this terrible dissonance – terrible for listeners in 1912, whereas from today’s
7 perspective it is terrible for reasons other than purely musical ones – is
8 irrefutable, for the sustained a′′ of the first violins, like the a′ in the third trumpet
9 in bars 206 and 208, surely refers to her. Less convincing, by contrast, is the
40 recently revived hypothesis that Mahler is referring to this chord in the poem
41R that he wrote to Alma immediately after his encounter with Freud, the first verse
THE FRAGMENTARY TENTH SYMPHONY 665
of which ends with the lines ‘Zusammen floss zu einem einzigen Akkord / Mein 1
zagend Denken und mein brausend Fühlen’ (literally, ‘My hesitant thinking and 2
raging feelings flowed together in a single chord’). It matters little whether 3
Mahler sketched out this chord before he travelled to Leiden or only after his 4
return. What matters is that if Mahler had been thinking of the chord in his 5
poem, it could only have been as an expression of otherworldly consonance, for 6
the chord in the poem refers to the love between the couple, a love that Mahler 7
urgently invokes and that he hopes to win back. For a nine-note dissonance to 8
express the longed-for restitution of marital harmony would have come suspi- 9
ciously close to a Freudian slip or an example of self-mortifying irony.3 10
However inadequate these comments, they may none the less suffice. The 1
harrowing circumstances in which these sketches were produced, their 2
puzzling character, the aura of the late work whose incompleteness cannot, 3
however, be blamed on the composer’s final fatal illness – all of this places the 4
fragmentary Tenth Symphony in the realm of speculation. It is by no means 5
illegitimate or symptomatic of a lack of piety to want to listen to Deryck 6
Cooke’s ‘performing version’, but the listener is simply deluding himself if he 7
thinks that what he can hear is Mahler’s Tenth Symphony. The work is not by 8
Mahler, and if it has found a place for itself in the concert hall, then scepticism 9
is in order. The objections of various Mahler experts are far from being invali- 20
dated by the increasing refinements to Cooke’s performing version or by the 1
alternative versions proposed by others. Although Cooke’s version seems to 2
have gained an unstoppable momentum, it is still worth reminding ourselves 3
of Adorno’s warning, which has lost none of its pertinence: 4
5
The draft has by no means been developed to the point where we can guess 6
where it was heading. Its own laws remained shrouded in darkness. With an 7
epico-musical composer like Mahler what is significant is the apparently 8
insignificant and the detail which, incessantly newly produced, is always 9
changing. And for that the fragment offers insufficient purchase. One does 30
not need to fall victim to puritanical zeal or to fetishize the genius when one 1
mistrusts attempts that cannot achieve their intended aim and that merely 2
cause confusion. . . . Even the opening movement would be better honoured 3
by our reading it in silence, rather than by being exposed to performances in 4
which the unrealized becomes the imperfect.4 5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3 36
4
5
6
7 ‘My heart is weary’ – The Farewell
8
9
10
1
2
3
4 How Men of Genius Die
5
‘How gentle and calm as the sea were your life and death, Wutz, you contented
6
little schoolmaster!’ one of Mahler’s favourite authors, Jean Paul, writes at the start
7
of the ‘kind of idyll’ that constitutes his life of Maria Wutz of Auenthal. ‘The calm
8
and mild sky of a late summer surrounded your life not with clouds but with
9
fragrance: the stages of your life were the fluctuations and your death was the
20
plucking of a lily whose leaves flutter on standing flowers – even outside the grave
1
you slept gently!’1 Mahler’s life and death were anything but gentle and as calm
2
as the sea. He was no contented musician, and it would never occur to anyone
3
remotely familiar with his life to describe it as a kind of idyll. Mahler had nothing
4
in common with Maria Wutz. The death of great men is generally seen as very
5
different from that of provincial schoolmasters. Take the following example:
6
7
He lay in the final agony, unconscious and with the death-rattle in his throat,
8
from 3 o’clock, when I arrived, until after 5 o’clock; then there was suddenly
9
a loud clap of thunder accompanied by a lot of lightning which illuminated
30
the death-chamber with a harsh light (there was snow in front of the house).
1
After this unexpected natural phenomenon, which had shaken me greatly, he
2
opened his eyes, raised his right hand and, his fist clenched, looked upwards
3
for several seconds with a very grave, threatening countenance, as though to
4
say, ‘I defy you, powers of evil! Away! God is with me.’ It also seemed as
5
though he were calling like a valiant commander to his faint-hearted troops:
6
‘Courage, men! Forward! Trust in me! The victory is ours!’
7
As he let his hand sink down onto the bed again, his eyes half closed. My
8
right hand lay under his head, my left hand rested on his breast. There was
9
no more breathing, no more heartbeat! The great composer’s spirit fled from
40
this world of deception into the kingdom of truth.2
41R
‘MY HEART IS WEARY’ – THE FAREWELL 667
Anselm Hüttenbrenner’s account of Beethoven’s death suggests that this is how 1

a Titan dies, nature providing elemental funeral music in the form of thunder 2
and lightning and driving snow. Another observer of the same event, Andreas 3
Johann Wawruch, the composer’s principal physician at the time of his death, 4
reports on a similar natural spectacle, adding the rhetorical question: ‘What 5
would a Roman augur have concluded about his apotheosis from the fortu- 6
itous unrest of the elements?’3 According to an ineradicable legend, Mozart’s 7
burial was accompanied by rain, snow and hail – it is possible that these condi- 8
tions preceded the interment but that the weather quickly improved. A similar 9
spirit permeates accounts of the last words or gestures of great men and 10
women. In the case of Mozart, he is said to have puffed up his cheeks to imitate 1
the timpani in his Requiem – a work likewise shrouded in mystery. As 2
Wolfgang Hildesheimer remarks in his biography of Mozart, ‘The last hours 3
and the death of a genius are also subject to aesthetic censure: they must 4
provide some undisputed beauty for reverent generations to come; they must 5
also have the stuff of tradition, “last words”, last gestures.’4 No ‘last words’ of 6
Mozart have come down to us, whereas according to Alma, Mahler repeatedly 7
spoke the name ‘Mozartl’ – an Austrian diminutive of the composer’s name – 8
while dying. 9
It is now generally accepted that Goethe did not say ‘More light’ on his 20
deathbed. According to another version, he spoke of the approach of spring, 1
when there was a greater chance of recovery. The truth of the matter is that the 2
cause of death – almost certainly a heart attack brought on by his bronchitis – 3
left him with little time to utter any dying words. In Goethe’s case we have the 4
highly realistic account of his final moments by his personal physician, Carl 5
Vogel, who reports on his contorted features, sunken eyes, ashen face and chat- 6
tering teeth, an account undoubtedly closer to the truth but hardly Titanic in 7
spirit. When great men die, the elements are thrown into disarray: according to 8
the French Classicists, they die ‘un beau trépas’. Goethe is one of the few to be 9
spared such concomitant phenomena, whereas in the case of Napoleon – if we 30
may believe his biographers – the whole of nature was in turmoil. The sober 1
historian Adolphe Thiers was unable to persuade his readers to accept his own 2
version of events, whereby the weather on the day the deposed emperor died 3
was calm and sunny. Chateaubriand talks of rain and storms, Emil Ludwig of a 4
storm that uprooted two trees outside Napoleon’s house. De Bradi describes an 5
uncanny calm abruptly broken by a violent tempest like a powerful cannonade, 6
while others claim that a thunderclap was heard in distant Flanders at the 7
moment that Napoleon died. Yet others insist that they saw a comet. Of course, 8
there is a venerable precedent to all of these reports: ‘And, behold, the veil of the 9
temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom, and the earth did quake, 40
and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened.’ 41R
668 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 And what about Mahler? Alma describes his death-rattle lasting several
2 hours. ‘That ghastly sound ceased suddenly at midnight on 18th May during a
3 tremendous thunderstorm. With that last breath his beloved and beautiful soul
4 had fled.’5 It has to be added at this point that she was not in fact present in the
5 room when Mahler died. According to Bruno Walter, when the coffin was
6 taken from the clinic to the cemetery chapel, ‘a storm broke and such torrents
7 of rain fell that it was almost impossible to proceed’.6 Paul Stefan describes
8 the moment at which the coffin was lowered into the ground: ‘The rain had
9 ceased, a wonderful rainbow became visible, and a nightingale’s voice was
10 heard through the silence. Then fell the last clods, and all was over.’7 Alma had
1 no hesitation in investing Mahler’s death with the features of Christ’s Passion:
2 ‘On the evening after, he was washed and his bed made. Two attendants lifted
3 his naked emaciated body. It was a taking down from the cross.’8 Last words
4 also include last signs and portents in the form of signals from another world,
5 a world that no longer makes sense to those who are shameless enough to
6 survive the great man’s death. Goethe, for example, is said to have drawn
7 symbols in the air with his forefinger and then, when he no longer had the
8 strength to raise his arm, on the blanket of his bed. Alma, too, claims to have
9 seen Mahler conducting with one of his fingers on the quilt.
20 Faced with the death of any great figure whom we admire unreservedly, we
1 inevitably ask ourselves questions as to whether their deaths were not prema-
2 ture or senseless and whether they might have gone on to create yet greater
3 masterpieces. Given the greatness of the Ninth Symphony and of the unfin-
4 ished Tenth, no one will claim that Mahler had passed the peak of his powers
5 and was merely repeating himself. Quite the opposite, a constant develop-
6 ment is discernible, and there is widespread agreement that these two works,
7 together with Das Lied von der Erde, represent the pinnacle of his achievement.
8 And even if we find it hard to imagine any further increase in his powers, there
9 is no reason to suppose that the Tenth would have been followed by a period
30 of creative stagnation or even decline. It is quite different when an artist
1 appears to have reached the end of his career and put his house in order and
2 his will to live is broken or at least so impaired that death seems a welcome
3 comforter, even if the artist himself is ultimately reluctant to accept this. The
4 elderly Goethe is a case in point. He had not reached the stage of desiring
5 death, but he was conscious of the fact that the harvest had been gathered in.
6 This was emphatically not true of Mahler.
7 It is also generally believed that the death of great men, like any powerful
8 event, is heralded by portents, including comets and other celestial phenomena.
9 But in spite of all the crises and catastrophes and threats to his health, Mahler
40 did not see his death coming and certainly did not long for it. There are a
41R number of chiefly American studies of a psychoanalytical bent that speak of a
deep-rooted death wish on Mahler’s part. Such writers claim that he was 1
obsessed by the death of so many of his brothers in their infancy and early 2
youth and above all by that of his favourite brother, Ernst, and that this obses- 3
sion found expression in the fratricide in Das klagende Lied and that it went 4
on to dominate his entire life as a covert driving force. Such claims can be 5
dismissed out of hand. Mahler never stopped thinking about death, but there is 6
no evidence that he had a relaxed approach to his own mortality. In principle 7
he shared Thomas Mann’s view in The Magic Mountain that ‘for the sake of 8
goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts’. 9
His discussions with Lipiner and his belief in entelechy were ultimately an 10
attempt to come to terms with death. The only candid remark of his to have 1
come down to us is the one that we have already quoted from his letter to Bruno 2
Walter: he had always known that he must die. And when, in the very next 3
breath Mahler denies having a hypochondriac’s fear of death, we know that we 4
can believe him.9 And yet the crisis of 1907 had shaken the very foundations of 5
his own private view of the world, and it needed considerable effort on his part, 6
lasting several years, to pull himself together again. An element of effusiveness 7
remains, and there seems little doubt that Mahler would not have subscribed to 8
the tone of Mozart’s famous remark in a letter to his father: 9
20
When looked at closely, death is the true goal of our lives, and for a number 1
of years I’ve familiarized myself with this true friend of man to such an extent 2
that his image is no longer a source of terror to me but is comforting and 3
consoling! And I give thanks to my God that He has given me the good 4
fortune of finding an opportunity – you understand what I mean – of real- 5
izing that death is the key to our true happiness. – I never go to bed without 6
thinking that – young as I am – I may no longer be alive the next morning – 7
and yet no one who knows me can say that I’m sullen or sad in my dealings 8
with them – and for this blessing I give daily thanks to my creator and with 9
all my heart wish that all my fellow creatures may feel the same.10 30
1
This is not the place to discuss the extent to which Mozart may have been 2
echoing intellectual and literary models of his age or, conversely, expressing his 3
very own profound convictions. Suffice it to say that Mahler did not share this 4
quietistic calm: his sense of inner equilibrium was fragile and effortfully 5
achieved, so that it could all too easily be shaken by any passing crisis. 6
7
8
The Last Season in New York
9
We cannot be sure about Mahler’s basic mood during the final months of his 40
life and whether he had learnt to cope with the events of the summer of 1910, 41R
670 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 but the surviving sources seem to indicate that, astonishingly, he survived the
2 third hammer blow more resiliently than the previous two. On the other hand,
3 a man like Mahler was never able to cope with events of this nature. And yet it
4 seems that he believed Alma and that he had survived the Gropius affair or,
5 rather, he interpreted her assurances in such a way that he was able to believe
6 that he had survived it. He remained unaware of the fact that she was contin-
7 uing her passionate affair behind his back, not only in Munich, where his
8 attention was taken up with rehearsals for his Eighth Symphony, but also in the
9 sleeping carriage from Munich to Paris and probably also in Paris, too. Nor
10 did he know that letters continued to pass to and fro between New York and
1 Berlin. Ever since he had suffered a severe attack of streptoccocal angina in
2 Munich in September 1910, he was marked out by death, a colourful metaphor
3 that in the present case has medical support. Yet he was by no means sick at
4 heart. As we have noted, many of his friends were struck by his wretched
5 appearance at the rehearsals and performances in Munich. And yet the snap-
6 shot photographs that were taken in Munich’s Hofgarten at this time do not
7 show a dying man, and the same is true of the pictures taken of him in New
8 York that winter.11 It will be recalled that the Viennese impresario Maurice
9 Baumfeld invited the Mahlers to spend Christmas with him and his family in
20 his New York apartment in 1907. In his reminiscences of the composer, which
1 were published soon after the latter’s death, he discusses the winter of 1910/11
2 in terms that could hardly be more unequivocal:
3
4 In the first half of the final winter he had been in a particularly happy frame
5 of mind. Full of the most grandiose plans which, contrary to his usual
6 custom, he actually confided in others. He was filled with the serene joy of life
7 that is typical of advancing age. Since he knew that he and his family were
8 financially secure for the rest of his life, he wanted to spend a few years –
9 ‘anyway it won’t be all that long’ – enjoying the unfettered existence of an
30 independent artist. Living only for his compositions, for which he expected
1 full recognition only from a later age, and looking forward to a time of
2 cheerful contemplation within the circle of those friends with whom he was
3 glad to spend hour upon hour.12
4
5 It is unclear how we should interpret the phrase ‘anyway it won’t be all that
6 long’. Does it mean that he would not be able to hold out for long without
7 conducting? Rather, it suggests that he had a limited life expectancy, but even
8 then it does not imply a presentiment of death or a longing for death, but
9 merely the sober realization that his health was seriously impaired and that his
40 family did not expect him to live for long. But why should he not live to be
41R more than sixty, like his father? Whatever the answer, nothing suggests that he
expected to be dead within a matter of months. Even what appears to be his 1

last surviving letter – it was written to Emil Hertzka of Universal-Edition and 2
arrived in Vienna on 21 February, the day of Mahler’s last concert, so it will 3
have been posted around the 13th, exactly a week before the onset of his final 4
illness – contradicts this claim, for Mahler says quite clearly that he plans to 5
return to New York for the following season. His family knew that he had a 6
weak heart, but such was his tremendous energy that he had recovered from 7
every exertion and achieved incredible feats of endurance. The present situ- 8
ation seemed no different. To all intents and purposes he looked to be fully 9
recovered. During the crossing to America, he was in the best of moods and 10
even took part in an onboard concert, accompanying the famous Irish tenor 1
John McCormack. 2
The couple arrived in New York on 25 October. At the end of November he 3
wrote to Emil Freund in Vienna: ‘I am pretty well at the moment, with a frantic 4
amount of work, which I am coping with very well. Alma and Gucki are, 5
I’m afraid, not in the best of health.’13 And to his Munich impresario, Emil 6
Gutmann, who had performed miracles in organizing the performances of the 7
Eighth Symphony in September, he wrote, probably in December: ‘It is as good 8
as certain that I shall return next season.’14 This is not the tone adopted by 9
someone paralysed by a presentiment of death. Mahler’s resolve was unbroken, 20
and he certainly needed his strength, for his commitments had increased, the 1
Philharmonic Society wanting him to conduct even more concerts than in 2
previous seasons. At the same time, however, his difficulties with some of the 3
Society’s organizers took a turn for the worse. Within days of his arrival in 4
New York he gave one of his rare interviews to The Etude. In the course of it, 5
he was particularly voluble, expatiating on the influence of the folksong on 6
national styles, on the importance of good music during a child’s formative 7
years and the inclusion of folk elements, real or apparent, in symphonic music, 8
an aspect of his own music that has often been criticized. Conversely, his 9
comments on the capabilities and potential of black Americans would now be 30
dismissed as an egregious example of political incorrectness. Music such as 1
ragtime, he insisted, was simply substandard and attempts to incorporate it 2
into American art music should be avoided at all costs. Neither Scott Joplin 3
nor George Gershwin could have appealed to Mahler in their defence. People 4
were not all the same, Mahler concluded, and ‘red-skinned aborigines’ needed 5
centuries to evolve to an advanced ethnological level.15 6
Mahler’s fortunes as conductor and music director of the New York 7
Philharmonic were by no means as brilliant during his final season in the city 8
as they had been previously. If we are to judge him by his own high standards, 9
we shall be forced to conclude that, his initial triumphs at the Met and 40
Carnegie Hall notwithstanding, his American years were not a success. Not 41R
672 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 even his experience and authority were enough to restore the Met to an even
2 keel, nor was he able to find a new artistic home in America for his own music,
3 while his tremendous commitment to the New York Philharmonic failed to
4 achieve the desired results.16 Mahler did not die at the peak of his personal
5 happiness and artistic triumphs – the first performances of the Eighth
6 Symphony had taken place a full eight months earlier, a date that had also
7 marked the low point in his marriage. After three years in New York, the
8 Viennese maestro’s novelty had worn off. The number of subscribers to his
9 concerts fell slightly but perceptibly. The critics no longer reviewed each
10 Mahler concert as if it were a sensation. Instead, it was Toscanini who was now
1 the talk of the town. At the very moment that Mahler was writing to Gutmann
2 to say that he was planning at least one more season in New York, the organ-
3 izers of the Philharmonic concerts seem to have started to discuss the question
4 of his successor. In this he himself was partly to blame, for, as with the Met, he
5 had hesitated to sign a long-term contract but had committed himself only to
6 one season at a time – and even this commitment had been made with some
7 reluctance. Understandably, orchestras and their boards of management, to say
8 nothing of their shareholders, are never keen on such ad hoc arrangements.
9 Mahler conducted his Fourth Symphony on 17 and 20 January 1911 in the
20 version that he had spent the previous summer meticulously revising. Although
1 he was very pleased with the way the work now sounded, a number of critics
2 again complained about music that struck them as so unusual. Mahler’s
3 programmes contained fewer novelties than before, but instead there were
4 more repeats, a change intended to make his work easier but which in fact meant
5 that the concerts received less attention, with the result that the Guarantors’
6 Committee insulted Mahler by setting up a programme committee designed to
7 assist him in planning his concerts. This was an act of brazen effrontery, and
8 Mahler interpreted it as such.
9 Strong-headed and undiplomatic as ever, Mahler also made mistakes when
30 dealing with the orchestra. Even before this, he had developed the habit of
1 seeking out a confidant in every orchestra with which he worked closely and
2 using that person in furthering his own ends. Collectives tended to make him
3 anxious, which he tried to overcome by high-handedness and a show of force.
4 All the more important, then, were the individuals on whom he believed he
5 could rely and who would report on the mood within the orchestra but whom
6 their orchestral colleagues regarded, rather, as spies and collaborators. His
7 brother-in-law Arnold Rosé had been one such figure in the Court Opera
8 orchestra in Vienna. It was a situation that led to animosities, for all that Rosé’s
9 outstanding musicality lent him a certain authority. In the case of the New York
40 Philharmonic, Mahler singled out a second violinist by the name of Theodor
41R Johner, but Johner had less natural authority than Rosé. The orchestra mutinied
against him and by extension against Mahler, insisting on the spy’s dismissal. As 1
always, Mahler dug his heels in and, insisting on retaining Johner’s services, 2
turned the whole wretched affair into a battle of wills. But whereas in Vienna he 3
had been the all-powerful director of the Opera, in New York he was no more 4
than the de facto principal conductor: the real power lay in the hands of the 5
committee that ran the orchestra. The players went running to the committee, 6
and Mahler lost the battle. 7
In the middle of February he was summoned to the home of Mary Sheldon, 8
whose unequivocal support he no longer enjoyed. The only member of the 9
committee to have retained her unquestioning loyalty was Minnie Untermeyer, 10
but on her own there was little that she could do. The immensely wealthy Mary 1
Sheldon evidently gave Mahler to understand that even great artists have to 2
serve the needs of the society that finances them. Mahler had to climb down 3
and accept Johner’s dismissal. According to Alma he returned from this 4
meeting incandescent with anger and shaking with fury. His shivering may also 5
have been a harbinger of his final fatal illness, although it could have been 6
brought on by the agitation that he was feeling. These events took place only 7
a few days before the onset of his final illness and undoubtedly hastened it. 8
His final concerts following this confrontation were overshadowed by his 9
deep-seated anger towards the orchestra and its committee and by an equally 20
deep-seated antipathy towards him on the part of large sections of the orchestra 1
and its committee. It was on this low point that their association ended, for all 2
that it had begun so gloriously. It is unlikely that in the wake of these events 3
Mahler thought seriously about returning to New York for a further season. 4
He conducted his very last concert at Carnegie Hall on 21 February. It 5
was an Italian-themed programme, with works by three contemporary Italian 6
composers, Leone Sinigaglia, Giuseppe Martucci and Marco Enrico Bossi, 7
Mendelssohn’s ‘Italian’ Symphony and Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque, which 8
Busoni, who was present at the performance, had written on the death of his 9
mother and which, he told his wife, Mahler did not conduct quite as well as his 30
Turandot Suite. None the less, the success of the performance was such that the 1
mutual regard in which the two composers held each other and which dated 2
back to their first meeting in Vienna in 1899 will undoubtedly have increased. 3
Mahler was unable to conduct the repeat of the concert three days later, when 4
the orchestra’s leader, Theodore Spiering, whom Mahler had himself engaged, 5
took over all the works in the programme with the exception of Busoni’s 6
Berceuse élégiaque, which Busoni himself conducted. Spiering conducted the 7
remainder of the concerts that season: it seems to have become clear very soon 8
that Mahler would be unable to do so, even though the rest of the world 9
continued to be assured that he would be returning to the podium very 40
quickly. 41R
674 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 The harmonious relationship between husband and wife that Alma describes
2 in her reminiscences of these final months in America rests on a deception. By
3 8 November, Mahler had completed his first three concerts of the season and,
4 as seems to be confirmed by an unclear photograph, he went for a walk in
5 Central Park with his daughter. Alma used his absence to write to Gropius from
6 her desk in the Savoy Hotel:
7
8 You float before me like a figure of light – a most beautiful youth – and you
9 determine my actions. When shall I see you in person? When? Shall I see you
10 again just like a god created you – for only a god can achieve anything of this
1 kind? I want to absorb all your beauty. The perfection of us both must surely
2 produce a demigod.17
3
4 Alma’s mother had long known about the affair and with a sound mother’s
5 instinct clearly sided with the stronger – and younger – couple. One has the
6 feeling that she had already written off Mahler, who for his part called her
7 ‘Mummy’ and clearly regarded her as a substitute for his own mother, who had
8 died twenty-two years earlier. Let us hope that he suspected nothing. In a letter
9 that she wrote to Gropius from Vienna on 13 November 1910 Anna Moll
20 noted that
1
2 the sad thing is that one cannot do anything at present – one has to leave it
3 all to time, but I firmly believe that for both of you your love will survive all
4 this. I have such boundless trust in you and am convinced that you love my
5 child so much that you will do nothing to make her even more unhappy.18
6
7 It must remain Alma’s secret how she managed to deal with Mahler’s childlike
8 high spirits as he kissed lips that had just sealed a letter to Gropius. The whole
9 of her cult of her dead husband, as described by Canetti, and her insistence on
30 carrying on like Mary Magdalene throughout Mahler’s final illness were clearly
1 the expression of a guilty conscience. She can scarcely have seen herself as
2 innocent of her husband’s death.
3 Mahler fell over himself in his attempts to show Alma his affection. He
4 invited her to Niagara Falls and in general was more charming and attentive
5 than he had ever been before. Initially, at least, these final months were not
6 overshadowed, except by problems with the orchestra. The couple began to
7 take an interest in theosophy and the occult and studied books by C. W.
8 Leadbeater and Annie Besant, the latter a former associate of Helena Blavatsky,
9 that were le dernier cri in Europe and America. The Mahlers tried closing their
40 eyes to see what colours they could see. ‘We were very near together in those
41R days.’ For Christmas 1910 Mahler gave his wife vouchers to spend on ‘a fine
spree along Fifth Avenue’. Some days earlier he had gone out ‘with a very 1
solemn air’, taking his chequebook with him, something he otherwise never 2
did, so great was his fear of losing it. He laid out her presents on a table, but 3
there was something about the situation that Alma claimed to have found 4
distinctly unsettling: 5
6
A pang of icy dread gripped me, when I saw, on a table all for me, that long 7
mound of presents covered with a white cloth and smothered in roses. I 8
snatched off the covering. Mahler stood idly by. But his sadness soon vanished 9
and my dread premonition also, for I was touched to the heart by all the lovely 10
things he had thought of without any regard for his own likes and dislikes.19 1
2
Mahler also took a greater interest in his daughter Anna than he had ever 3
done before. She was then six, an age at which Mahler, who was unable to 4
relate to infants, could begin to treat her as a person. As an old woman, Anna 5
gave several interviews in which she spoke about her father and her mother. 6
(With Alma she always had what, to put it mildly, was a problematical relation- 7
ship.) She had the piercing eyes and profile of her father. When she was young, 8
it was her mother’s gentler features that predominated, but in old age she came 9
to look just like her father. People who knew Anna, including her lovers, 20
claimed that she was more attractive than her mother, inevitably triggering 1
feelings of jealousy in the latter. In adulthood she made no secret of the fact 2
that as a small child there was something terrible about the atmosphere at 3
home, where her father was always revising his scores and needed peace and 4
quiet for his work, but whenever he spent time with her, he was loving and 5
understanding. She sometimes went roller-skating in Central Park but kept 6
falling over. Each time her father patiently set her on her feet again. Even as an 7
old woman, there was one detail Anna remembered very clearly: her father 8
used to eat meat that was badly overcooked. As she realized very clearly, he 9
really did not want to eat meat at all, as he had never entirely abandoned the 30
vegetarian ideas of his youth but believed that he needed meat as a source of 1
strength. But it could not look or taste like meat. It had to be dried out and 2
shrivelled up – if it tasted terrible, it could not be a sin against the spirit. Anna 3
also remembered watching him scratching out notes in a manuscript and 4
exclaiming ‘Papi, I wouldn’t like to be a note.’ ‘Why not?’ he asked. ‘Because 5
then you might scratch me out and blow me away.’20 Mahler was delighted by 6
her answer. The scratched-out notes were an integral part of his Ninth 7
Symphony, which he continued to work on as long as he could. Evidently he 8
did not return to his Tenth Symphony during his final winter. 9
After another tiring series of concerts, Mahler again fell ill on 20 February. 40
It seemed to be the usual sore throat. Joseph Fraenkel examined him and 41R
676 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 suggested that he should pull out of the concert the following evening. Mahler
2 pointed out with some justification that this would not be the first time he had
3 conducted a concert with a high temperature. Frozen to the marrow, he made
4 his way to Carnegie Hall wrapped in blankets. During the interval he felt even
5 worse but continued with the concert. On returning to his hotel, he was given
6 an aspirin and put to bed. By the next morning he seemed to be much better,
7 the fever had gone and, with it, the infection. Mahler’s good spirits returned.
8 The attack appeared to have followed its usual course, just as it had done for
9 years, so that there seemed little reason to be anxious. But suddenly the whole
10 situation changed. The fever returned, initially in a mild form, then stronger,
1 only for it to recede, before returning again with yet greater virulence. This was
2 unusual, and it was also unsettling for Mahler, who knew his own body and his
3 reactions very well. For her part, Alma seems not to have been unduly unset-
4 tled as yet. Initially they thought it was influenza. But when Mahler collapsed
5 again, just as he had done in Toblach the previous summer, Fraenkel grew
6 concerned, and on this occasion Mahler seems to have sensed that the situ-
7 ation was serious, although he could still call on his humour to help him. ‘You
8 will be in great demand when I am gone,’ he told Alma, ‘with your youth and
9 looks. Now who shall it be?’21 And he drew up a list from which Gropius’s
20 name was conspicuous by its absence. Alma was forced to laugh, even though
1 she, too, was now conscious of the gravity of the situation. On another occa-
2 sion he told her to look after his retouched scores of the symphonies of
3 Beethoven and Schumann, claiming – mistakenly – that they were valuable.
4 He was still able to attend a rehearsal for one of his concerts on 3 March, when
5 Frances Alda, the famous New Zealand soprano who was married to the Met’s
6 director, Giulio Gatti-Casazza, sang one of Alma’s songs, ‘Laue Sommernacht’.
7 Alma attended the actual concert and was able to report that the song had
8 been well received, which pleased Mahler.
9 From now on Mahler’s health got worse by the day. It probably did not take
30 Fraenkel long to suspect a case of endocarditis, for he knew that his friend and
1 patient had a heart valve defect and that he had suffered from recurrent bouts
2 of throat infection. But he had no means of verifying this diagnosis, and so he
3 turned to Emanuel Libman, who had studied with the world’s leading
4 authority on such matters, William Osler. Libman worked at the Mount Sinai
5 Hospital, where he specialized in inflammatory heart diseases. Much later he
6 developed an interest in a nonbacterial form of endocarditis now known as
7 Libman endocarditis. Libman visited Mahler at his hotel and began by
8 confirming not only Fraenkel’s diagnosis of a heart valve defect but also his
9 suspicion that Mahler was suffering from a subacute endocarditis. The symp-
40 toms were clear. The spleen was enlarged, petechiae – small lesions – were
41R visible on the conjunctivae and skin, and, most worryingly, there was a slight
clubbing of the fingers, a condition found when the heart is no longer able to 1
supply the blood with sufficient oxygen. Inasmuch as the fingertips and toes 2
are the parts of the body that are furthest from the heart, this under-provision 3
of oxygen is most clearly apparent here. The fingertips swell and become 4
rounded. If the fingers are particularly narrow, as they were with Mahler, then 5
the clubbing is especially noticeable, encouraging the comparison with a 6
drumstick. This suspicion still needed to be confirmed by a blood culture. This 7
was a relatively new method of diagnosis and it was expensive. Nowadays we 8
have laboratories in which thousands of diagnoses can be made every day on 9
the basis of small quantities of a patient’s blood, using expensive equipment, so 10
that it is hard for us to imagine how difficult this procedure was in Mahler’s 1
day. Considerable quantities of blood had to be drawn using thick cannulae. 2
Libman asked his young assistant, George Baehr, to take the samples and 3
prepare the cultures. Baehr later recorded his impressions: 4
5
On arrival I withdrew 20 ml. of blood from an arm vein with syringe and 6
needle, squirted part of it into several bouillon flasks and mixed the 7
remainder with melted agar media which I then poured into sterile Petri 8
dishes. After 4 or 5 days of incubation in the hospital laboratory, the Petri 9
plates revealed numerous bacterial colonies and all the bouillon flasks were 20
found to show a pure culture of the same organism which was subsequently 1
identified as streptococcus viridans.22 2
3
The bacterium is described as ‘viridans’ because it looks green under a micro- 4
scope. When Mahler was examined shortly afterwards by André Chantemesse 5
in Paris, the famous bacteriologist was delighted by the ‘marvellous state of 6
development’ in Mahler’s streptococci. ‘Just look at these threads – it’s like 7
seaweed.’23 It is hard not to be reminded of the Doctor in Berg’s Wozzeck. This 8
diagnosis confirmed Fraenkel’s worst fears – Alma claims that his hair turned 9
white overnight – and effectively sounded Mahler’s death knell. It was still 30
possible to support the circulation and give Mahler a blood transfusion, 1
although this was not in fact attempted because of the patient’s impaired state 2
of health and the risks bound up with such a course of treatment. He was given 3
anti-streptococci vaccinations, but these produced no significant results. 4
Before the discovery of penicillin, none of this would have been of any medical 5
use. The streptococci had settled on the damaged parts of the heart. They 6
could also, of course, have infected a healthy heart, but in a damaged heart 7
they had a far better chance of developing. In such cases the heart valves 8
increasingly fail, the lungs can become congested, causing Mahler to have 9
choking fits. And embolisms can occur in other organs if parts of the bacterial 40
colony are carried in the bloodstream. The kidneys can fail and be the 41R
678 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 immediate cause of death, as was evidently the case with Mahler. And there
2 can also be multiple organ failure. Mahler’s final illness lasted three months. It
3 was not a merciful death.
4 Mahler’s fever dropped when the blood samples were taken, leading Alma –
5 foolishly and senselessly, but forgivably – to feel a renewed sense of hope.
6 Revealing her medical ignorance, she writes in her memoirs that ‘Probably it
7 would have been a good thing if he had been bled’.24 Baehr reports that Mahler
8 insisted on knowing the truth. No doubt he was not told the whole truth, but
9 only that his illness was life-threatening. Since Mahler had no medical under-
10 standing, it was easy to conceal things from him, and so he was given the
1 impression that it was still possible to alleviate his condition. Collargol injec-
2 tions were tried, which were as effective as incense cones during an outbreak
3 of cholera. Fraenkel was all in favour of consulting a bacteriologist in Europe.
4 This, too, was a cosmetic solution, since neither he nor Libman had any hope
5 for their patient’s recovery, and they duly prepared Alma to expect the worst.
6 Chantemesse was one of the most eminent bacteriologists in Europe, and Paris
7 had the additional advantage that it was home to many of the Mahlers’ friends.
8 And so it was decided to take the patient back to Europe as long as he was still
9 capable of travelling.
20 Alma’s mother – the procuress and confidante – was given one final chance
1 to help her son-in-law. She came to New York as quickly as she could, and
2 her resolve and energy proved useful, for Alma had relapsed into one of her
3 frequent bouts of weak-willed inactivity. Although Anna Moll almost set the
4 whole apartment alight with a spirit stove, she was otherwise a great help.
5 Maurice Baumfeld visited Mahler on the day before his departure and found
6 him lying on a couch by the open window, covered in blankets, tired and
7 emaciated, his face ravaged by his illness. Little Anna was playing in the room.
8 Mahler was still lucid and asked about the latest gossip in the musical life of
9 New York but showed little reaction when he was told. Baumfeld had the
30 distinct feeling that Mahler was ‘receding further into the distance with every
1 passing hour’.25 On the day of the departure – 8 April – Mahler refused the
2 stretcher that was offered him. Leaning on Fraenkel for support, he dragged
3 himself to the hotel lift. The lobby had been cleared by the hotel’s solicitous
4 staff in order to spare him the stares of inquisitive strangers. At the side
5 entrance he was collected by the waiting car of Minnie Untermeyer, the last of
6 the Philharmonic Society’s board members to remain loyal to him.
7 Once onboard, Mahler was taken straight to his cabin. Fraenkel gave Alma
8 all the necessary instructions, warning her not to call in the ship’s doctor and
9 then saying goodbye to Alma and Mahler, whom he knew he would never see
40 again. Mahler still felt sufficiently strong to get up nearly every day and take
41R the air in a secluded part of the deck. It was on one such occasion that the last
two photographs of him were taken. On one of them he is seen sitting on a 1

crate-like structure on the upper deck next to Alma, who is turned towards 2
him. His right leg is raised and rests on the railing. There is nothing to indi- 3
cate that he is a dying man, but he is too far from the camera for us to be able 4
to make out his face. Indeed, there is some suggestion that this photograph 5
may date from his previous crossing. The second picture is more powerfully 6
expressive. Here he is seen leaning against the railings in a position entirely 7
typical of him, his left leg bent around his right leg, his left arm resting 8
elegantly on the railing and a walking stick in his right hand, the stick appar- 9
ently wedged between the planks. He is wearing the same suit as the one seen 10
in photographs taken during his voyage to America only a few months earlier, 1
a sturdy, tweed-like travelling suit, while his hat is familiar from the Munich 2
snapshots from the previous September. Some writers have sought to date this 3
photograph to October 1910, and certainly it seems surprising that Mahler still 4
had the strength to stand, fully dressed, on deck, suggesting that the photo- 5
graph may not have been taken in April 1911. On the other hand, there is 6
no denying that his features reveal a dramatic decline in his health when 7
compared with images from the previous autumn and winter. The negligent 8
stance is deceptive, and the observer will find it hard to avoid the feeling that 9
the stick is the only support for the composer’s infirm body. It is, however, his 20
face that reveals the true facts of the matter. The tremendous energy that we 1
can see in his eyes and mouth in all his other photographs has been replaced 2
by a despondent and enfeebled emptiness. His lips had always been thin, but 3
his once expressive mouth is now so contracted as to express only bitterness, 4
the corners turned down to such an extent that they seem to pass into the 5
chin, while the deep furrows running from the nose to the cheekbones bulge 6
visibly. The eyes are lifeless, like candles that have been snuffed out. It is the 7
last photograph ever taken of Mahler. It is impossible to look at it for long. 8
9
30
Return
1
Other passengers on board the ship included Ferruccio Busoni and a ‘young 2
Austrian’ who annoyed Alma by his attentions. Later, on the train from 3
Cherbourg to Paris, he also got on Mahler’s nerves by telling his daughter 4
unsettling stories. It was the young Stefan Zweig.26 Mahler refused to see 5
anyone, and Alma admitted no one to his presence, so that Busoni was able to 6
keep his colleague’s spirits up only by writing down ‘crazy specimens of coun- 7
terpoint’ and having them delivered to the Mahlers’ cabin. Busoni never forgot 8
this crossing with Mahler and only a few days after his death he wrote to a 9
fellow pianist, Egon Petri, to say that he was ‘completely devastated’ by what 40
had happened: ‘I had just gained a friend in him; it strikes me as completely 41R
680 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 implacable.’27 Zweig watched events unfold on the quay at Cherbourg with an

2 importunate curiosity that finds expression in a particularly precious piece
3 of prose:
4
5 He lay there, deathly pale, motionless, his eyelids shut. The wind had blown
6 his greying hair to one side, his rounded brow stood out clear and bold and
7 beneath it the hard chin that was the seat of his thrusting will. His emaciated
8 hands lay folded wearily on the blanket. For the first time I saw him weak,
9 this man who had once been consumed by fire.
10 This silhouette – unforgettable, unforgettable! – was set against the grey
1 infinity of sky and sea. There was boundless sorrow in this sight, but also
2 something transfigured by greatness, something that died away on a note of
3 sublimity, like music.28
4
5 In her reminiscences, Alma claims, rather more prosaically, that Zweig had
6 offered to help with the Mahlers’ luggage but that he vanished at the critical
7 moment.
8 The Mahlers put up at the Hôtel Élysée on 16 April, where they were joined
9 by Carl Moll. The next day there was a flicker of ghost-like hope, for when Alma
20 got up, she discovered Mahler sitting on the balcony, fully dressed, and
1 demanding breakfast. He even began to plan for the future. Something should
2 be done about Peter Cornelius’s opera Der Barbier von Bagdad, he insisted. It
3 was, he said, a wonderful piece. He then ordered an ‘electric automobile’ in
4 order to visit the Bois de Boulogne, for it was a beautiful day. The beauty of the
5 city and of the weather briefly revived him, but the effort proved too much, and
6 by the end he was at death’s door, his head resting in his mother-in-law’s lap.
7 Now he, too, lost all hope. Until now there had been no talk of a desire or readi-
8 ness to die. Of course, his feelings had vacillated between euphoria and despair
9 and sometimes a mixture of the two, but now his strength began to fail him. He
30 had always exuded life and driven his feeble body beyond its natural limits, and
1 it was this vital spark that kept him going for a full three months. But by
2 18 April Mahler had abandoned all hope for his future recovery, and even then
3 it took another month before his life was finally snuffed out. During this period
4 he spoke a lot with Anna Moll in order to spare his wife. He told her that
5 he wanted to be buried at Grinzing next to his daughter and that there was
6 to be no music and no speeches at his funeral. And only the word ‘Mahler’ was
7 to be placed on his tombstone: ‘Any who come to look for me will know who I
8 am, and the rest do not need to know.’29 In the event, the Secessionist artist Josef
9 Hoffmann who designed the timeless tombstone added only the word ‘Gustav’.
40 Alma adds another detail that should be noted, albeit with reservations.
41R According to her reminiscences Mahler spoke at length about the companions
of his youth, by which he meant Lipiner and his circle: ‘They spun webs 1
around me like spiders. They stole my life away. They kept me apart, from jeal- 2
ousy and envy. But I am to blame too. Why did I let it happen? My life has all 3
been paper!’30 And he apparently kept repeating this final sentence. One is 4
tempted to think that Alma was giving free rein to the ineradicable hatred that 5
she felt for Lipiner and for all who had influenced her husband before she met 6
him, including his sister Justine. It is altogether implausible that Mahler would 7
have expressed himself in such negative terms, especially after his rapproche- 8
ment with Lipiner, something he had welcomed so sincerely and which there 9
is no reason to think had turned sour. Bruno Walter, who brought the old 10
friends together again, would surely have noticed if there had been a renewed 1
cooling off, but he says absolutely nothing. The final sentence, ‘My life has all 2
been paper’, may, however be different, as it has an authentic Mahlerian ring to 3
it, for all that it is disconcertingly unexpected. 4
Is it conceivable that all nine completed symphonies were just ‘paper’ and 5
that Mahler regretted having written them? For more than a century these 6
works have fired the imagination of several generations of music lovers, 7
moving them and inspiring them. Such an expression flies in the face of 8
Mahler’s lifelong approach to the creative process, although it is certainly 9
possible that his profound despair in the face of death provoked such 20
depressing thoughts. Although it must sound slightly fatuous to say so, death 1
came at a particularly unfortunate time for Mahler: whatever he may have 2
tried to tell himself, he had dealt with his marital crisis on only the most super- 3
ficial level; his activities in New York had taken a distinctly unfavourable turn; 4
his wonderful vision of life with family and friends in Semmering, where he 5
could devote himself to composition, was still far from being realized; and he 6
had only just made a start on his Tenth Symphony. Ultimately, however, one 7
remains incredulous precisely because from Alma’s perspective a sentence 8
such as ‘My life has all been paper’ confirms her permanent struggle for affec- 9
tion and at the same time reinforces her own belief that she was right to turn 30
her back on music that she had never been able or willing to embrace in all its 1
significance and that had never justified such extreme commitment. A far 2
more credible picture is drawn by Bruno Walter, who hurried to Paris to be 3
with his dying mentor. And yet he too reports on a negative attitude towards 4
Mahler’s own works, confirming Alma’s account, albeit in less dramatic terms: 5
6
There he lay, the tormented victim of an insidious illness that now affected 7
his spirit as well as his body. His mood was sombre and dismissive. When, in 8
an effort to turn his mind to more cheerful matters, I cautiously raised the 9
subject of his own works, his remarks were, for the first time, wholly 40
pessimistic. 41R
682 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Sometimes a spark of his old humour was rekindled, but generally Walter felt
2 only a kind of disinterestedness far removed from the man he knew and loved,
3 but it was all that he needed to make clear to him the hopelessness of Mahler’s
4 situation. Walter made one last attempt to cheer him up by reminding him of
5 the house that he was planning at Semmering, prompting Mahler to reply
6 sadly: ‘That would be nice, but my only desire now is to be allowed enough
7 digitalis to keep my heart going.’31 Walter had to return to Vienna, and when
8 he next saw Mahler in the clinic in the city, the latter was already in a coma.
9 The reason why the Mahlers had travelled to Paris was André Chantemesse,
10 an eminent bacteriologist at the Pasteur Institute, but he could do no more than
1 confirm Libman’s diagnosis and express his delight at the cultures beneath his
2 microscope. Mahler’s condition continued to deteriorate and in her helpless-
3 ness Alma summoned Franz Chvostek from Vienna, who was really a specialist
4 in diseases of the thyroid gland and liver but who enjoyed a legendary reputa-
5 tion in Vienna as a diagnostician. He was on holiday in Trieste when the
6 summons reached him, but he came at once to Paris. Of course, not even he
7 could help, but Mahler knew him, and since Chvostek knew how to deal with
8 such patients, he sought to cheer him up by joking that Mahler would soon
9 recover: ‘Now then, Mahler, what’s all this about? Working too hard, that’s what
20 it is. You’ll have to knock off for six months or a year. You’ve brought it on
1 yourself – you can’t treat your nerves that way, you know.’32 Mahler was
2 delighted by Chvostek’s jocular tone and could not wait to return to Vienna
3 with him, as Chvostek suggested. He wanted to live or die in Vienna, not Paris.
4 On 21 April Mahler was transferred to Dr Defaux’s clinic at Neuilly, where he
5 received the serum therapy prescribed by Chantemesse. But it produced no
6 results. Mahler started to suffer from choking fits, with additional symptoms of
7 angina pectoris, and after three weeks at the clinic, Mahler could take no more.
8 The medical opportunities in Paris seemed to be exhausted, which is hardly
9 surprising, since they had been non-existent in the first place. On the night of
30 11/12 May 1911 Mahler and his party boarded the train to Vienna.
1 In Vienna a competition was in progress to decide who could shed the biggest
2 crocodile tears. On 28 April the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt had published a
3 collage of two photographs and a drawing on its title page. One of the photo-
4 graphs showed Defaux’s clinic at Neuilly, the other the doctor himself, while the
5 drawing depicted Mahler, fully dressed and lying on a couch, with Defaux next
6 to him in conversation with his patient. Viennese patriotism felt violated. For all
7 that he had been persecuted and vilified by the majority of the local papers, this
8 great man, not to say this genius, was ‘one of us’. So why was he being treated in
9 Paris? Until only recently, the Neues Wiener Journal had led the field in attacking
40 Mahler, but now it rejoiced when the terminally ill composer finally arrived back
41R in Vienna on 12 May:
Mahler is an example of the way in which so much strength is dissipated 1

when torn from its native soil and natural habitat. . . . He has been obliged to 2
submit to foreign methods of treatment at the hands of doctors who struck 3
him as strangers, until the sudden decisiveness of those around him set 4
him free. . . . A genius from a caring state is not exposed in this way to life’s 5
superficial vicissitudes. Such a genius has a home in which to move freely and 6
work creatively. 7
8
And the writer went on to inveigh against Mahler’s enemies of old: ‘Austria 9
now has the honour of being the country to which Mahler longed to return: it 10
was his last request to return to a country where, as he himself emphasized, he 1
belongs. But, in truth, it has not done all that it could have done to deserve this 2
honour.’ Karl Kraus reproduced these passages in Die Fackel, adding only a 3
single sentence: ‘Thus spake the Neues Wiener Journal, after organizing the 4
Mahler witch-hunt.’33 As he lay dying, Mahler generated more interest than he 5
had ever done as the Court Opera’s controversial director. His final days 6
became the subject of sensational speculations. Bertha Zuckerkandl wrote to 7
her sister Sophie Clemenceau in Paris, where it seems that Mahler’s French 8
friends had not been allowed to visit him: 9
20
The moment the press announced that Mahler was seriously ill and on his 1
way home, the city was seized by a show of demonstrative grief – the same 2
people who, when he was healthy and active, had driven away the very man 3
who had sacrificed himself for their sake. 4
Under sensational headlines the press issued daily bulletins from his 5
bedside. Sentimental anecdotes were peddled by people who affected to be 6
touched by them. In the salons and coffee houses there was a veritable fire- 7
work display of memories of the glorious age of opera under Mahler. His 8
brilliant Don Giovanni . . . His magnificent Fidelio . . . His ebullient Figaro! . . . 9
Never again will people see anything like it! . . . The same sneering gentlemen 30
who had spat on every Mahler performance now wanted to belong to the inti- 1
mate circle of Mahlerians. 2
And the Loew Sanatorium, where the dying man lay, protected by Alma, 3
was surrounded each day by hundreds of people.34 4
5
The journey from Paris to Vienna had itself been a media event, although it 6
bore no resemblance to the scene in Ken Russell’s Mahler film in which the 7
ailing composer is shown pale and coughing but cheerful and sitting upright 8
in his train carriage. The truth of the matter is that Mahler spent the whole 9
journey lying in his sleeping compartment, incapable of standing up. At each 40
of the larger stations journalists came onboard, hoping to hear news of his 41R
684 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 condition. Mahler was told about them and apparently did not find their
2 interest excessive. The Loew Sanatorium was located in the Mariannengasse in
3 Vienna’s ninth district, between the Alserstraße and the Lazarettgasse. For
4 Mahler, it was no more than a place to die. In the train, Chvostek had warned
5 Alma that even if Mahler recovered, he would spend the rest of his life in a
6 wheelchair with his mind impaired. A demented Mahler in a wheelchair was
7 neither conceivable nor desirable. The steps that the doctors took in the Loew
8 Sanatorium were gestures of helplessness, nothing more. Swellings appeared
9 on the patient’s legs, and radium was applied. He was still sufficiently lucid to
10 notice the countless baskets of flowers that arrived for him, including one from
1 the Vienna Philharmonic that apparently gave him particular pleasure. Arnold
2 Berliner came from Berlin and was one of the last people whom he saw.
3 Mahler grasped his hand and said ‘My dear friend’, then turned his face to the
4 wall. His daughter was brought to see him and he is said to have told her to ‘be
5 a good girl’.35 In old age, Anna Mahler was no longer able to remember this,
6 her ability to deal with unpleasant experiences being sufficiently well devel-
7 oped to suppress details of this kind. She remembered only that when her
8 mother came to tell her that her father was dead, she replied: ‘Don’t. I know.’36
9 The final stage in Mahler’s death throes began with the onset of pneumonia
20 on 14 May. On the 17th he fell into a coma, although his fingers continued to
1 tremble on the blanket, which Alma interpreted as conducting. Chvostek
2 increased the dose of morphine, and shortly after eleven o’clock on the evening
3 of the 18th it was all over. Apart from the medical staff, Carl Moll was the only
4 member of the family to be with Mahler at the end. But it was the sculptor
5 Anton Sandig, rather than Moll, who took the death mask. Alfred Roller and
6 other close friends took their leave of Mahler in his hospital room. Roller
7 reports that by the time he came to see Mahler, the signs of Mahler’s weeks of
8 wrestling with death had already etched themselves into his face, whereas
9 Klimt, who came later, noted a change to something more solemn and calm, a
30 kind of sublime beauty, which, he claimed, is how the death mask depicts
1 Mahler. On this point the biographer scarcely has the authority to contradict
2 those who saw Mahler on his deathbed, but anyone seeing the death mask –
3 at the 2010 Viennese Mahler exhibition, for example – will gain a feeling less
4 of sublimity than of the final struggle for life, a life to which the dying man
5 clung with every fibre of his being. The facies hippocratica overshadows all
6 attempts to heroicize and aestheticize death. In his will he had left instructions
7 that his heart should be pierced with a sharp instrument, a practice still
8 common at this time to ensure that death had indeed occurred.
9 Mahler was not unprepared to meet death. As we have seen, the thought of
40 it had haunted him since the summer of 1907, without, however, exerting a
41R hypochondriac’s hold on him. Of course, he had always been impressed by the
thoughts on life and death of his old philosophical mentor Gustav Theodor 1
Fechner: 2
3
We must never believe that death will spirit us away to a completely different 4
world. Even after death we shall continue to inhabit the same earthly world 5
as the one in which we now live; only we shall comprehend this world by 6
other means and pass through it with greater freedom. In the world through 7
which we now effortfully trudge, we shall one day float effortlessly. Why plant 8
a new garden when flowers bloom in the old garden, flowers to which our 9
new lives will open our eyes and provide us with new senses with which to 10
enjoy them? The same earthly plants serve the caterpillars and butterflies, but 1
they must strike them both in different ways. And whereas the caterpillar 2
clings to a single plant, the butterfly flies freely over the whole of the garden. 3
On earth we can see nothing of the people who preceded us into the afterlife. 4
But what can the caterpillar see that tells it of the life of the butterfly? What 5
does the chicken in the egg know about the life of the bird? . . . It is only 6
because we have earthly eyes that we cannot see those souls who have already 7
been born into a new life, even though these people are among us and around 8
us and live and work within us.37 9
20
We could express this a little differently using the lines of Friedrich Rückert 1
that Mahler set in slightly altered form in the fourth of his Kindertotenlieder: 2
3
Oft denk’ ich, sie sind nur ausgegangen! 4
Bald werden sie wieder nach Hause gelangen! 5
Der Tag ist schön! O, sei nicht bang! 6
Sie machen nur einen weiten Gang! 7
8
Jawohl, sie sind nur ausgegangen 9
Und werden jetzt nach Hause gelangen! 30
O, sei nicht bang, der Tag ist schön! 1
Sie machen nur den Gang zu jenen Höhn! 2
3
Sie sind uns nur vorausgegangen 4
Und werden nicht wieder nach Haus verlangen! 5
Wir holen sie ein auf jenen Höhn 6
Im Sonnenschein! Der Tag ist schön auf jenen Höhn! 7
8
[I often think they have just gone out. They’ll soon be coming home again. 9
It’s a beautiful day. No, do not be afraid. They have only gone for a long walk. 40
Yes, they have just gone out and will now be returning home. Don’t be afraid, 41R
686 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 it’s a beautiful day, they are only walking to those heights. They’ve just gone
2 on ahead of us and won’t want to return home. We shall overtake them on
3 those heights in the sunshine. It’s a beautiful day on those heights.]
4
5 If his despair during the final stage of his life was not too demoralizing, Mahler
6 will have drawn strength from these ideas and additionally recalled Lipiner’s
7 thoughts on death, allowing him to regard the via dolorosa of his final months
8 as painful pebbles beneath his feet on his way to Rückert’s heights.
9 The last book that Mahler read was Eduard von Hartmann’s The Problem
10 of Life. Alma has left a vivid account of the way in which Mahler tore the
1 pages from this 440-page book because he no longer had the strength to hold
2 it in its bound form. Hartmann had been an engineer and an army officer
3 before turning to philosophy, in which he was essentially self-taught. His first
4 published work, Philosophy of the Unconscious, appeared in 1869 and was a
5 tremendous popular success. Hartmann set out to combine Schopenhauer’s
6 doctrine of the will with the late Schelling’s metaphysics and Hegel’s thoughts
7 on the world-historical process. Thanks to his use of the term ‘unconscious’
8 thirty years before Freud, Hartmann continues to interest writers even today,
9 although he cannot be regarded as a precursor of psychoanalysis. In both of
20 the aforementioned works he seeks to explain the dialectic between will and
1 representation as attributes of an unconscious substance that is said to
2 underpin all our lives and actions. He later questioned some of the issues that
3 were then exercising modern physics and sought to resist the inexorable
4 advance of Darwinism, proving a powerful critic of a mechanistic view of the
5 world and a leading proponent of vitalism. In The Problem of Life, which
6 appeared in 1906, Hartmann sums up these views, while dealing at length with
7 his opponents and with more recent writings on the subject. The first part of
8 the book is historical and traces the theory of evolution in the wake of Darwin,
9 discussing the pros and cons of mechanism and vitalism in modern biology,
30 while making clear the author’s own support of vitalism and pointing out that
1 the physical and chemical laws that had filled the century of progress with such
2 enthusiasm were not enough to produce the forms of life as we know them.
3 Hartmann’s aim was to re-establish a peaceful coexistence between natural
4 science and natural philosophy, and on this point he was bound to excite
5 Mahler’s interest, since the latter’s curiosity about the latest findings in physics,
6 as communicated to him chiefly by Arnold Berliner, was not that of a man who
7 believed implicitly in progress but of someone whose views were also coloured
8 by the natural philosophy of Goethe and the Romantics.
9 In the second, and final, part of his book, Hartmann considers death, and it
40 will have been this section that interested Mahler the most. The author opens
41R his chapter with the following consideration: ‘Behind all life, death lurks like a
spectre. Why? Why must all that is born die, since life itself does not die but 1
continues in new generations?’38 And at the end of this chapter Hartmann 2
comes close to answering the question that exercised the dying Mahler. 3
Hartmann observes that the change from one generation to the next and the 4
replacement of the old by the new is indispensable if life is to evolve at all. Even 5
the most brilliant mind must at some point fall short of the demands of the age 6
in terms of its ability to adapt. ‘The world always needs new generations that 7
can adapt to the new conditions with a fresh and impartial consciousness in 8
order to raise evolution to a higher stage. Death in old age can therefore be 9
justified from a teleological point of view, even if it cannot be justified in terms 10
of life’s outward aims.’39 In reading these lines, Mahler may well have thought 1
of Arnold Schoenberg, whom he sought to help during his final illness. 2
Hartmann felt that it was better for the individual consciousness to step aside 3
when that person had completed his role in life and better if the prejudiced 4
individual were replaced by his unprejudiced counterpart, as he puts it. ‘At the 5
same time, however, the fact that people die when they are old reminds us of 6
our other insight, namely, that no individual creature exists for its own sake 7
but only to sacrifice itself on the altar of nature as a whole, nature whose 8
meaning lies in the spiritual life of the whole.’40 9
If Mahler was reading Hartmann’s book for the first time in 1911, this 20
passage will have reminded him of his own convictions about entelechy as set 1
forth in his letter to Alma of June 1909.41 We may recall that it had long been 2
his belief that entelechy, which expresses itself in creativity, is not bound to a 3
single body. Rather, it migrates to another body when that other body dies. 4
The works that the genius produces are mortal and fleeting, a skin or husk, and 5
this is true, Mahler believed, of even great works, including his own. The only 6
thing that lasts is what man makes of himself and what he becomes by dint of 7
restless striving. All of this chimed in a quite remarkable way with Hartmann’s 8
thoughts on the continuation of life and the meaning of death. And this brings 9
us back to the summer of 1909, when, driven on by his thoughts about death, 30
Mahler had renewed contact with Lipiner. These thoughts had preoccupied 1
him since the summer of 1907 and represented a position very different from 2
the one he had previously held. In early May 1908 he held a lengthy discussion 3
with Adele Marcus in Hamburg, in the course of which they touched on the 4
afterlife. Back in Toblach, Mahler sent her a copy of Goethe’s conversations 5
with Eckermann, a book that he always carried round with him. And he drew 6
her attention to particular passages which, he said, might provide her with 7
more information about the mystery that they had discussed. 8
In particular, Mahler directed her to the conversation between Goethe and 9
Eckermann on 10 January 1830, when Goethe read aloud the scene from Faust 40
in which his hero travels to ‘the mothers’. Eckermann himself then developed a 41R
688 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 theory about the significance of these ‘mothers’, a theory that Mahler took to be
2 Goethe’s. The interior of the earth is imagined here as a vast empty space with
3 no corporeality, and it is here that the ‘mothers’ live outside space and time. They
4 are the creative, preservative principle that is the starting point for all existence:
5
6 Whatever ceases to breathe returns to them as a spiritual nature, and they
7 preserve it until a fit occasion arises to come into existence anew. All souls
8 and forms of what has been, or will be, hover about like clouds in the vast
9 space of their abode. . . . All this is, indeed, no more than a poetic creation;
10 but the limited human mind cannot penetrate much further, and is contented
1 to find something on which it can repose. Upon earth we see phenomena,
2 and feel effects, of which we do not know whence they come and whither
3 they go. We infer a spiritual origin – something divine, of which we have no
4 notion, and for which we have no expression, and which we must draw down
5 to ourselves and anthropomorphize, that we may in some degree embody and
6 make comprehensible our dark forebodings.42
7
8 It seems as if Mahler was helped through his final weeks by a combination of
9 Goethe’s concept of the ‘mothers’, Hartmann’s ideas on growth, dissolution and
20 renewal, and Mahler’s own belief in entelechy. But there can be no question of a
1 return to Christian or Jewish or other religious convictions such as we often find
2 at the end of people’s lives. All in all, one has the impression that when he died,
3 Mahler was not at peace with himself or with the wider questions of life and death.
4 ‘And later that same day the world was respectfully shocked to receive the
5 news of his death.’ It is impossible not to quote the final sentence of Thomas
6 Mann’s novella, Death in Venice, not least because the outward appearance of
7 his writer, Gustav von Aschenbach, is modelled, in part, on Mahler, who had
8 left such a profound impression on Mann at the time of the first performance
9 of his Eighth Symphony in Munich. Barely twenty-four hours after his death,
30 Mahler’s coffin was taken to the cemetery chapel at Grinzing, a transfer
1 attended by Bruno Walter, who reports on the storm and heavy rain. There the
2 coffin lay until midday of 22 May. Alma had announced her husband’s death
3 in the Viennese press:
4
5 In her own name and in that of her daughter Anne [sic] Maria and all her
6 relatives, Alma Maria Mahler announces the death of her dearly beloved
7 husband, father etc. Gustav Mahler, who was released from his long and
8 serious suffering on Thursday 18 May, before midnight, in his fifty-first year.
9 The mortal remains of the dearly departed will be blessed in the parish
40 church at Grinzing at 3 o’clock on Monday, the twenty-second of this month,
41R and laid to eternal rest in the local cemetery.43
Mahler had already written his will in April 1904. In the briefest possible 1
terms, Alma is appointed his sole heir and his descendants limited to the statu- 2
tory portion of his estate. Carl Moll is appointed their guardian, Emil Freund 3
as Mahler’s executor.44 Alma attended neither her husband’s death nor his 4
burial. She had contracted a serious case of pneumonia, and Chvostek had 5
ordered her to remain in bed. Moll and Arnold Rosé made the necessary 6
arrangements. A large group of mourners numbering around five hundred 7
followed the coffin from the church to the grave. The church was not the tiny 8
cemetery chapel, where the coffin had been laid out, but the parish church in 9
Grinzing. The cemetery lies on a hill just before the centre of the village, on the 10
left-hand side of the road when approaching from Vienna. 1
There is a surviving photograph of the burial, showing Mahler’s coffin on a 2
horse-drawn carriage and accompanied by uniformed attendants, while 3
another photograph depicts part of the funeral procession, which included 4
many friends, both close and not so close. Guido Adler and Fritz Löhr were 5
there, as were Bruno Walter, Alfred Roller, Arnold Schoenberg and presum- 6
ably also Alban Berg, Paul Stefan, Richard Specht and, from the Netherlands, 7
Alphons Diepenbrock – Mengelberg seems to have been prevented from 8
attending. The Court Opera was well represented, foremost among the 9
mourners being its new director, Hans Gregor, whom Mahler held in such 20
low regard. Anna Bahr-Mildenburg was there, of course, as were Leo Slezak 1
and Erik Schmedes. Julius Epstein, Mahler’s old piano teacher, came to pay 2
his respects to his much younger pupil. Other mourners included Gustav 3
Klimt, Emil Hertzka from Universal-Edition, Hermann Bahr and Hugo von 4
Hofmannsthal. The family was represented by Justine and Arnold Rosé. We do 5
not know whether Emma was there. Josef Bohuslav Foerster attended the 6
ceremony with his wife Berta and later recalled how small the coffin seemed, 7
almost like a child’s. Silence reigned: 8
9
It was at this moment – not a word was spoken through it all – that the world 30
seemed to stand still for an instant, and a great sigh was uttered by all who 1
were present. Then, as before, there followed a silence as sublime as it was 2
hallowed.45 3
4
Foerster was not given to embroidering his narrative, and so we may well 5
believe him when he writes that somewhere in the vicinity a bird sang a 6
disjointed springtime melody, irresistibly reminding him and no doubt the 7
others of the final movement of the Second Symphony: 8
9
There, above a world shaken to its very foundations by the horrors of the Last 40
Judgement, a solitary bird soars aloft, as high as the clouds themselves, the 41R
690 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 last living creature, and its song, free of all terror and free of all sadness, fades
2 away, quietly, ever so quietly, as, sobbing convulsively, its final note coincides
3 with the entry of the trumpets that call both the quick and the dead to the
4 judgement seat.46
5
6 Moll and Rosé threw the first clods of earth on the coffin. A few days later
7 Hofmannsthal wrote to a friend, the Countess Ottonie von Degenfeld:
8
9 Mahler was buried the other day. I stood by the open grave among a jostling
10 crowd of people and threw earth into it, and I felt the most unfathomable
1 sadness for Mahler, felt the whole bitter weight of a loss that nothing would
2 ever make good. Then, as I was leaving, I suddenly understood that men will
3 similarly lose something when I myself die and that one day someone may be
4 sad at heart in consequence, just as I am now sad because of Mahler, to whom
5 I spoke only once in my life. At that moment, the unfathomable nature of an
6 existence like mine no longer seemed oppressive.47
7
8 Arnold Schoenberg left a disconcerting painting of this scene, the open grave
9 like a gaping wound in a mound inflamed by yellows and greens and reds.
20 We began this chapter with Jean Paul, and we shall end it with Jean Paul. In
1 his novel Titan the quirkily humorous librarian Schoppe, who has taught the
2 hero Albano all he knows, dies after being placed in an asylum, where he does
3 indeed go mad when confronted by his alter ego Siebenkäs, the hero of an
4 earlier novel by the same author. The narrator writes his Requiem:
5
6 You have nothing more to do here on earth, you firm and rigorous spirit, and
7 a gentle, playful sun poured its rays into the final evening storm in your
8 breast, filling it with roses and gold. The earth and all things earthly from
9 which the fleeting worlds are formed was far too small and light for you. For
30 behind life you sought something higher than life, not your self, no mortal,
1 no immortal, but the eternal, all-first God. – Appearances here on earth – evil
2 as well as good – were a matter of indifference to you. You now rest in real
3 being, death has swept away the whole sultry cloud of life from your dark
4 heart, and the eternal light is revealed, a light that you sought for so long; and
5 you, its beam, live again in the fire.48
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
37 3
4
5
6
Mahler and Posterity 7
8
9
10
1
2
3
O YOU HAVE to be there in person when you become immortal?’ This was 4
‘
D Mahler’s answer when he was asked by a friend why he did not do more
to ensure that his works were performed and better known: ‘Sooner or later,
5
6
they themselves will do whatever is necessary.’1 Rather more famous are two 7
other remarks by Mahler: first (and it is doubtful that this originated from 8
Mahler himself), that he was homeless three times over and, second, ‘My time 9
will come.’ But, as so often, we need to take a closer look at the context from 20
which this sentence comes, for although the basic interpretation remains the 1
same, it acquires a more nuanced aspect. When Mahler wrote it, he was 2
attempting to distance himself from Richard Strauss and referring specifically 3
to Strauss’s attitude following the first performance in Vienna of his opera 4
Feuersnot, when the composer turned out to be obsessed with success and 5
with the royalties that would accrue to him as a result. Mahler was clearly 6
disenchanted by the whole aura surrounding Strauss: 7
8
Rather live in poverty and walk the path of the enlightened than surrender 9
oneself to Mammon, don’t you agree? One day people will separate the wheat 30
from the chaff – and when his day has passed, then my time will come. 1
Would that I could live to see it at your side! But you, my Lux, will certainly 2
live to see it, I hope, and you will remember the time when you had not yet 3
learnt to distinguish the sun through the mist. Do you remember, in the 4
Stadtpark, when everyone saw the sun as a hideous red stain?2 5
6
In short, Mahler was seeking to distance himself from Strauss and to see an 7
inverse relationship between his own fate and that of a colleague and rival 8
whom he respected but did not love. 9
Mahler’s hope that he would live long enough to see his time come turned 40
out to be deceptive, but from every other point of view he was proved right. 41R
692 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Strauss’s reputation has sunk since the interwar period and is now limited to
2 the indestructible popularity of a handful of operas. His other stage works
3 have more or less disappeared from the repertory, and his tone poems play
4 only a marginal role in the concert hall and, interestingly enough, are
5 conducted chiefly by those conductors who have little time for Mahler.
6 Moreover, Alma died in 1964 and was able to witness the beginning of the
7 international wave of enthusiasm for Mahler’s works that began around 1960
8 and to divert part of the resultant lustre to her own person. Mahler himself
9 seems not to have doubted that his time would come, only about the date when
10 this process would begin. And so we find him writing to a French journalist in
1 1906 when the latter offered to promote his works in Paris: ‘I sometimes feel I
2 shall not live to see “my time”; and then an echo from an unknown world
3 comes just at the right moment.’3 A third remark, again taken from a letter to
4 Alma, is strangely moving and prophetic. Mahler was preparing for the first
5 performance of his Fifth Symphony in Cologne in October 1904. However
6 valiant, the Gürzenich Orchestra inevitably had problems with the Scherzo,
7 prompting Mahler to comment: ‘Would that I could perform my symphonies
8 for the first time fifty years after my death!’4 And it was indeed about fifty years
9 after his death that his works finally entered the repertory.
20 Writers now refer so routinely to a ‘Mahler renaissance’ that it is impossible
1 to avoid this term, however unsatisfactory it may be. Strictly speaking, a renais-
2 sance can be enjoyed only by something that already existed in a thoroughly
3 stable form and that needed only to be reborn to achieve its former greatness.
4 But there can be no question of this in Mahler’s case, for it was not until 1960
5 that Mahler was first acknowledged as a composer of international importance
6 and his works first entered the repertory. Throughout the period from 1911 to
7 1960 he was a controversial figure, his works attacked and despised well before
8 they were officially banned in those countries in which the racial doctrines of
9 the National Socialists robbed all Jewish composers of the air that they needed
30 to breathe and, where possible, deprived them of their lives. But nor would it be
1 true to claim that Mahler’s works disappeared without trace between 1911 and
2 1960 and that only then were they exhumed. Even during this period his music
3 was passionately championed by enthusiasts in the concert hall and among
4 audiences and loved by a minority, while being denigrated and reviled by the
5 majority. As we have already indicated, a by no means unimportant role in this
6 state of affairs was played by anti-Semitism. Within days of Mahler’s death the
7 Alldeutsches Tagblatt made it clear to its Viennese readers that the object of its
8 hatred had certainly not disappeared with his passing:
9
40 He was buried in Grinzing on Monday 22 May, the former director of the
41R Court Opera and conductor of the Philharmonic. He was undoubtedly a
MAHLER AND POSTERITY 693
Jewish patriot and lived entirely for Judah. The reports about him were, of 1
course, written by people like him and were so inordinately effusive as to be 2
worth handing down to posterity as cultural curiosities. There were vast 3
numbers of wreaths whose ribbons were covered with dedications to the 4
Nibelung dwarf who came to power from the darkness of the pariahs, and 5
there was once again a fine opportunity for people to kowtow to the Jews like 6
the good citizens that they are.5 7
8
This was not an isolated instance of anti-Semitism. Rather, it set the tone that 9
was to remain typical of responses to Mahler’s works, even if it was not always 10
expressed in such virulent terms but more or less skilfully concealed behind 1
specious arguments. 2
A second example must suffice. On 26 June 1912 Bruno Walter conducted the 3
world première of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic in 4
the city’s Musikvereinssaal. On 20 November 1911, moreover, he had given 5
the first performance of Das Lied von der Erde in Munich. Together, these 6
performances represented a pioneering feat which, if the First World War had 7
not intervened, would perhaps have laid the foundations for a continuous tradi- 8
tion of performing Mahler’s works. Walter’s actions were hailed by Mahlerians 9
as an act of ordination but provoked rather different reactions in other quarters. 20
Writing about the Ninth Symphony in the Ostdeutsche Rundschau a certain 1
Heinrich Damisch complained that 2
3
The whole thing is one gigantic weed in the symphonic garden, a weed from 4
which a new cross-beam for the temple of disgusting indecency may be 5
carved. It is with increasing brazenness that criminals and psychopaths are 6
violating music, that unique gift from heaven that the gods still allow us in an 7
age of the most sobering reality. And, seated in boxes and galleries, the mob 8
howls its approval for this music, which it welcomes either out of snobbism 9
or from self-conceit. Perhaps we may yet be saved from all this impropriety 30
by the sense of aesthetic shame on the part of those noble-minded women 1
whose sensitivities lie close to eternal nature: perhaps they will rescue us 2
from such art and from this culture from the Orient, for it is from here that 3
those people have come who busy themselves debasing what is good, raising 4
aloft what is evil, reviling the dead and deceiving the living.6 5
6
Although Damisch avoids the word ‘Jew’, the anti-Semitic thrust of his 7
attack was clear to every reader. During the years that followed, Damisch 8
developed the views expressed here. It is worth adding that he played a signif- 9
icant part in the establishment of the Salzburg Festival and although he had 40
to moderate his ideas in the wake of the Second World War, he still held an 41R
694 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 influential position in the International Mozarteum Foundation in Salzburg

2 and received one of Austria’s highest awards for services to his country.
3 The First World War shook the cultural life of Europe to its very core, and
4 yet this seemed as if it might be Mahler’s chance of a breakthrough, for many
5 commentators have heard in his marches a prefigurement of war. During the
6 winter of 1918/19 there was a small-scale Mahler cycle in Vienna under the
7 direction of Bruno Walter, who was by now general music director in Munich
8 and whose love of Mahler remained constant, for all that he rarely conducted
9 the middle symphonies. Ernst Bloch referred specifically to Mahler, while
10 exaggerating his importance as a ‘Jewish prophet’.7 The organizational and
1 artistic high point of the first great Mahler wave after 1918 was undoubtedly
2 the Mahler Festival that was mounted in Amsterdam in 1920. This was the first
3 time that Mahler’s works had been presented in their entirety, accompanied by
4 a series of lectures. The guiding hand was that of Willem Mengelberg, together
5 with his nephew Rudolf, who was a writer on music. One of the lectures was
6 given by the Italian composer Alfredo Casella, a rare example of a Mahlerite in
7 his native country. Other lecturers were Guido Adler, Felix Salten, Richard
8 Specht and Paul Stefan, whose Mahlerian enthusiasms had failed to find a
9 fertile soil in Vienna – Herta Blaukopf was the first writer to recognize the
20 true significance of this Mahler Festival in Amsterdam.8 Universal-Edition
1 published a booklet to mark this exceptional occasion. Mahler’s works were
2 performed on alternate days between 6 and 21 May, all of them with the
3 Concertgebouw Orchestra under Mengelberg in a unique act of love and devo-
4 tion. The festival organizers also honoured Mahler’s spirit by including a series
5 of chamber recitals featuring works by Max Reger, Alphons Diepenbrock,
6 Alfredo Casella, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Alexander Scriabin, Carl
7 Nielsen, Josef Suk, Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg.
8 The publication that commemorated these events also included press reviews
9 and indicates that the festival was enthusiastically reviewed as far apart as London
30 and New York. And it ends with a list of foreign visitors demonstrating the power
1 of Mahler’s music to bring nations together, especially nations divided until
2 recently by war. In turn this led to the suggestion that another, even larger festival
3 should be organized at which former enemies should present their latest and
4 most important contributions to the field of music, creating a forum for the
5 artistic and academic exchange of new ideas. A committee was set up to pursue
6 this plan, and Willem Mengelberg was proposed as its honorary president.
7 Among the manifesto’s signatories were Casella, Schoenberg and Nielsen and
8 the Berlin critic Oscar Bie. The significance of this suggestion can perhaps be
9 judged from a comparison between this slender publication of 1920 and the
40 monumental volume published seventy-five years later to mark the 1995
41R Amsterdam Mahler Festival.9
The Amsterdam Festival raised the question of whether Mahler’s time had 1
finally come. Nine years after his death, his breakthrough seemed inevitable, 2
especially when one reads the lively debates about his music in reviews and 3
publications of the period. In the autumn of 1920 Mahler’s young disciple 4
Oskar Fried was able to mount a Mahler cycle in Vienna, although it is 5
significant that he used not the Philharmonic but the Vienna Symphony 6
Orchestra and that there were no accompanying lectures or discussions. None 7
the less, Mahler’s works were all performed with the exception of the Eighth 8
Symphony. In the reviews the old animosities alternated with a new enthu- 9
siasm, and it seemed that not even in Vienna were people left cold by Mahler 10
any longer. In 1923/4 Thomas Mann’s brother-in-law Klaus Pringsheim organ- 1
ized a relatively major Mahler cycle in Berlin, Hermann Scherchen began 2
to explore Mahler’s works in Leipzig, and in Wiesbaden, where Mahler had 3
conducted on more than one occasion, there was a small Mahler festival. The 4
first half of the 1920s confirmed Mahlerians in their view that their hero’s time 5
had come, an impression underscored by the dates of the most important 6
books on Mahler that were published at this time. As early as 1918 the leading 7
critic Paul Bekker had brought out a slender volume, The Symphony from 8
Beethoven to Mahler, the very title of which scandalized many contemporaries. 9
His major study, Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies, appeared three years later and 20
continues to be an important introduction to the composer’s music. It also had 1
a decisive and generally underrated influence on Adorno’s picture of Mahler. 2
The final page includes a brief but impressive bibliography, beginning, chrono- 3
logically, with Ludwig Schiedermair’s 1901 study of Mahler and also listing 4
works by Paul Stefan, Richard Specht, Guido Adler and Artur Neißer. 5
Alfred Roller’s iconography, with its unparalleled physical description 6
of the composer, appeared in 1922; Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s reminiscences in 7
1923, albeit in a heavily abridged edition; and Alma’s first edition of Mahler’s 8
correspondence in 1924, an affectionately designed tribute, with photographs 9
and a facsimile of one of Mahler’s letters. Vienna’s leading avant-garde music 30
journal, the Musikblätter des Anbruch, had devoted a whole issue to Mahler 1
as early as 1920. Also in Vienna, Webern conducted a performance of 2
the Third Symphony in 1922 at one of the Workers’ Symphony Concerts 3
organized by the city’s active Social Democrats under David Josef Bach. From 4
then on Webern was regarded as one of the finest Mahler conductors of his 5
age, although his reputation barely extended beyond the confines of Vienna. 6
Zemlinsky, too, championed Mahler’s works in both Vienna and Prague. 7
When Franz Schalk conducted the fragmentary Tenth Symphony at the 8
Vienna State Opera in a performing edition by Ernst Krenek, Mahler’s ship 9
of state seemed finally to be home and dry. But appearances proved to be 40
deceptive. 41R
696 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 In 1922 the leading Berlin critic Adolf Weißmann, who had already made a
2 name for himself with level-headed books on prima donnas and virtuosos,
3 published a study under the title of Music in Crisis, which sought to relate devel-
4 opments in music since the turn of the century to the upheaval of the First
5 World War and the overthrow of middle-class values. One chapter is devoted to
6 Mahler and begins with the laconic statement: ‘There is a Mahler problem.’10
7 Although Weißmann was himself Jewish – or perhaps precisely because of that
8 fact – he was obsessed with Mahler’s Jewishness. While chastising those writers
9 who regarded the ‘problem of race’, as it was called at this time, as central to
10 their critique of Mahler, he insisted that Mahler’s own Jewishness could not be
1 gainsaid and that it found expression in features such as his internationalism
2 and universal aspirations. And he then went on to list the clichés that we know
3 only too well from our chapter on Mahler and Jewishness and which continue,
4 even today, to bedevil debates on the composer:
5
6 He wants to sing songs that are autochthonous and Austrian, but he is
7 haunted, tormented and burdened in a hundred different ways: as a man of
8 the modern age, as a fervent epigone, and as a Jew. All of this affects his
9 music, which is driven by a demon. Hence the countless contradictions in his
20 works. Hence a certain profound shallowness, a half-creative irony that seeks
1 to turn base metal into gold. Hence, too, his inspired sonorities that counter-
2 feit the idea of woods and meadows. And overriding everything, as a
3 hallmark of his race, there is something Christ-like, something that strives for
4 sanctity.11
5
6 Weißmann ends his chapter on Mahler with words that betray his whole
7 uncertainty and that are typical of interwar critics and music lovers who, while
8 not actually hating Mahler, were somehow puzzled and exercised by music
9 that they did not want to let into their lives: ‘His life is more valuable than his
30 music, which is largely rooted in his all-compelling ability to recreate the
1 works of others. As a result he remains a passing phenomenon, with no sense
2 of fulfilment to him. And yet it is impossible to think of him without profound
3 emotion.’12
4 This, then, was the position regarding Mahler after 1918: while revered by an
5 increasingly large group of Mahlerians and raised to the status of a modern clas-
6 sical composer at the Mahler Festival in Amsterdam in 1920, he was at the same
7 time hated or at least mistrusted by a far greater number of music lovers and
8 experts, whether real or self-appointed. In the first Austrian Republic, Mahler’s
9 standing remained precarious, and attempts to erect a monument to him, which
40 originated in part with Alma, failed to make much progress – in a city in which
41R one of the main streets was named after its anti-Semitic mayor, Karl Lueger, it was
not so easy to establish a memorial to Mahler. And Mahler’s name was inevitably 1
added to the Index of the new Third Reich. There is abundant evidence of this. 2
Suffice it to mention Theodor Fritsch’s Handbook on the Jewish Question and the 3
notorious Lexicon of Jews in Music by Theo Stengel and Herbert Gerigk. Less well 4
known is the Musical ABC of Jews that appeared in Munich in 1935. The entry on 5
Mahler begins with a clear allusion to Wagner’s polemics of the 1850s: 6
7
He is generally regarded as the typical representative of the noisy hooligans; 8
he wrote monstrous works for the concert hall such as the ‘Symphony of a 9
Thousand’ whose mass of instruments serves only to cover up its pitiful lack 10
of melodies and desolation. By always hankering after empty effects, his 1
works are as quintessentially Jewish as his ancestry. He came from a Jewish 2
brandy bar and had himself baptised only later in Vienna.13 3
4
At least until the Third Reich’s annexation of Austria in 1938, the situation in 5
Vienna was very different. Under its federal chancellor Engelbert Dollfuß and, 6
following his assassination, Kurt von Schuschnigg, the authoritarian Ständestaat 7
that was established under the constitution of 1 May 1934 sought to make 8
Mahler the quintessential Austrian composer of the recent past. Presumably 9
the chances that three living composers, Franz Schmidt, Joseph Marx and Julius 20
Bittner, would enjoy this privilege were regarded as extremely slim. But in 1
promoting a Jewish composer like Mahler, a regime whose authoritarianism was 2
plain for all to see could at least score points for tolerance when compared with 3
the hated National Socialist government in neighbouring Germany. Although 4
Austria could look back on a long tradition of anti-Semitism, this was not one of 5
the Ständestaat’s defining ideologies, as it was in the case of Germany. Moreover, 6
Alma Mahler entertained close links with a number of Austrian leaders as well 7
as with prominent Austrian Catholics influential in the running of the country. 8
Among her admirers were Kurt von Schuschnigg, Hans Pernter, who was in 9
charge of the arts section at the Ministry of Education, and Ernst Rüdiger von 30
Starhemberg, who had once marched alongside Hitler at the Feldherrnhalle in 1
Munich and who was now the leader of the Austrian Patriotic Front. 2
In post-war Austria, Mahler’s finest hour came in May 1936, when Bruno 3
Walter conducted performances of the three works that were best suited to pres- 4
tigious performances, namely, the Second and Eighth Symphonies and Das Lied 5
von der Erde. Driven from Germany, Walter had evinced a pronounced sympathy 6
for the ‘New Austria’, a point that he shared with Ernst Krenek, who was briefly 7
married to Mahler’s daughter. At the same time, Walter delivered a lecture that 8
helped to underline his position as Mahler’s heir and prophet and guaranteed 9
that the picture of Mahler became more soft-edged and less angular – this is a 40
mere statement of fact and is not intended to belittle Walter’s achievements or his 41R
698 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 profound love of Mahler’s music. Walter’s love of harmony, which also encour-
2 aged a Christian interpretation of the Second and Eighth Symphonies, was
3 well suited to the country’s basically Catholic ideology. Krenek sounded a similar
4 note. In an essay that he wrote in 1941 for the American edition of his book on
5 Mahler, Walter praised Mahler’s works as sprung from the spirit of Christian
6 eschatology.14
7 But the situation soon changed. It is interesting to observe the way in which
8 conductors who continued to conduct Mahler’s works while Austria was still
9 independent suddenly stopped doing so without a word of complaint. Leopold
10 Reichwein was one such conductor. So, too, was Clemens Krauss, an eminently
1 gifted Austrian who was the friend and librettist of Strauss. Few people know
2 that until 1938 Krauss was a committed Mahlerian but ignored his works
3 thereafter. Equally interesting is the case of Wilhelm Furtwängler. In the
4 minds of many observers even today, he could have been the greatest Mahler
5 conductor of his age if he had wanted to be. After 1945 he conducted only the
6 Kindertotenlieder and the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, including a famous
7 recording with Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau. Until 1933 Furtwängler’s repertory
8 included the First, Second, Third and Fourth Symphonies. But his notebooks
9 reveal that under the Third Reich he sought increasingly to distance himself
20 not only from Mahler’s works, which were in any case banned, but also
1 from those of Richard Strauss. Furtwängler’s greater interest in Beethoven,
2 Bruckner, Brahms and Wagner encouraged him to speak with mounting
3 scepticism of Mahler, Reger and Strauss, three turn-of-the-century composers
4 whom he invariably bundled together and whom he now regarded as sympto-
5 matic of a development in the direction of gigantomania. Such artists were
6 ‘able to bring “skill” so much to the fore because the lack of dominant spiritual
7 strength is so marked in them. In Mahler, Reger, Strauss and Debussy, tech-
8 nique begins to distance itself from experience, to become high-handed. The
9 disappearance of substance, an aesthetic formed by the age and also the form
30 of the audience, is characteristic.’15 Furtwängler was no anti-Semite and was
1 not playing the anti-Jewish card here, but he none the less comes close to
2 repeating Wagner’s jibe about ‘effects without causes’, technique remote from
3 experience amounting to more or less the same thing in his estimation. It is
4 hardly surprising that, given his views on the subject, Furtwängler felt no great
5 desire to conduct Mahler’s works again after 1945.
6 Much the same is true of Karl Böhm, a conductor far more willing to
7 compromise than Furtwängler. Böhm had conducted the occasional perform-
8 ance of a Mahler symphony before 1938 since it was opportune to do so. But
9 he had no difficulty in forgoing Mahler in Nazi Germany, where he pursued
40 his wartime career, and even when the war was over, his passion for Mahler
41R was not rekindled. Herbert von Karajan was a more complicated case, just as
his attitude to National Socialism was more ambivalent than that of either 1
Furtwängler or Böhm. Like Furtwängler, Karajan had concentrated on the 2
three Bs, Beethoven, Bruckner and Brahms, and also conducted a good deal of 3
Wagner, but, unlike Furtwängler, he had no problems with either Verdi or 4
Richard Strauss. Indeed, some of his greatest successes had been in Strauss’s 5
operas and symphonic poems. He had already turned sixty when he decided 6
in 1970 that there was now room in his life for Mahler. During the 1960s both 7
Leonard Bernstein and Georg Solti – two conductors whom the pathologically 8
ambitious Karajan regarded as his keenest rivals – had proved surprisingly 9
successful in conducting Mahler’s works, and so Karajan decided to bite the 10
bullet, scoring such a success with Das Lied von der Erde that he was tempted 1
to explore other works by a composer to whom he had previously not felt 2
attracted. But Mahler invariably takes his revenge on bandwagon-hoppers. 3
Even with the Berlin Philharmonic, Karajan was never able to establish himself 4
as a leading Mahler conductor. His interpretations were always controversial, 5
and his recordings remain so, except for a thrilling live performance of the 6
Ninth Symphony. None the less – and whatever his reasons – he deserves some 7
credit for initially tackling two of the less frequently performed symphonies, 8
the Fifth and the Sixth. In the case of the Sixth, Wolfgang Stresemann, who 9
was the orchestra’s general administrator at this period, recalls that there was 20
no overlooking Karajan’s uncertainty with regard to Mahler, whose music 1
he dismissed as ‘Kapellmeister music’. He had also wanted to make a major 2
cut in the symphony’s final movement and had been discouraged only by 3
Stresemann’s admonitions.16 4
But we are starting to get ahead of ourselves and need to return to the 5
immediate post-war period. There seemed little place for Mahler in a conti- 6
nent that had been left ravaged by war and little chance for the sort of upturn 7
in his fortunes that had occurred after 1918. Indeed, there were many critical 8
voices only too happy to express the view that Mahler’s time was now over. 9
Many of these agenda-setters had actively supported the National Socialists in 30
both Austria and Germany, and after a brief pause to rethink their position 1
had once again set to work. As we have already had occasion to note, they had 2
no difficulty in regaling their readers with their old anti-Semitic prejudices, 3
while merely removing the most offensive expressions. But even outside this 4
circle, there was the widespread belief that it was no longer necessary to take 5
any more interest in Mahler. Stravinsky was the man of the moment, and 6
attempts by Adorno to hold up the Second Viennese School as a counterweight 7
remained limited in what they achieved. In Adorno’s The Philosophy of New 8
Music of 1949, Mahler’s name is occasionally mentioned as an undisputed 9
authority, chiefly in the context of Alban Berg, but he could hardly be pressed 40
into service as a radical forebear of new music. Above all, Adorno’s writings 41R
700 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 had for the present little impact on the concert-going public or on musical
2 journalism.
3 Two random examples of typical attitudes to Mahler during this post-war
4 period may be cited here. When Bruno Walter conducted Schubert’s ‘Unfinished’
5 and Mahler’s First Symphony in Munich in early October 1950, one of the press
6 seats was occupied by Karl Heinz Ruppel, who was to go on to become one of the
7 Federal Republic’s most prominent music and theatre critics. Writing in the
8 Süddeutsche Zeitung, he noted that
9
10 The main work on the evening’s programme was Gustav Mahler’s D major
1 Symphony, the first of nine, and it was not without a sense of shock that one
2 encountered it. For here one is confronted by a genuine tragedy – the tragedy
3 of a spiritual individual who in the second half of the nineteenth century
4 strove to escape from the complexities and problems of a highly civilized
5 existence. This is not a question of the natural creativity of a composer
6 who, as a genius of the ethos of the artist and as an intellectually supremely
7 well-organized child of a late-flowering age, was a universal rather than an
8 original phenomenon. No, what one finds so disturbing on renewed acquain-
9 tance with his First Symphony is a tragic error: Mahler thought that it was
20 still possible in the years around 1890 to write a pastoral symphony.
1
2 And Ruppel describes the third movement as ‘an example of genuine inspir-
3 ation in which the tragic flaw in Mahler’s nature – the very thing that every-
4 where else prevented him from achieving creative perfection – itself becomes
5 creative and finds magnificently moving expression’.17 We do not need to
6 plumb the depths of Rudolf Bauer’s concert guide – quoted in our chapter on
7 Mahler and Jewishness – to rediscover all the old formulas which, even when
8 clothed in faint praise, retain their dismissive character: Mahler lacked origin-
9 ality, he was a tragic figure and was prevented from achieving perfection as a
30 creative artist. If this was the opinion of one of the most prominent critics of
1 the period, what could one expect from his less eminent colleagues?
2 One final example may serve to illustrate the levels to which provincial
3 critics could sink. In May 1951 the First Symphony finally received its first
4 performance in Hanover. The town’s leading critic began his review:
5
6 After a long time music lovers can finally make up their own minds about a
7 composer who was as widely admired at the turn of the century as he has
8 been vilified since then. There is no doubt that most of today’s listeners have
9 moved away from most of his symphonies, which, far from being timeless,
40 were closely bound up with their age. Even so, it is worth our while to listen
41R to his First Symphony, which is crammed full of inspired details, even if its
Wunderhorn ideas and its orchestration, which is sometimes downright 1

theatrical in its hankering after effects, have lost their appeal for us today.18 2
3
These two specimens of German music journalism are entirely typical of the 4
situation in the 1950s, making the sudden change in Mahler’s fortunes after 5
1960 all the more remarkable. 6
Various suggestions and suppositions have been advanced to explain this 7
sudden shift, and there seems little doubt that a number of factors came 8
together at this time. The centenary of the composer’s birth was a reason to 9
hold major Mahler festivals. The two most important ones took place in New 10
York and Vienna. Leonard Bernstein’s cycle with the New York Philharmonic 1
began to appear that same year on LP. The Berlin publishing house of Bote & 2
Bock brought out Erwin Ratz’s new edition of the Seventh Symphony, the first 3
volume in a planned critical edition that was a collaborative effort between 4
the International Gustav Mahler Society in Vienna and the five different 5
publishers who owned the rights to Mahler’s works. Ratz had been editor- 6
in-chief since 1955. The edition remains incomplete, although only a handful 7
of minor works still have to be included. Even so, it has repeatedly become 8
clear that the older volumes need revising as new sources have come to light. 9
Another impetus came from the record industry. Even during the era of 20
78 rpm records, there had been recordings of complete symphonies, but it 1
required the introduction of 33 rpm records in 1948 to make a complete cycle 2
a viable option. The early Mahler cycles under Bernstein, Haitink and Solti 3
were conceivable only in the age of the long-playing record. 4
Related to this was the introduction of stereophonic sound in 1958. By the 5
Mahler centenary of 1960 this development was well into its stride. The 6
leading Mahler biographer of this period, Kurt Blaukopf, was particularly 7
interested in the sociology of music and repeatedly stressed the significance of 8
stereophonic sound to the Mahler boom. After all, Mahler’s scores contain so 9
many instructions to the performers that are akin to stage directions affecting 30
the dramaturgical use of sonority, including the use of offstage bands and 1
distant cowbells, that monophonic recordings of his music, lacking the spatial- 2
ization of the sound that became possible with stereo, were bound to remain 3
rudimentary. On this point, Blaukopf even believed that stereo recordings 4
were preferable to performances in the concert hall, where they had to contend 5
with the pitfalls of problematical acoustics: 6
7
The best studio recordings of recent times can at last give us a sound image 8
closer to Mahler’s intentions than almost any concert performance. . . . 9
Thanks to the techniques of electro-acoustic recording and reproduction, 40
textual purity can be preserved and Mahler’s original intention, as manifested 41R
702 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 in his notation, fulfilled. The stereo record has been the salvation of these
2 works.19
3
4 Adorno’s slender but immensely important monograph on Mahler appeared
5 in 1960. Its significance was quickly appreciated, even though its conceptual
6 and stylistic demands mean that it was never destined to achieve a widespread
7 impact. Other writers who began to publish on Mahler at around this time
8 include Donald Mitchell, whose four-volume disquisition on Mahler’s works
9 began in 1958 and ended in 2007 with a collection of essays covering a whole
10 half-century. The first volume of Henry-Louis de La Grange’s monumental and
1 exhaustive study appeared in English in 1973, before being continued in
2 French between 1979 and 1984. A new English edition, begun in 1995, will run
3 to four volumes. Kurt Blaukopf ’s tremendously influential account of Mahler’s
4 life and works appeared in 1969 and was followed in 1976 by a magnificent
5 documentary study produced in collaboration with his wife, Herta, and trans-
6 lated that same year into English. A revised edition of the German version was
7 published in 1993. Mahler’s letters had first appeared in print in 1924 in an
8 edition superintended by Alma. A much enlarged edition by Herta Blaukopf
9 appeared in 1982, a revised edition in 1996. Herta Blaukopf was also respon-
20 sible for editions of Mahler’s correspondence with Strauss and a number of
1 other contemporaries, while numerous other articles added considerably to
2 our knowledge of the composer. The study of Mahler’s music published in
3 1982 by the German musicologist Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht ranks alongside
4 Adorno’s monograph as one of the most important German-language publica-
5 tions in this regard. The profound three-volume study by the Hamburg
6 musicologist Constantin Floros appeared between 1977 and 1985. The third of
7 these volumes, devoted to the symphonies, was published in an American
8 translation in 1993. Floros’s Berlin colleague Hermann Danuser published a
9 volume of essays on Mahler in 1991 and the following year edited an anthology
30 of articles by other writers spanning several generations. These are only the
1 most important stages on the road of Mahler scholarship.
2 For all its derogatory associations, the term ‘Mahler boom’ is by no means
3 unjustified. If the 1960s witnessed his breakthrough as a composer, the 1970s
4 brought a degree of popularization which, as so often, was not without a
5 certain trivialization. In this context it is impossible to avoid mentioning
6 Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which ensured that the Adagietto
7 from the Fifth Symphony came to be regarded as an example of sentimental-
8 ized kitsch. Unfortunately, the use of this music in the film has come to be
9 equated with the film itself, with the result that Death in Venice is now
40 routinely dismissed as little more than a tear-jerker. Such a dismissal is unfair,
41R for it is in fact a quite remarkable film, stylistically assured, very well acted and
of great aesthetic appeal. And the link between Mahler and the main character 1
in Thomas Mann’s short story was already suggested by Mann himself, at least 2
on a physical level, so that it was by no means unreasonable of Visconti to re- 3
locate the poet Gustav von Aschenbach and place him in a musical landscape. 4
But the interpretation of the Adagietto that Visconti used is almost unbearable. 5
Presumably for legal and financial reasons he avoided any of the famous 6
recordings and recorded a new version of questionable aesthetic merit that is 7
notable above all for its element of kitsch. There seems little doubt that it was 8
with Death in Venice that Mahler came to be seen as a composer who is easy 9
on the ear. Even nowadays there are few television films on the subject of 10
Vienna around 1900 and on decadence and fin-de-siècle culture in general that 1
do not use Mahler as background music. And the same is true of cinema films 2
with any artistic pretensions. But we do not need to worry unduly about this. 3
Mahler’s music can bear it, and if a handful of listeners develop an interest in 4
this background music, then this trivialization may be said to have a positive 5
side to it. 6
Fifty years ago it would have been hard to find a composer who claimed 7
Mahler as his model – in Germany only Karl Amadeus Hartmann comes to 8
mind. Today the situation is different, although it seems that the trend may 9
now be in decline. Stravinsky was a notorious Mahlerian nay-sayer, but 20
once that influence had faded, there were increasing numbers of composers 1
willing to admit to their debt to Mahler, the most famous undoubtedly being 2
Shostakovich, whose fortunes in the West were long overshadowed by the 3
perception of him as a product of Stalinist policies in music. Now he has taken 4
his rightful place on the international stage, and the traces of Mahler’s influ- 5
ence on his music are palpable. His official pronouncements on Mahler 6
amounted to little more than clichés, but in private he admitted to an intense 7
love of Mahler. Time and again he acknowledged that Das Lied von der Erde, 8
and especially the final movement, invariably moved him to tears. Many 9
composers of the older generation have proclaimed their allegiance to Mahler. 30
Pierre Boulez as a conductor has championed him. Luciano Berio used the 1
Scherzo from Mahler’s Second Symphony as the template for the third move- 2
ment of his five-movement Sinfonia of 1968/9, producing a collage-like work 3
that at the time created quite a stir and even today remains highly effective. In 4
1988/9 Alfred Schnittke wrote a quartet movement in A minor as a second 5
movement for Mahler’s fragmentary piano quartet. And Wolfgang Rihm 6
admitted in a conversation some years ago that after his early infatuation with 7
Mahler’s music, he moved away from it, only to return to it with renewed affec- 8
tion. Rihm credits Mahler’s influence in the early 1970s with warning avant- 9
garde composers of the dangers of adopting the sort of over-academic musical 40
language that they had promoted since the time of the Darmstadt Summer 41R
704 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 Schools. Instead, Mahler’s music was able to offer the dramaturgy of the great
2 novel, epic grandeur and exuberance, for which the composer needed no
3 superficial tricks of an illustrative or literary kind. It was, Rihm concluded,
4 Mahler’s intellectual and spiritual insistence on the here and now that made
5 him a contemporary of the future, to quote the subtitle of Kurt Blaukopf ’s 1969
6 study.20 Peter Ruzicka has expressed himself in not dissimilar terms. In the
7 mid-1990s the New York jazz musician Uri Caine approached Mahler’s music
8 using a collage-like method of adaptation designed to make the music sound
9 unfamiliar, the success of which owed something to his problematical insis-
10 tence on the Jewish element in this music. Unless appearances are deceptive,
1 then Mahler’s influence on the latest generation of European composers is no
2 longer as great as it was on those who are now fifty and older. But this may be
3 a false impression and unreliable as the basis of a prognosis.
4 Mahler is here to stay. He has asserted himself and achieved an international
5 popularity that fills concert halls and sells CDs. For a composer who was so
6 controversial during his lifetime and afterwards, this is exceptional. Mahler
7 festivals such as those held in Amsterdam in 1995 and the Mahler cycle that was
8 given in Munich in 2002 now play to sold-out houses. When Sir Simon Rattle
9 took over as principal conductor of the Berlin Philharmonic in that year, he
20 sought to impose his own personal stamp on the orchestra in part through
1 Mahler’s Fifth Symphony, which he conducted at the first concert he gave in the
2 wake of his appointment. Performed under the full glare of the world’s media
3 spotlight, the concert was immediately released on CD.
4 No one should think that the old antipathies to Mahler, still occasionally
5 coloured by anti-Semitic prejudices, have been erased by the composer’s
6 newfound popularity. Such undertones are still discernible, even if they are no
7 longer expressed with quite the same virulence as before – for that we have to
8 thank the fact that Mahler is now a mainstream composer and that anti-
9 Semitism remains unacceptable, even if that taboo is no longer as powerful as it
30 once was. The continuing existence of reservations about Mahler is clear from
1 even the most cursory glance at those conductors who champion Mahler’s works
2 and those who do not. The former category includes Claudio Abbado, Maurice
3 Abravanel, John Barbirolli, Rudolf Barshai, Leonard Bernstein, Gary Bertini,
4 Pierre Boulez, Riccardo Chailly, Gustavo Dudamel, Ivan Fischer, Valery Gergiev,
5 Michael Gielen, Carlo Maria Giulini, Bernard Haitink, Daniel Harding, Jascha
6 Horenstein, Eliahu Inbal, Mariss Jansons, Otto Klemperer, Paul Kletzki, Kirill
7 Kondrashin, Rafael Kubelík, James Levine, Lorin Maazel, Zubin Mehta, Dimitri
8 Mitropoulos, Kent Nagano, Vaclav Neumann, Roger Norrington, Jonathan Nott,
9 Seiji Ozawa, Simon Rattle, Fritz Reiner, Hermann Scherchen, Carl Schuricht,
40 Giuseppe Sinopoli, Georg Solti, Leopold Stokowski, George Szell, Klaus
41R Tennstedt, Michael Tilson Thomas and Bruno Walter – an incomplete but suffi-
ciently impressive list. But at least as interesting is the list of those conductors 1
who have given Mahler a wide berth. Of the older generation, suffice it to name 2
Ernest Ansermet, Karl Böhm, Sergiu Celibidache, Ferenc Fricsay, Wilhelm 3
Furtwängler (after 1933), Eugen Jochum, Herbert von Karajan (until the 1970s), 4
Erich Kleiber, Hans Knappertsbusch, Pierre Monteux, Charles Munch, 5
Wolfgang Sawallisch, Arturo Toscanini and Günter Wand. More recently, Carlos 6
Kleiber, Riccardo Muti and Christian Thielemann have likewise avoided 7
Mahler – Thielemann conducted the Eighth Symphony in Munich in 2010. 8
It is striking that among the conductors who are contemptuous of Mahler, 9
there are many who have established themselves as Brucknerians of the first 10
order. The evident incompatibility between Bruckner and Mahler from an 1
interpretative point of view is a remarkable phenomenon. (There are, of course, 2
exceptions, but these merely confirm the rule.) Celibidache and Wand are the 3
best-known examples of this. Wand once noted that in Bruckner’s music there 4
are no musical statements of a ‘private’ nature, only impersonal and supra- 5
personal ones. The conclusion would seem to be that Mahler’s music is far too 6
‘private’ for a conductor like Wand, too personal, too exhibitionist and too soul- 7
baring. Or is it because Bruckner’s music is emphatically Christian in character? 8
At all events, we need to be wary of claiming that Mahler conductors must 9
necessarily be Jewish, for there is at least one significant counter-example: 20
Daniel Barenboim may have worked tirelessly to introduce Wagner’s music to 1
Israel in spite of the nominal boycott that still exists there, but for a long time 2
he fought shy of Mahler. In 2007, however, he conducted the First, Fifth, 3
Seventh and Ninth Symphonies in Berlin, together with Das Lied von der Erde. 4
For a conductor to wait until he is over sixty to demonstrate such a commit- 5
ment to Mahler is surely unique in the history of music. 6
Mahler today and tomorrow: it is difficult to imagine Mahler becoming any 7
more popular than he is now. Rather we may anticipate a decline in that popu- 8
larity when the last vestiges of any sort of cultural education disappear for 9
good, for Mahler’s music needs not only technical reproduction but also a 30
constant revitalization through the experience of live performances; and to the 1
extent that his works are expensive to perform, they are a costly pleasure that 2
society must be willing to afford. His music and his person are so weighed 3
down with clichés that even the most incompetent review of a concert or a 4
recording parrots the same old phrases about a homeless Jew, inwardly torn 5
apart, a prophet both strict and zealous, a man lost to the world, sometimes 6
also the first terrible husband of the famous Alma Mahler-Werfel – the music 7
itself tends sometimes to disappear behind this wall of clichés. Above all, 8
a knowledge and understanding of his music runs the risk of vanishing with 9
the disappearance of middle-class musical culture and its technologies 40
and techniques, including the ability to read music. This is not to belittle the 41R
706 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 purely emotional experience of Mahler, which is clearly still an international

2 phenomenon. Listeners who are moved by Mahler’s music will initially, at
3 least, be won over by it. This is already a lot, but it is not enough. Listeners who
4 merely allow themselves to be overwhelmed by the intoxication of this music
5 will simply remain in thrall to it and never achieve a state of impassioned
6 understanding.
7 Mahler remains a problematical phenomenon. Adorno once wrote a short
8 essay to which he gave the title ‘Die Wunde Heine’ (‘The Heine Wound’). He was
9 referring to the inability of German readers, long before National Socialism, to
10 come to terms with Heinrich Heine’s virtuosity and with the natural fluency of
1 his poetic and linguistic expression, which was the opposite of autochthonous
2 homeliness and hence hinted at the failure of Jewish emancipation. As we have
3 already had occasion to note, this could scarcely be said to apply in every detail
4 to Mahler, who was some sixty years younger than Heine. But in reactions to
5 Mahler, the same wound continues to fester and bleed. It is no wonder that, as
6 Adorno observed, Heine’s true nature was revealed not in the songs of those
7 composers such as Schubert and Schumann who set his poems to music but in
8 the composer who did not set them, Mahler. For it is in Mahler’s songs about
9 army deserters and in his funeral marches such as that of the Fifth Symphony
20 and, finally, in the strident shifts between major and minor tonalities of the
1 Wunderhorn songs, that the music of Heine’s poetry ultimately comes to vibrant
2 life. There is also a Mahler wound, which will not close as long as human society
3 lacks the desire for reconciliation. His music speaks of this lack with a clarity that
4 is found in the works of few other composers.
5
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
Abbreviations
AME Alma Mahler-Werfel, Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler (Zurich am

Main and Berlin 1971); trans. Basil Creighton as Gustav Mahler:
Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell and Knud Martner, 4th
edn (London 1990)
AME (1949) Alma Mahler, Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe, 2nd
edn (Amsterdam 1949)
AMML Alma Mahler-Werfel, Mein Leben (Frankfurt am Main 1960); Engl.
trans. And the Bridge is Love: Memories of a Lifetime (London 1958)
AMTB Alma Mahler-Werfel, Tagebuch-Suiten 1898–1902, ed. Antony
Beaumont and Susanne Rode-Breymann (Frankfurt am Main 1997);
trans. Antony Beaumont as Diaries 1898–1902 (London 1998)
BWGM Bruno Walter, Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Wilhelmshaven 1981);
trans. Lotte Walter Lindt (London 1990)
BWTV Bruno Walter, Thema und Variationen: Erinnerungen und Gedanken
(Frankfurt am Main 1947); trans. James Galston as Theme and
Variations: An Autobiography (New York 1946)
DLG I Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler: Chronique d’une vie,
3 vols (Paris 1979–84)
DLG II Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler, 4 vols (Oxford 1995–;
vols 2–4 published so far)
GMB Herta Blaukopf (ed.), Gustav Mahler: Briefe (Vienna 1996);
partial Engl. trans. by Eithne Wilkins, Ernst Kaiser and Bill
Hopkins as Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Kurt Martner
(London 1979)
GMBA Henry-Louis de La Grange and Günther Weiß (eds), Ein Glück
ohne Ruh’: Die Briefe Gustav Mahlers an Alma (Berlin 1995);
trans. Antony Beaumont as Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife
(London 2004)
708 ABBREVIATIONS
GMFB Stephen McClatchie (ed.), Gustav Mahler: ‘Liebste Justi!’ Briefe an die
Familie (Bonn 2006); originally published in English as The Mahler
Family Letters (Oxford 2006)
GMMB Franz Willnauer (ed.), Gustav Mahler: ‘Mein lieber Trotzkopf, meine
süße Mohnblume’. Briefe an Anna von Mildenburg (Vienna 2006)
GMRSB Herta Blaukopf (ed.), Gustav Mahler – Richard Strauss: Briefwechsel
1888–1911 (Munich 1988); trans. Edmund Jephcott as Gustav
Mahler – Richard Strauss: Correspondence 1888–1911 (London 1984)
GMUB Herta Blaukopf (ed.), Gustav Mahler: Unbekannte Briefe (Vienna
and Hamburg 1983); trans. Richard Stokes as Mahler’s Unknown
Letters (London 1986)
HDMZ Hermann Danuser, Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit (Laaber 1991)
HEMM Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht, Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 2nd edn
(Munich 1986)
HKBGM Herta and Kurt Blaukopf (eds), Gustav Mahler: Leben und Werk in
Zeugnissen der Zeit (Stuttgart 1994)
IGMG Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft
KBMD Kurt Blaukopf (ed.), Mahler: Sein Leben, sein Werk und seine Welt
in zeitgenössischen Bildern und Texten (Vienna 1976); trans. Paul
Baker and others as Mahler: A Documentary Study (New York and
Toronto 1976)
MHGM Mathias Hansen, Gustav Mahler (Stuttgart 1996)
NBL Herbert Killian (ed.), Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von
Natalie Bauer-Lechner (Hamburg 1984); partial trans. by Dika
Newlin as Recollections of Gustav Mahler by Natalie Bauer-Lechner,
ed. Peter Franklin (London 1980)
NLM Norman Lebrecht, Gustav Mahler im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Zurich
and Sankt Gallen 1990); originally published in London in 1987
NMF Nachrichten zur Mahler-Forschung
RMA Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler’s American Years (1907–1911): A
Documentary History (Stuyvesant, NY, 1989)
RMU Zoltan Roman, Gustav Mahler and Hungary (Budapest 1991)
TWAM Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik
(Frankfurt am Main 1960); trans. Edmund Jephcott as Mahler: A
Musical Physiognomy (Chicago 1992)
WMWO Franz Willnauer, Gustav Mahler und die Wiener Oper (Vienna 1993)
1
2
3
4
5
6
Notes 7
8
9
10
1
2
3
Chapter 1. What Did Mahler Look Like? An Attempt at a Description 4
1. AMML 29. Throughout the main text, Mein Leben and its English-language equivalent, 5
And the Bridge is Love, are referred to as Alma’s ‘memoirs’. (For full bibliographical details, 6
see the list of abbreviations on p. 707.) Conversely, the term ‘reminiscences’ is reserved for
Donald Mitchell’s edition of her Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler, available in English as 7
Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (AME). In general, references to the German 8
edition are to the one published in Frankfurt am Main in 1971, although occasionally the
second edition, published in Amsterdam in 1949, is preferred as this contains documents 9
not taken over into the 1971 edition. For these and other abbreviations used in the notes, 20
the reader is referred to the list of abbreviations on pp. 707–8. 1
2. BWGM 17; Engl. trans. 17–18.
3. Ferdinand Pfohl, Gustav Mahler: Eindrücke und Erinnerungen aus den Hamburger 2
Jahren, ed. Knud Martner (Hamburg 1973), 16. 3
4. BWGM 19; Engl. trans. 20.
5. NBL and Alfred Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig and Vienna 1922), 4
9–28. Roller’s description of Mahler is included in Norman Lebrecht’s Mahler 5
Remembered (London 1987), 149–65, and taken over from there by Gilbert Kaplan in 6
The Mahler Album (New York and London 1995), 15–28. A revised edition of Kaplan’s
Mahler Album was published in 2011. 7
6. Kaplan, The Mahler Album (note 5). 8
7. AME 42.
8. Roller, Die Bildnisse (note 5), 15. 9
9. Roller, Die Bildnisse (note 5), 15. 30
10. NBL 82; Engl. trans. 84. 1
11. Pfohl, Gustav Mahler (note 3), 17.
12. Pfohl, Gustav Mahler (note 3), 17. 2
3
Chapter 2. Small Steps: Kalischt and Iglau (1860–75) 4
2. KBMD, fig. 4, 6. 6
3. See Wilma Iggers (ed.), Die Juden in Böhmen und Mähren: Ein historisches Lesebuch
(Munich 1986), 15–17, and Natalia Berger (ed.), Wo sich Kulturen begegnen: Die Geschichte 7
der tschechoslowakischen Juden (Prague 1992). 8
4. GMB 318; for the letter heading, see GMB 25; not in the Engl. trans.
5. This incident is known from the unpublished section of NBL, cited here from NLM 33; 9
Engl. trans. 12. 40
6. AME 30–1. 41R
710 NOTES to pp. 21–74
1 7. See Susan M. Filler, ‘The Missing Mahler: Alois (Hans) in Chicago’, Neue Mahleriana,
ed. Günther Weiß (Berne, and New York 1997), 39–45.
2 8. Alma Rosé is the subject of a study by Richard Newman and Karen Kirtley, Alma Rosé:
3 Vienna to Auschwitz (Portland, OR 2000).
4 9. NLM 28–30.
10. NBL 69.
5 11. Theodor Fischer, ‘Aus Gustav Mahlers Jugendzeit’, Deutsche Heimat: Sudetendeutsche
6 Monatsschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Heimat und Volkskunde, vii (1931), 264–8.
12. NBL, typescript in the archives of the IGMG, 12.
7 13. On klezmer music, see Rita Ottens and Joel Rubin, Klezmer-Musik (Munich and Kassel
8 1999); on the early influences on Mahler’s musical development, see Vladimir
9 Karbusicky, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt (Darmstadt 1978).
14. Fischer, ‘Aus Gustav Mahlers Jugendzeit’, cited in NLM 20; Engl. trans. 20 (emended).
10 15. NBL, typescript in the archives of the IGMG, 11–12.
1 16. Ibid.
17. Počátek cesty: Gustav Mahler a Jihlava v archivních pramenech, ed. Jihlava Municipal
2 Archives (Jihlava 2000). Although this volume is advertised as bilingual, the English
3 translations by Nora Martišková are so woefully unidiomatic as to render the publica-
4 tion unusable by English-speaking readers.
18. Quoted from the facsimile in Počátek cesty (note 17), 90.
5 19. GMB 31; Engl. trans. 55.
6 20. GMB 25; not in the Engl. trans.
7
8 Chapter 3. Studies in Vienna (1875–80)
9 1. Hermann Broch, ‘Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit’, Schriften zur Literatur, i: Kritik (Frankfurt
am Main 1975), 111–284.
20 2. Robert A. Kann, Geschichte des Habsburgerreiches 1562 bis 1918, 3rd edn (Vienna,
1 Cologne and Weimar 1993), 331.
3. On the Ringstraße, see the comprehensive documentary study by Renate Wagner-
2 Rieger (ed.), Die Wiener Ringstraße: Bild einer Epoche, 11 vols (Vienna 1969–79); see
3 also Carl E. Schorske, ‘Die Ringstraße, ihre Kritiker und die Idee der modernen Stadt’,
4 Wien: Geist und Gesellschaft im Fin de siècle (Munich 1994), 23–109.
4. Broch, ‘Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit’ (note 1), 175.
5 5. NBL 157–8; Engl. trans. 146.
6 6. On Hans Rott, see Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (eds), Hans Rott: Der
Begründer der neuen Symphonie (Munich 1999 (= Musik-Konzepte 103/4); see also
7 the important documentation in Uwe Harten (ed.), Hans Rott (1858–1884) (Vienna
8 2000).
9 7. For quotations from Krzyzanowski’s jottings, see Thomas Leibnitz, ‘ “Ja, er ist
meinem Eigensten so verwandt . . .”: Hans Rott und Gustav Mahler. Notizen zu
30 einer tragischen Beziehung’, Gustav Mahler: Werk und Wirken, ed. Erich Wolfgang
1 Partsch (Vienna 1996), 73–5. The complete text has been published by Uwe Harten
(note 6).
2 8. NBL 70–1; not in the Engl. trans.
3 9. Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Hugo Wolf: Leben und Werk (Berlin 2003), 372–4.
4 10. HKBGM 26; Engl. trans. 154 (emended).
11. HKBGM 27; Engl. trans. 154 (emended).
5 12. Arnold Schoenberg, ‘Brahms, der Fortschrittliche’, Stil und Gedanke: Aufsätze zur
6 Musik (Frankfurt am Main 1976), 35–71; trans. Leo Black as ‘Brahms the Progressive’,
Style and Idea, ed. Leonard Stein (London 1975), 398–441, esp. 401.
7 13. HKBGM 28–9; Engl. trans. 156.
8 14. NBL, typescript in the archives of the IGMG, fol. 26/27 III.
9 15. GMBA 286; Engl. trans. 239.
16. NBL, unpag. typescript in the archives of the IGMG.
40 17. NBL 32; Engl. trans. 37.
41R
NOTES to pp. 74–106 711
18. See the excellent account by Herta Blaukopf, ‘Mahler an der Universität: Versuch, eine 1
biographische Lücke zu schließen’, Neue Mahleriana, ed. Günther Weiß (Berne and New
York 1997), 1–16.
2
19. Theodor Fischer, ‘Aus Gustav Mahlers Jugendzeit’, Deutsche Heimat: Sudentendeutsche 3
Monatsschrift für Kunst, Literatur, Heimat- und Volkskunde, vii (1931), 264–8, esp. 267. 4
20. The standard study on the Pernerstorfer circle remains William J. McGrath, Dionysian
Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven 1974); see also William J. McGrath, 5
‘Mahler und der Wiener “Nietzsche-Verein” ’, Nietzsche und die jüdische Kultur, ed. 6
Jacob Golomb (Vienna 1998), 210–24.
21. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sämtliche Briefe, 8 vols, ed. Giorgio Colli and Mazzino Montinari
7
(Munich and Berlin 1986), v.346–7. 8
22. See the brief but accurate account in Peter Sprengel, Geschichte der deutschsprachigen 9
Literatur 1870–1900 (Munich 1998), 224–5, where Sprengel draws attention to the affini-
ties between Lipiner’s Prometheus and Carl Spitteler’s mythopoeic rhapsody, Prometheus 10
und Epimetheus, of 1880. 1
23. BWTV 190; Engl. trans. 159–60.
24. Richard Kralik, Tage und Werke: Lebenserinnerungen (Vienna 1922), 59.
2
25. Friedrich Eckstein, ‘Alte unnennbare Tage!’ (Vienna 1936), 112–13. 3
26. BSB, Ana 600, B, I, 2 b/Poisl, quoted in Sigrid von Moisy, ‘Gustav Mahlers Briefe’, 4
Gustav Mahler: Briefe und Musikautographen aus den Moldenhauer-Archiven in der
Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (Munich 2003), 53–4. 5
27. GMB 30–3; Engl. trans. 54–7. 6
28. HKBGM 31–2; Engl. trans. 158.
29. Mahler’s letter of 14 March 1880 to Anton Krisper in Hans Holländer, ‘Unbekannte
7
Jugendbriefe Gustav Mahlers’, Die Musik, xx (1928), 807–13, esp. 811; see also Engl. 8
trans. of GMB, 62. 9
30. GMB 37; Engl. trans. 387 (emended).
20
Chapter 4. The Summer Conductor: Bad Hall (1880) 1
1. Hans Holländer, ‘Unbekannte Jugendbriefe Gustav Mahlers’, Die Musik, xx (1928),
2
807–13, esp. 809; see also Engl. trans. of GMB, 60 (emended) (letter to Anton Krisper, 3
18 Feb. 1880). 4
2. GMB 32–3; Engl. trans. 56–7 (letter to Josef Steiner, 19 June 1879).
3. GMB 30; Engl. trans. 54 (letter to Josef Steiner, 17–19 June 1879). 5
4. GMB 33; Engl. trans. 57 (emended) (letter to Emil Freund, June 1879). 6
5. GMB 34; Engl. trans. 58 (emended) (letter to Anton Krisper, postmarked 22 Sept. 1879).
6. GMB 35; Engl. trans. 59 (emended) (undated letter to Anton Krisper, [between late
7
Nov. and 14 Dec. 1879]). 8
7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Collected Works, xi: ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’, 9
trans. Victor Lange (Princeton, NJ 1995), 20 and 36.
8. GMB 37; Engl. trans. 62 (letter to Anton Krisper, postmarked 3 March 1880). 30
9. GMB 205; Engl. trans. 200 (undated letter to Max Marschalk, [4 Dec. 1896]). 1
10. Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Kinder- und Hausmärchen, ed. Heinz Rölleke, 3 vols
(Stuttgart 1980), i.166.
2
11. On this point and on Das klagende Lied in general, see Janina Klassen, ‘Märchenerzählung: 3
Anmerkungen zum “Klagenden Lied” ’, Gustav Mahler durchgesetzt?, ed. Heinz–Klaus 4
Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich 1999), 8–32 (= Musik-Konzepte 106).
5
Chapter 5. Emotional Ups and Downs in Laibach (1881–2) 6
1. GMB 39–40; Engl. trans. 64–5 (emended) (letter to Emil Freund, 1 Nov. 1880).
7
2. Stefan Zweig, Die Welt von Gestern (Frankfurt 1953), 89–90; trans. as The World of 8
Yesterday (New York 1943), 88–9. 9
3. See Jens Malte Fischer, Richard Wagners ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’: Eine kritische
Dokumentation als Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus (Frankfurt 2000). 40
4. GMFB 350; Engl. trans. 251 (letter to Justine Mahler, 17 Dec. 1893). 41R
712 NOTES to pp. 106–31
1 5. NBL 124; Engl. trans. 118.

6. KBMD 229; Engl. trans. 226.
2 7. Indeed, it was not until the mid-1930s that the existence of a three-movement version
3 came to light, and not until 1969 was it properly rediscovered both in the concert hall
4 and on record, albeit in a hybrid version that combined the first version of the opening
movement with the revised versions of the other two sections. The first version of
5 Mahler’s bold ‘op. 1’ was finally revealed to the world only in 1997, when Kent Nagano
6 performed the piece to compelling effect in Manchester, a performance also released on
compact disc. Since then there are only two versions in which Das klagende Lied should
7 be performed: either the two-movement revised version or, preferably, the original
8 version in three movements. Hybrid versions are not acceptable.
9
10 Chapter 6. For the Last Time in the Provinces: Olmütz (1882–3)
1 1. GMFB 49; Engl. trans. 20–1 (letter from Marie Mahler to Gustav Mahler, 15 Dec. 1882).
2. HKBGM 47–8; Engl. trans. from Kurt Blaukopf (ed.), Mahler: A Documentary Study,
2 trans. Paul Baker and others (New York and Toronto 1976), 166.
3 3. GMB 43–4; Engl. trans. 17 (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 12 Feb. 1883).
4 4. HKBGM 45; Engl. trans. 168 (emended).
5. GMB 47; Engl. trans. 73 (emended) (letter to Friedrich Löhr, July 1883).
5
6 Chapter 7. Presentiment and a New Departure: Kassel (1883–5)
7 1. The present chapter is based on the detailed researches of the Kassel dramaturge Hans
8 Joachim Schaefer in Gustav Mahler: Jahre der Entscheidung in Kassel 1883–1885 (Kassel
9 1990).
2. GMB 48; Engl. trans. 74 (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 19 Sept. 1883).
20 3. GMB 50; trans. from Kurt Blaukopf (ed.), Mahler: A Documentary Study (New York and
1 Toronto 1976), 170 (undated letter to Gustav Lewy, [late Oct. 1883]).
4. GMB 51; trans. from Mahler: A Documentary Study (note 3), 170 (emended) (undated
2 letter to Hans von Bülow, [25 or 26 Jan. 1884]).
3 5. Quoted from Schaefer, Gustav Mahler (note 1), 45.
4 6. GMB 52; Engl. trans. 76 (emended) (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [April 1884]).
7. GMB 56; Engl. trans. 80 (emended) (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [late Aug. 1884]).
5 8. GMB 57; Engl. trans. 81 (emended) (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 1 Jan. 1885; Löhr argues
6 that Mahler was alluding to Jean Paul here.)
9. See Schaefer, Gustav Mahler (note 1), 79.
7 10. Schaefer, Gustav Mahler (note 1), 82.
8 11. GMB 66; Engl. trans. 89 (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 5 July 1885).
9
30 Chapter 8. The Avid Reader: Mahler and Literature
1 1. GMB 141–2; Engl. trans. 153 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [late 1894 or Jan. 1895]).
2. On Mahler’s song texts, see the present writer’s detailed examination in ‘Das klagende Lied
2 von der Erde: Zu Gustav Mahlers Liedern und ihren Texten’, Jahrhundertdämmerung:
3 Ansichten eines anderen Fin de siècle (Vienna 2000), 90–110, esp. 90–4.
4 3. Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano, Des Knaben Wunderhorn: Alte deutsche
Lieder, ed. Heinz Rölleke, 3 vols (Stuttgart 1987), iii.119–20.
5 4. NBL 165; Engl. trans. 155–6.
6 5. TWAM 57; Engl. trans. 38.
6. Hans Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern: A Chronicle of his Life and Work (London
7 1978), 75–6.
8 7. Karl Kraus, ‘Bekenntnis’, Gedichte, ed. Christian Wagenknecht (Frankfurt 1989), 93.
9 8. Rudolf Borchardt, Prosa III (Stuttgart 1960), 340.
9. Hans Wollschläger, ‘ “Der Gang zu jenen Höhn” ’, Friedrich Rückert: Kindertotenlieder
40 (Frankfurt and Leipzig 1993), 38–9.
41R
NOTES to pp. 131–56 713
10. Herta Blaukopf, ‘ “Bücher fresse ich immer mehr und mehr”: Gustav Mahler als Leser’, 1
Mahler-Gespräche, ed. Friedbert Aspetsberger and Erich Wolfgang Partsch (Innsbruck
2002), 96–8.
2
11. GMBA 307; Engl. trans. 257 (letter to Alma Mahler, 12 Jan. 1907). 3
12. GMBA 282; Engl. trans. 236 (letter to Alma Mahler, 16 Aug. 1906). 4
13. GMBA 206; Engl. trans. 168 (letter to Alma Mahler, 28 June 1904).
14. NLM 238; Engl. trans. 255. 5
17. NLM 236; Engl. trans. 253.
7
18. NLM 241; Engl. trans. 260–1 (revised). 8
19. NBL 198; Engl. trans. 178. 9
20. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin 1913), 35; a different version of this anecdote
may be found in AME 155; Engl. trans. 126. 10
21. Specht, Gustav Mahler (note 20), 35. 1
22. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. David McDuff (London
2003), 308.
2
23. Jean Paul, Ideen-Gewimmel (Munich 2000), 53. 3
4
Chapter 9. Becoming Mahler: Prague (1885–6) 5
1. GMB 67; Engl. trans. 90 (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 10 [July] 1885). 6
2. Heinrich Grünfeld, In Dur und Moll: Begegnungen und Erlebnisse aus fünfzig Jahren
(Leipzig and Zurich 1923), 19.
7
3. GMB 68; Engl. trans. 94 (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 28 Nov.–28 Dec. 1885). 8
4. Jitka Ludvová has documented every surviving trace of Betty Frank in ‘Betty 9
Frank, Gustav Mahlers Prager Freundin’, Gustav Mahler und Prag (Prague 1996),
23–56. 20
5. KBMD 173; Engl. trans. 174. 1
6. HKBGM 64–5; Engl. trans. 175 (emended).
7. HKBGM 65; Engl. trans. 176.
2
3
Chapter 10. The First Symphony 4
1. GMB 92; Engl. trans. 111–12 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [March 1888]). 5
2. NBL 173; Engl. trans. 157. 6
3. GMB 169–70 and 171–2; Engl. trans. 177–8 and 178–81 (letters to Max Marschalk,
20 and 26 March 1896).
7
4. Bruno Walter, Briefe 1894–1962, ed. Lotte Walter Lindt (Frankfurt 1969), 48–52 (letter 8
to Ludwig Schiedermair, 6 Dec. 1901). 9
5. GMB 277; Engl. trans. 262 (undated letter to Max Kalbeck, [20 Nov. 1900?]).
6. NBL 138; Engl. trans. 131. 30
7. These and later comments on individual works are based in part on the writings 1
of Theodor W. Adorno, Paul Bekker, Hermann Danuser, Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht,
Constantin Floros, Mathias Hansen and Donald Mitchell.
2
8. NBL 173; Engl. trans. 157. 3
9. TWAM 61; Engl. trans. 41. 4
10. MHGM 55.
11. Mahler’s own detailed comments on his First Symphony may be found in NBL 172–6; 5
the Engl. trans. (157–61) is incomplete. 6
12. Eduard Hanslick’s review originally appeared in the Neue Freie Presse on 20 Nov. 1900
and is quoted here from Renate Ulm (ed.), Gustav Mahlers Symphonien: Entstehung –
7
Deutung – Wirkung (Munich and Kassel 2001), 70. 8
13. Ferdinand Pfohl, Gustav Mahler: Eindrücke und Erinnerungen aus den Hamburger 9
Jahren, ed. Knud Martner (Hamburg 1973), 64–7.
14. RMA 313–14. 40
15. GMB 396; Engl. trans. 346 (undated letter to Bruno Walter, [18 or 19 Dec. 1909]). 41R
714 NOTES to pp. 159–86
1 Chapter 11. Life’s Vicissitudes: Leipzig (1886–8)

2 1. GMB 68; Engl. trans. 94 (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 28 Nov.–28 Dec. 1885).
3 2. GMB 78; Engl. trans. 101 (corrected) (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [Oct.? 1886]).
3. GMB 79; Engl. trans. 102 (letter to Max Staegemann, 6 Nov. 1886).
4 4. HKBGM 68; Engl. trans. 177.
6. GMB 87; Engl. trans. 109 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [early May 1887]).
6 7. Ethel Smyth, Impressions that Remained, 2 vols (London 1923), ii.174–5.
7 8. GMB 88–9; Engl. trans. 109 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [4 Jan. 1888]).
8 9. Cosima Wagner, Das zweite Leben: Briefe und Aufzeichnungen 1883–1930, ed. Dietrich
Mack (Munich 1980), 191 (letter from Cosima Wagner to Hermann Levi, 19 June
9 1889).
10 10. NBL 175; Engl. trans. 159.
11. GMB 92; Engl. trans. 112 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [March 1888]).
1 12. GMB 93–4; Engl. trans. 113 (letter to Max Staegemann, 16 May 1888).
2
3 Chapter 12. Notes on Mahler’s Songs
4 1. Readers who wish to pursue their understandable interest in Mahler’s songs are referred,
5 once again, to Mathias Hansen’s brief but lucid account in MHGM and to Peter Revers,
Mahlers Lieder: Ein musikalischer Werkführer (Munich 2000).
6 2. GMB 57; Engl. trans. 81 (emended) (letter to Friedrich Löhr, 1 Jan. 1885).
7 3. Rudolf Baumbach, Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, 4th edn (Leipzig 1882), 1.
8 4. GMB 322; Engl. trans. 282 (letter to Ludwig Karpath, 2 March 1905).
5. NBL 193; Engl. trans. 173.
9 6. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Rezension von Des Knaben Wunderhorn’, Sämtliche
20 Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens (Munich 1988), vi/2.602–16.
7. Jean Paul, ‘Speech of the Dead Christ from the Universe that There Is No God’
1 from ‘Siebenkäs’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich and Vienna 1987),
2 i/2.270–5.
3 8. NBL 135; this passage is not in the Engl. trans.
4 10. AMML 32; Engl. trans. 60.
5 11. MHGM 248.
6
Chapter 13. Lowland Dreams: Budapest (1888–91)
7
8 1. The fullest account of Mahler’s time in Budapest is Zoltan Roman’s documentary study,
Gustav Mahler and Hungary (Budapest 1991) (= RMU).
9 2. GMB 95; this letter is not included in the 1979 Engl. trans. (undated letter to Max
30 Steinitzer, [early summer 1888]).
3. On Mihalovich and his later letters to Mathilde Wesendonck, in which Mahler plays an
1 important role, see Inge Birkin-Feichtinger’s article, ‘Ödön von Mihalovich’s Mahler-
2 Bild aus der Sicht von Briefen an Mathilde Wesendonck aus den Jahren 1889–97’, Studia
3 Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, xliii (2002), 41–51.
4. Ludwig Karpath, Begegnung mit dem Genius (Vienna 1934), 11–12; Engl. trans. from
4 Kurt Blaukopf (ed.), Mahler: A Documentary Study, trans. Paul Baker and others (New
5 York and Toronto 1976), 182.
6 6. GMB 97; Engl. trans. 117 (undated letter to members of the Budapest Opera, [before
7 10 Oct. 1888]).
8 7. GMB 98; Engl. trans. 118 (letter to Max Staegemann, 20 Dec. 1888).
40 10. RMU 200.
41R
NOTES to pp. 186–218 715
11. RMU 59. 1

12. Lilli Lehmann, Mein Weg, 2nd edn (Leipzig 1920), 367; trans. Alice Benedict Seligman
as My Path Through Life (London 1914), 388.
2
13. HKBGM 88; Engl. trans. 190 (emended). 3
4
Chapter 14. The Conductor 5
1. Franz Werfel, Gedichte (Berlin, Vienna and Leipzig 1927), 321. 6
2. Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Hamburg 1960), 455–6; trans. Carol Stewart as Crowds
and Power (London 1962), 396.
7
3. Mary Lawton, Schumann-Heink: The Last of the Titans (New York 1929), 360. 8
5. H. C. Robbins Landon, Beethoven: His Life, Work and World (London 1992), 174–5.
6. Schließmann’s caricature is reproduced in Kurt Blaukopf (ed.), Mahler: A Documentary 10
Study, trans. Paul Baker and others (New York and Toronto 1976), pl. 194. 1
7. Gilbert Kaplan, The Mahler Album (New York and London 1995), pl. 194.
8. This caricature is reproduced on p. 274 of K. M. Knittel’s excellent article, ‘ “Ein hyper-
2
moderner Dirigent”: Mahler and Anti-Semitism in Fin-de-siècle Vienna’, 19th Century 3
Music, xviii (1995), 257–76. 4
10. NLM 246; Engl. trans. 267–8. 5
11. BWGM 71; Engl. trans. 81. 6
12. Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Der Pilger: Erinnerungen eines Musikers (Prague 1955), 386.
13. BWGM 71; Engl. trans. 81–2.
7
8
Chapter 15. The Second Symphony 9
1. GMB 172–3; Engl. trans. 180 (letter to Max Marschalk, 26 March 1896). 20
2. See GMBA 87–9; Engl. trans. 64–5; GMB 172–3; Engl. trans. 180 (letter to Max 1
Marschalk, 26 March 1896); and NBL 40; Engl. trans. 43–4.
3. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, 6 vols (Munich 1967–92), i.223–4.
2
4. GMB 302; Engl. trans. 269 (letter to Julius Buths, 25 March 1903). 3
5. Rudolf Stephan, Gustav Mahler: II. Symphonie c-Moll (Munich 1979), 74–5. 4
6. TWAM 179; Engl. trans. 136.
7. Alban Berg, Briefe an seine Frau (Munich and Vienna 1965), 21; trans. Bernard Grun 5
as Alban Berg: Letters to His Wife (New York 1971), 32 (emended). 6
7
Chapter 16. Self-Realization: Hamburg (1891–7) 8
1. Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Der Pilger: Erinnerungen eines Musikers (Prague 1955), 352–3; 9
the Titian canvas is reproduced in Kurt Blaukopf (ed.), Mahler: A Documentary Study,
trans. Paul Baker and others (New York and Toronto 1976), pl. 100. 30
2. BWGM 20; Engl. trans. 20–21. 1
4. Modeste Tchaikovsky, The Life & Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, ed. Rosa Newmarch
2
(New York 1973), 675. 3
5. Foerster, Der Pilger (note 1), 92–3; Engl. trans. from Blaukopf, Mahler: A Documentary 4
Study (note 1), 193.
6. Marie von Bülow, Hans von Bülows Leben dargestellt aus seinen Briefen (Leipzig 5
1921), 510. 6
7. GMB 118; Engl. trans. 139 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [28 Nov. 1891]).
8. GMB 117; Engl. trans. 138 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [28 Nov. 1891]).
7
9. GMB 117; Engl. trans. 138 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [28 Nov. 1891]). 8
10. GMB 141; Engl. trans. 152 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [late 1894 or Jan. 9
1895]).
11. GMB 119; Engl. trans. 140 (undated letter to Emil Freund, [late autumn of 1891 or 40
winter of 1891/2]). 41R
716 NOTES to pp. 219–45

13. GMB 121–2; Engl. trans. 141–2 (undated letter to Arnold Berliner, [9 June 1892]).
2 14. Hermann [Herman] Klein, Thirty Years of Musical Life in London 1870–1900 (London
3 1903), 365–6.
4 15. GMB 123; Engl. trans. 142–3 (undated letters to Arnold Berliner, [29 June and 14 July
1892]).
5 16. Dan H. Laurence (ed.), Shaw’s Music, 3 vols (London 1989), ii.650 (‘Siegfried at Covent
6 Garden’, originally published in The World on 15 June 1892).
17. Herman Klein, The Golden Age of Opera (London 1933), 163–4.
7 18. Ferdinand Pfohl, Gustav Mahler: Eindrücke und Erinnerungen aus den Hamburger
8 Jahren, ed. Knud Martner (Hamburg 1973), 11.
9 19. Pfohl, Gustav Mahler (note 18), 26–8.
10 21. Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Erinnerungen (Vienna and Berlin 1921), 14; Engl. trans. from
1 Blaukopf, Mahler: A Documentary Study (note 1), 202–3.
2 23. Jean Paul, ‘Vorschule der Ästhetik’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert Miller and others
3 (Munich and Vienna 1987), i/5.125; see also Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression
4 and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford 2009), 127–32.
24. Anna von Mildenburg, ‘Aus Briefen Mahlers’, Moderne Welt, iii/7 (1921), 13; quoted
5 from NLM 101–2; Engl. trans. 90–1. Mildenburg is more forthcoming here than in her
6 Erinnerungen of the same year.
25. GMUB 246–7; Engl. trans. 232 (undated letter to Wilhelm Zinne, [30 May 1895]).
7 Mahler writes ‘Geheimrad’, a pun compounding ‘Geheimrat’ (privy councillor) and
8 ‘Rad’ (bicycle).
9 26. GMBA 297–8; Engl. trans. 248 (telegram to Alma Mahler, 6 Nov. 1906). The whole
telegram is written in doggerel rhyme.
20 27. NBL, typescript in the archives of the IGMG, 3.
1 28. AME 81; Engl. trans. 55.
29. On Mahler’s visits to Steinbach, see Herta Blaukopf, ‘Das Häuschen am Attersee’, Gustav
2 Mahler in Steinbach am Attersee, ed. IGMG (Vienna n.d.), 3–5. See also the account by
3 Mahler’s nephew, Alfred Rosé, who travelled to Steinbach with his mother in 1928 and
4 received a first-hand report from her: Alfred Rosé, ‘From Gustav Mahler’s Storm and
Stress Period’, Canadian Music Journal, i (1957), 21–4, reproduced in the Engl. edition of
5 NLM 67–71.
6 30. BWGM 30; Engl. trans. 33.
31. GMUB 234; Engl. trans. 220 (undated letter to Cosima Wagner, [late Oct. 1896]).
7 32. GMB 156; Engl. trans. 169–70 (undated letter to Anna von Mildenburg, [21 Nov. 1895]).
8 33. GMMB 40–41 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 29 Nov. 1895).
9 34. NBL 180–1; Engl. trans. 163–4.
35. Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Darstellung der Werke Richard Wagners aus dem Geiste der
30 Dichtung und Musik: Tristan und Isolde. Vollständige Regiebearbeitung sämtlicher
1 Partien mit Notenbeispielen (Leipzig and Vienna 1936).
36. GMMB 54 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 10 Dec. 1895).
3 38. GMMB 77–8 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 7 Feb. 1896).
4 39. GMMB 95–6 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 19 May 1896).
40. GMMB 149 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 21 July 1896).
5 41. GMMB 219 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 14 May 1897).
6 42. HKBGM 124–5; Engl. trans. 212.
43. GMMB 244–5 (undated letter to Anna von Mildenburg, [?24 July 1897]).
7 44. Emil Pirchan, Alexander Witeschnik and Otto Fritz, 300 Jahre Wiener Operntheater
8 (Vienna 1953), 190–1.
9 45. GMMB 316 (undated letter to Anna von Mildenburg, [March 1902]).
46. GMMB 225 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 7 Dec. 1907).
40 47. Bahr-Mildenburg, Erinnerungen (note 21), 32.
41R 48. HKBGM 97; Engl. trans. 195.
NOTES to pp. 248–72 717
49. GMUB 234–5; Engl. trans. 219–21 (undated letter to Cosima Wagner, [late Oct. 1
1896]).
50. GMUB 218; Engl. trans. 205 (emended) (letter from Cosima Wagner to Marie von
2
Wolkenstein, 2 July 1899). 3
51. GMUB 221; Engl. trans. 207 (undated letter from Cosima Wagner to Marie von 4
Wolkenstein, [after 11 Dec. 1899]).
52. Wilhelm Kienzl, Meine Lebenswanderung (Stuttgart 1926), 143; Engl. trans. from 5
Blaukopf, Mahler: A Documentary Study (note 1), 201. 6
53. HKBGM 118; Engl. trans. 207–8.
7
8
Chapter 17. Jewishness and Identity
9
1. Ernest Ansermet, Les fondements de la musique dans la conscience humaine et autres
écrits, ed. Jean-Jacques Rapin (Paris 2000), 670–2. 10
2. Hans Joachim Schaefer and others, Gustav Mahler: Jahre der Entscheidung in Kassel 1
1883–1885 (Kassel 1990), 62.
3. HKBGM 122; Engl. trans. 210 (Die Reichspost, 14 April 1897).
2
4. HKBGM 132; Engl. trans. 218 (Deutsche Zeitung, 4 Nov. 1898). 3
5. See Hans Rudolf Vaget, Im Schatten Wagners: Thomas Mann über Richard Wagner 4
(Frankfurt 1999), 232–3.
6. Rudolf Louis, Die deutsche Musik der Gegenwart (Munich and Leipzig 1909), 182. 5
7. Dr B., Völkischer Beobachter (Munich edn) (26 Jan. 1929). 6
8. Wolfgang Schlüter, Niedersächsische Zeitung (19 Nov. 1952).
9. Rudolf Bauer, Das Konzert, rev. edn (Berlin 1961), 403.
7
10. See Jens Malte Fischer, Richard Wagners ‘Das Judentum in der Musik’: Eine kritische 8
Dokumentation als Beitrag zur Geschichte des Antisemitismus (Frankfurt 2000). The 9
introduction to this documentary volume deals with the present problem in some
detail. 20
11. GMB 140; Engl. trans. 152 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [late 1894 or Jan. 1
1895]).
12. HKBGM 119 (undated letter to Ödön von Mihalovich); Engl. trans. 208 (dated 25 Jan.
2
1897). 3
13. GMB 246; Engl. trans. 231 (a sentence has been inadvertently omitted from the English 4
translation) (undated letter to Bruno Walter [late May or early June 1897]).
14. GMBA 144; Engl. trans. 114 (letter to Alma Mahler, 31 March 1903). 5
15. GMUB 55; Engl. trans. 55 (undated letter to Oskar Fried, [Aug. 1906]). 6
16. Alfred Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig and Vienna 1922), 25.
17. Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (note 16), 25.
7
19. Freud in an interview conducted in English in 1926, cited by Peter Gay, A Godless Jew: 9
Freud, Atheism, and the Making of Psychoanalysis (New Haven 1987), 139.
20. AME 137; Engl. trans. 109. 30
21. Gay, A Godless Jew (note 19), 122 (letter from Sigmund Freud to an unnamed corres- 1
pondent, 27 Jan. 1925).
2
23. See Vladimir Karbusicky, Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt (Darmstadt 1978). 3
24. RMA 442–5. 4
26. Gershom Scholem, ‘Juden und Deutsche’, Judaica II (Frankfurt 1970), 33. 5
27. GMB 367–8; Engl. trans. 324 (letter to Bruno Walter, 18 July [1908]). 6
28. Heinrich Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Berlin and Leipzig 1926).
29. Max Brod, Gustav Mahler: Beispiel einer deutsch-jüdischen Symbiose (Frankfurt 1961),
7
20 and 19. 8
30. GMB 191; Engl. trans. 189 (letter to Bruno Walter, 2 July 1896). 9
32. HEMM 287–9. 40
33. NBL 185; not in Engl. trans. 41R
718 NOTES to pp. 274–319
1 Chapter 18. The Third Symphony

2 1. BWGM 32–3; Engl. trans. 3.
3 2. NBL 35; Engl. trans. 40.
3. GMB 196; the Engl. trans. (192–3) reproduces only the German without a translation
4 (letter to Max Marschalk, 6 Aug. 1896).
5 4. GMB 187; the Engl. trans. (190) is abridged and misdated (undated letter to Anna von
Mildenburg, [28? June 1896]).
6 5. HDMZ 152–4.
7 6. GMB 187; Engl. trans. (190) incomplete (undated letter to Anna von Mildenburg,
8 [28? June 1896]).
9 8. NBL 60; Engl. trans. 63.
10 9. NLM 239; Engl. trans. 257.
1 11. See Anette Unger, Welt, Leben und Kunst als Themen der ‘Zarathustra-Kompositionen’
2 von Richard Strauss und Gustav Mahler (Frankfurt 1992).
3 12. BWGM 102; Engl. trans. 118.
13. GMBA 107 and 62; Engl. trans. 81 and 19 (letter to Alma Mahler, 19 Dec. 1901).
4 14. NLM 201; Engl. trans. 210.
5 15. TWAM 53–4; Engl. trans. 36.
16. GMB 190–1; Engl. trans. 189 (letter to Bruno Walter, 2 July 1896).
6 17. MHGM 95.
7
8 Chapter 19. The God of the Southern Climes: Vienna (1897–1901)
9 1. GMB 199; Engl. trans. 193 (undated letter to Friedrich Löhr, [autumn 1896]).
3. GMB 211–12; not in Engl. trans. (letter to Josef von Bezecny, 21 Dec. 1896).
1 4. Franz Bittong, Die Meistersinger, oder: Das Judenthum in der Musik. Parodistischer
2 Scherz in 1 Akt (Berlin [1871]), reproduced by Jens Malte Fischer, Richard Wagners ‘Das
3 Judentum in der Musik’: Eine kritische Dokumentation als Beitrag zur Geschichte des
Antisemitismus (Frankfurt 2000), 329–52.
4 5. RMU 166 (letter to Ödön von Mihalovich, 21 Dec. 1896).
5 6. RMU 167 (letter to Ödön von Mihalovich, 22 Dec. 1896).
7. RMU 168–9 (undated letter to Ödön von Mihalovich, [mid-Jan. 1897]).
6 8. This was the soprano Henriette Standthartner, Mottl’s first wife (1866–1933), whom he
7 married in 1893. They later separated, but she refused to divorce him, and it was only
8 on his deathbed that he was able to marry his second wife, the soprano Zdenka
Fassbender (1879–1954). (Mahler was not the only conductor to promote the stage
9 careers of the women in his life.)
30 9. HHStA Wien, Gen. Intendanz, 897, K 165 (no. 491) (letter from Eduard Hanslick,
27 March 1897).
3 12. HKBGM 123; Engl. trans. 211 (‘Wiener Brief ’, Breslauer Zeitung, 16 May 1897).
13. NBL 87; Engl. trans. 89 (emended).
4 14. Eduard Hanslick, ‘Dalibor’, Am Ende des Jahrhunderts: Musikalische Kritiken und
5 Schilderungen (Berlin 1899), 65–6.
15. KBMD 157; Engl. trans. 147–8.
6 16. AMTB 481; Engl. trans. 269 (entry of 24 March 1900).
7 17. Marie Gutheil-Schoder, Erlebtes und Erstrebtes: Rolle und Gestaltung (Vienna and
8 Leipzig 1937), 19–20.
18. Dési Halban (ed.), Selma Kurz: Die Sängerin und ihre Zeit (Stuttgart and Zurich 1983), 88.
9 19. Halban, Selma Kurz (note 18), 89.
40 20. Halban, Selma Kurz (note 18), 89.
21. Ludwig Karpath, Begegnung mit dem Genius (Vienna and Leipzig 1934), 66–7.
41R 22. NBL, typescript in the archives of the IGMG.
NOTES to pp. 323–57 719
Chapter 20. Mahler’s Illnesses: A Pathographical Sketch 1

1. AME 151; Engl. trans. 122. 2
2. GMB 247; Engl. trans. 227 (letter to Anna von Mildenburg, 12 June 1897). 3
3. NBL 38; not in Engl. trans.
4. AMTB 752; Engl. trans. 468 (entry of 6 Jan. 1902). 4
5. AMTB 738; Engl. trans. 456 (emended) (entry of 9 Dec. 1901). 5
6. See, for example, Peter Ostwald, ‘Gustav Mahler: Health and Creative Energy’, A ‘Mass’
for the Masses: Proceedings of the Mahler VIII Symposium, Amsterdam 1988, ed. Eveline 6
Nikkels and Robert Becqué (Rijswijk 1992), 100–2. 7
7. AME 96; Engl. trans. 69. 8
9. GMBA 385–6; Engl. trans. 324 (letter to Alma Mahler, 20? June 1909). 9
10
Chapter 21. The Fourth Symphony 1
1. GMB 305; Engl. trans. 272 (letter to Julius Buths, 12 Sept. 1903). 2
2. NBL 198; Engl. trans. 177–8. 3
3. HKBGM 153–4; Engl. trans. 230 (review by Theodor Kroyer first published in Die
Musik, i [1901/2], 548–9). 4
4. NBL 203; Engl. trans. 184. 5
6. GMB 428; Engl. trans. 372 (letter to Georg Göhler, 8 Feb. 1911). 6
7. NBL 162; Engl. trans. 151–2. 7
8. NBL 202; Engl. trans. 182. 8
9. Jean Paul, ‘Vorschule der Ästhetik’, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert Miller (Munich and
Vienna 1987), i/5.124–6. 9
10. Jean Paul, ‘Vorschule der Ästhetik’ (note 9), i/5.156. 20
11. NBL 198; Engl. trans. 178. (It is a foolhardy translator who disagrees with Dika Newlin,
but it seems to the present translator that the standard translation of ‘Heiterkeit’ as 1
‘serenity’ is wide of the mark and that a meaning closer to the joviality of comic opera 2
– in German, ‘heitere Oper’ – is more appropriate here.) 3
4
Chapter 22. Vienna in 1900: Alma as a Young Woman (1901–3)
5
1. Hermann Bahr, ‘Wien’, Sinn hinter der Komödie (Graz and Vienna 1965), 71–3.
2. Leaflet from 1896 quoted in Arthur Schnitzler: Materialien zur Ausstellung der Wiener 6
Festwochen 1981 (Vienna 1981), 66. 7
3. Arthur Schnitzler, ‘Der Weg ins Freie’, Gesammelte Werke, 6 vols (Frankfurt 1961–7), 8
i.696–7.
4. KBMD 228; Engl. trans. 225. 9
5. Quoted in Ludwig Greve and others (eds), Jugend in Wien: Literatur um 1900 (Munich 30
1974), 87.
6. Hermann Broch, ‘Hofmannsthal und seine Zeit’, Kommentierte Werkausgabe, ed. Paul 1
Michael Lützeler, 13 vols (Frankfurt 1974–81), i.170. 2
8. Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Hamburg 1952), 33; trans. Sophie Wilkins
and Burton Pike as The Man Without Qualities (London 1997), 29. 4
9. Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (note 8), 35; Engl. trans. 31. 5
11. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Gabriele D’Annunzio’, Gesammelte Werke, Reden und 6
Aufsätze, ed. Bernd Schoeller and Rudolf Hirsch, 10 vols (Frankfurt 1979), i.174–6. 7
12. See, above all, Marian Bisanz-Prakken, Gustav Klimt: Der Beethovenfries. Geschichte, 8
Funktion und Bedeutung (Salzburg 1977).
13. See DLG II, ii.512–13. 9
14. AME 62–3; Engl. trans. 37. 40
15. Ludwig Hevesi, Acht Jahre Secession (Vienna 1906), 383.
16. GMB 293; Engl. trans. 262 (undated letter to Alfred Roller, [May 1902]). 41R
720 NOTES to pp. 357–89
1 17. AME 189; Engl. trans. 160.

18. Bertha Zuckerkandl, Österreich intim: Erinnerungen 1892–1942 (Frankfurt 1970), 38–43.
2 19. Zuckerkandl, Österreich intim, 43 (Bertha Zuckerkandl’s letter to Sophie Clemenceau,
3 30 Nov. [1901]).
4 20. AMTB 318; Engl. trans. 163 (entry of 11 July 1899).
21. Elias Canetti, Das Augenspiel: Lebensgeschichte 1931–1937 (Munich and Vienna 1985),
5 59–61; trans. Ralph Manheim as The Play of the Eyes (London 1990), 51–3.
6 22. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (5 Dec. 1995), L 9.
23. Claire Goll, Ich verzeihe keinem (Munich and Zurich 1980), 174.
7 24. AMTB 371; Engl. trans. 195 (entry of 22 Sept. 1899).
8 25. AMTB 316; not in Engl. trans. (entry of 9 July 1899).
9 26. AMTB 180; Engl. trans. 89 (entry of 29 Jan. 1899).
27. AMTB 694; Engl. trans. 421 (entry of 28 July 1901).
10 28. AME 42; Engl. trans. 18.
1 29. AMTB 586; Engl. trans. 345 (entry of 18 Oct. 1900).
30. AMTB 422; Engl. trans. 225 (entry of 13 Jan. 1900).
2 31. AMTB 612; not in Engl. trans. (entry of 1 Jan. 1901).
3 32. AMTB 11; Engl. trans. 5 (entry of 9 Feb. 1898).
4 33. AMTB 662; Engl. trans. 400 (entry of 22 April 1901).
34. AMTB 165–6; not in Engl. trans. (entry of 21 Dec. 1898).
5 35. GMBA 108; Engl. trans. 82 (letter from Mahler to Alma Schindler, 19 Dec. 1901).
6 36. Sigmund Freud, Briefe 1873–1939 (Frankfurt 1968), 82–3; trans. Tania and James Stern
as Letters of Sigmund Freud (New York 1992), 76 (letter from Sigmund Freud to Martha
7 Bernays, 15 Nov. 1883).
8 37. AMTB 745; Engl. trans. 462 (entry of 20 Dec. 1901).
9 38. AMTB 724; Engl. trans. 443 (entry of 7 Nov. 1901).
39. AMTB 725; Engl. trans. 444 (entry of 8 Nov. 1901).
1 41. AMTB 744–5; Engl. trans. 461 (entry of 19 Dec. 1901).
42. AMTB 740; Engl. trans. 457 (entry of 12 Dec. 1901).
4 45. GMBA 75; Engl. trans. 52 (undated letter to Alma Schindler, [8 Dec. 1901]).
46. GMBA 84; Engl. trans. 61 (undated letter to Alma Schindler, [12 Dec. 1901]).
5 47. GMBA 85; Engl. trans. 61 (undated letter to Justine Mahler, [13 Dec. 1901]).
6 48. GMBA 97; Engl. trans. (emended) 72 (undated letter to Justine Mahler, [15 Dec. 1901]).
49. GMBA 105; Engl. trans. 79 (undated letter to Alma Schindler, [19 Dec. 1901]).
9 52. AMTB 751; Engl. trans. 467 (entry of 5 Jan. 1902). For reasons that are unclear, the
German edition of GMBA mistakenly dates this entry 3 Jan., but the error has been
30 corrected in the Engl. trans. (cf. GMBA 124; Engl. trans. 96).
54. AME 51; Engl. trans. 26.
3 56. Lipiner’s letter was first published in its entirety by Eveline Nikkels, ‘O Mensch! gib
4 acht!’: Friedrich Nietzsches Bedeutung für Gustav Mahler (Amsterdam 1989), 108–12.
57. NBL 204; not in Engl. trans.
5
6 Chapter 23. The Fifth Symphony
7 1. NBL 192; not in Engl. trans.
8 2. NBL 193; Engl. trans. 173.
9 3. HEMM 67–9.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Zweiter Mahler-Vortrag’, Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols (Frankfurt
40 1997), xviii.596.
41R 5. MHGM 117.
NOTES to pp. 389–404 721
6. GMBA 220–1; Engl. trans. 179 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 14 Oct. 1
1904). (The quotation comes from the Prologue in Heaven in Goethe’s Faust, ll. 243–4.)
7. MHGM 112.
2
8. Quoted in Truus de Leur, ‘Gustav Mahler in the Netherlands’, Gustav Mahler: The World 3
Listens, ed. Donald Mitchell (Amsterdam 1995), i.15–40, esp. 37. 4
9. GMRSB 90; Engl. trans. 75 (letter from Richard Strauss to Gustav Mahler, 5 March
1905). 5
11. MHGM 122.
7
8
Chapter 24. ‘Nothing is lost to you’: Faith and Philosophy
9
1. AMML 28; cf. Engl. trans. 27–8.
4. GMBA 430–1; Engl. trans. 361–3 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 18 June
1910).
2
5. GMBA 431; Engl. trans. 363 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 18 June 1910). 3
6. NLM 172; Engl. trans. 174–5 (emended). 4
7. NLM 235–6; Engl. trans. 252 (emended).
8. Alfred Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig and Vienna 1922), 26. 5
9. See Constantin Floros, Die geistige Welt Gustav Mahlers in systematischer Darstellung 6
(Wiesbaden 1977), 123–4.
10. On Fechner and his world of ideas, see Michael Heidelberger, Die innere Seite der Natur:
7
Gustav Theodor Fechners wissenschaftlich-philosophische Weltauffassung (Frankfurt 1993). 8
11. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Zend-Avesta, ed. Friedrich Panzer (Wiesbaden n.d.), 180–1. 9
12. GMBA 148; Engl. trans. 117–18 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 2 April
1903). 20
13. GMBA 148; Engl. trans. 118 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 2 April 1903). 1
14. GMBA 386; Engl. trans. 324 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, [20]
June 1909).
2
15. BWGM 101; Engl. trans. 117. 3
16. Roller, Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (note 8), 24. 4
17. NLM 103; Engl. trans. 91 (emended).
18. It is not possible to discuss Lotze’s philosophy and cultural anthropology in adequate 5
detail here. For the most recent and fullest account of his ideas, see Reinhardt Pester, 6
Hermann Lotze: Wege seines Denkens und Forschens. Ein Kapitel deutscher Philosophie
und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert (Würzburg 1997). On Mikrokosmos, see
7
especially pp. 255–7. 8
19. Hermann Lotze, Mikrokosmos (Leipzig 1909), iii.51. See also Pester, Hermann Lotze 9
(note 18), 269–71. Lotze’s approach here is far more muted than that adopted by
Fechner, whose divagations on the subject are markedly more discursive and mystical. 30
20. Alban Berg, Briefe an seine Frau (Munich and Vienna 1965), 175 (letter from Alban 1
Berg to Helene Berg, 4 Aug. 1910). (This passage is not included in Bernard Grun’s 1971
Engl. trans.)
2
21. GMBA 385–6; Engl. trans. 324 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 3
[20] June 1909). 4
22. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens
(Berlin and Weimar 1982), 345; trans. John Oxenford as Conversations of Goethe with 5
Eckermann and Soret (London 1913), 443 (entry of 3 March 1830). 6
23. Hans Günter Ottenberg and Edith Zehm (eds), Briefwechsel zwischen Goethe und
Zelter in den Jahren 1799 bis 1832 (Munich 1991), i.981–2; trans. Arthur D. Coleridge
7
as Goethe’s Letters to Zelter (London 1892), 281–2 (letter from Goethe to Zelter, 19 8
March 1827). 9
24. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe (note 22), 265; Engl. trans. 360 (entry of 4 Feb. 1829).
25. Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe (note 22), 412 (entry of 1 Sept. 1829). 40
26. BWGM 102; Engl. trans. 118–19. 41R
722 NOTES to pp. 405–32
1 27. Flodoard von Biedermann (ed.), Goethes Ausgewählte Gespräche (Leipzig 1912), 203–5
(entry of 25 Jan. 1813).
2 28. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, ed. Albrecht Schöne (Frankfurt 1999), 784.
3 29. Jochen Schmidt, Goethes Faust: Erster und zweiter Teil. Grundlagen – Werk – Wirkung
4 (Munich 1999), 288.
30. Schmidt, Goethes Faust (note 29), 289.
5 31. GMBA 389; Engl. trans. 327 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
6 [22] June 1909).
32. Goethe, Faust (note 28), 788.
7 33. Friedrich Rückert, Kindertodtenlieder, ed. Hans Wollschläger (Frankfurt 1993), 303.
8 34. GMBA 91; Engl. trans. 67 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Schindler, 14 Dec. 1901).
9 35. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin 1913), 52.
10
Chapter 25. The Sixth Symphony
1
1. GMB 318; Engl. trans. 277 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Richard Specht,
2 [autumn 1904]).
4 3. NLM 187; Engl. trans. 193.
4. See Karl Heinz Füssl, NMF, xxvii (1992), 3–5 and Gastón Fournier-Facio, ‘The “Correct”
5 Order of the Middle Movements in Mahler’s Sixth Symphony’, Discovering Mahler:
6 Writings on Mahler, 1955–2005, by Donald Mitchell (Woodbridge 2007), 633–47.
5. MHGM 135.
8 7. Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus (Berlin and Frankfurt 1949), 775–6; trans. John E.
9 Woods as Doctor Faustus (New York 1999), 515.
8. Michael Gielen and Paul Fiebig, Mahler im Gespräch: Die zehn Sinfonien (Stuttgart and
20 Weimar 2002), 127.
1 9. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Dritter Mahler-Vortrag’, Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols (Frankfurt
1997), xviii.621–2.
2
3
Chapter 26. Opera Reform – Early Years of Marriage – Mahler’s Compositional Method
4 (1903–5)
5 1. Alfred Roller, ‘Mahler und die Inszenierung’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, ii (1920), 273.
6 2. See Brigitte Hamann, Hitlers Wien (Munich and Zurich 1996), 42–6; trans. Thomas
Thornton as Hitler’s Vienna: A Dictator’s Apprenticeship (New York and Oxford 1999),
7 26–7. A complete chronicle of Vienna Court Opera performances during Mahler’s years
8 in the city is held by the IGMG and confirms all of Hamann’s suppositions on this point.
9 3. HKBGM 135; Engl. trans. 219. The second part of this quotation is taken from the
same document in Manfred Wagner, Alfred Roller in seiner Zeit (Salzburg and Vienna
30 1996), 71.
5. Roller’s designs are reproduced in Wagner, Alfred Roller in seiner Zeit (note 3). The
2 Tristan designs appear on p. 132.
3 6. Max Graf, Die Wiener Oper (Vienna and Frankfurt 1955), 163–5.
4 7. Hermann Bahr, Tagebuch (Berlin 1909), 38; Engl. trans. from HKBGM 238.
8. GMB 301; Engl. trans. 267–8 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alfred Roller,
5 [between 22 Feb. and 3 March 1904]).
6 9. HKBGM 171; Engl. trans. 235 (Illustriertes Extrablatt, Vienna, 9 Sept. 1903).
10. See the designs reproduced in Wagner, Alfred Roller in seiner Zeit (note 3), 134.
7 11. Deutsches Volksblatt (8 Oct. 1904), quoted by Wagner, Alfred Roller in seiner Zeit
8 (note 3), 83.
9 12. Ludwig Hevesi quoted by Wagner, Alfred Roller in seiner Zeit (note 3), 90.
13. Roller, ‘Mahler und die Inszenierung’ (note 1), 274.
40 14. AME 47; Engl. trans. 22; see also GMBA 97; Engl. trans. 72 (undated letter from Gustav
41R Mahler to Justine Mahler, [15 Dec. 1901]).
NOTES to pp. 432–61 723
15. AMTB 747; Engl. trans. 464 (entry of 23 Dec. 1901). 1

2
18. AMTB 752; Engl. trans. 468 (entry of 16 Jan. 1902). 3
20. AMML 33; Engl. trans. 33.
22. AMML 33; Engl. trans. 33. 6
23. These dreams are described in AMML 35–6; not in the Engl. trans.
24. GMBA 138; Engl. trans. 109 (diary entry of 8 Jan. 1903).
7
25. GMBA 135; Engl. trans. 106 (diary entry of 10 July 1902). 8
26. GMBA 166; Engl. trans. 132 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 9
[4 Sept. 1903]).
27. AMTB 731–2; Engl. trans. 449 (entry of 3 Dec. 1901). 10
28. AMTB 731; Engl. trans. 449 (entry of 3 Dec. 1901). 1
29. AMML 40; not in the Engl. trans.
30. AMML 48; not in the Engl. trans.
2
31. AMML 37–8; partially available in the Engl. trans. 34. 3
32. GMBA 254; Engl. trans. 212 (diary entry of 6 July 1905). 4
33. William Ritter quoted in GMBA 366–7; Engl. trans. 308.
35. NMF, vii (1980), 14. 6
37. GMFB 503–4; Engl. trans. 369–70 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Justine
7
Mahler, [17 March 1902]). 8
38. AME 82; Engl. trans. 55–6. 9
39. GMFB 459–60; Engl. trans. 337 (undated letter from Justine Mahler to Emma Mahler,
[third week of June 1900]); see also Herta Blaukopf, ‘Villa Mahler am Wörthersee’, 20
Gustav Mahler am Wörthersee (Klagenfurt n.d.), 7. The present information on the villa 1
at Maiernigg is based on Herta Blaukopf ’s account.
40. GMB 270; Engl. trans. 242 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Nina Spiegler, 18 Aug. 1900).
2
41. See Rudolf Stephan, Gustav Mahler: II. Symphonie c-Moll (Munich 1979). 3
45. NBL 28; not in the Engl. trans. 6
46. This point is well illustrated by the list assembled by Rudolf Stephan (ed.) in Gustav
Mahler: Werk und Interpretation (Cologne 1979).
7
47. NBL 29–30; partial trans. in Engl. trans. 34. 8
49. This is the expression used by Stephan, Gustav Mahler (note 46), 63.
51. This development is well documented by Eberhardt Klemm, ‘Zur Geschichte der 1
Fünften Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler’, Jahrbuch Peters 1979 (Leipzig 1980), 9–116.
52. GMB 304; Engl. trans. 270 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Emil Freund, [24–8
2
July 1903]). 3
4
Chapter 27. The Seventh Symphony 5
1. GMB 360; Engl. trans. 312 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Emil Gutmann, 6
[early 1908]).
2. See Eberhardt Klemm, ‘Zur Geschichte der Fünften Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler’,
7
Jahrbuch Peters 1979 (Leipzig 1980), 51 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Peters, 8
[5 Dec. 1907]). 9
4. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin 1913), 251. 40
5. Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin 1921), 265. 41R
724 NOTES to pp. 462–80
1 6. TWAM 180–1; Engl. trans. 137.

7. MHGM 151.
2 8. Joseph von Eichendorff, Werke in einem Band, ed. Wolfdietrich Rasch (Munich 1955),
3 11–12.
4
5 Chapter 28. The Administrator – Contemporaries – Signs of Crisis (1905–7)
6 1. The most detailed account of Mahler’s activities as director of the Vienna Court Opera
is WMWO, esp. 149–56.
7 2. This satire was rediscovered by Willi Reich and published under the title ‘Ein heiteres
8 Dokument aus der Mahler-Zeit’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, xix (1964), 26–8.
9 3. BWTV 183; Engl. trans. 152–3.
4. The caricature is reproduced by Gilbert Kaplan, The Mahler Album (New York and
10 London 1995), no. 293, unfortunately without a source reference.
1 5. Paul Stefan, Gustav Mahlers Erbe (Munich 1908), 9.
6. WMWO 75–90, esp. 79.
2 7. NBL 146; Engl. trans. 138.
3 8. GMBA 146–7; Engl. trans. 116 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
4 [1 April 1903]).
5 10. See Jens Malte Fischer, ‘Hans Pfitzner: The Very German Fate of a Composer’, Music and
6 Nazism, ed. Michael H. Kater and Albrecht Riethmüller (Laaber 2003), 75–98; see also
the comprehensive study by Sabine Busch, Hans Pfitzner und der Nationalsozialismus
7 (Stuttgart 2001).
8 11. Hans Pfitzner, ‘Eindrücke und Bilder meines Lebens’, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Bernhard
9 Adamy (Tutzing 1987), 556–692, esp. 690–2.
12. GMBA 182–3; Engl. trans. 146 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
20 [1 Feb. 1904]).
1 13. The relationship between Mahler and Strauss is documented by Herta Blaukopf ’s
edition of their correspondence, GMRSB, which also includes a lengthy afterword.
2 14. GMB 205; Engl. trans. 200 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Max Marschalk,
3 [4 Dec. 1896]).
4 15. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Richard Strauss’, Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols (Frankfurt 1997),
xvi.565–6.
5 16. GMB 328; Engl. trans. 298 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Albert Neisser,
6 [mid-Dec. 1905?]).
17. The court censor’s decision is reproduced in WMWO 200–1; see WMWO 189–209
7 for the events surrounding plans to stage Salome in Vienna; and see GMRSB for the
8 correspondence between Mahler and Strauss.
9 18. GMRSB 118; Engl. trans. 93 (letter from Richard Strauss to Gustav Mahler, 15 March
1906).
30 19. AME 53; Engl. trans. 28.
1 20. GMBA 129; Engl. trans. 100 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Schindler, 31 Jan. 1902).
21. GMBA 266–7; Engl. trans. 222 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 8 Nov. 1905).
2 22. GMBA 279; Engl. trans. 233 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
3 [22 May 1906]).
4 23. Arnold Schoenberg, Letters, ed. Erwin Stein (London 1974), 261 (undated letter from
Arnold Schoenberg to Olin Downes, [mid-Dec. 1948]). (Schoenberg wrote in English.)
5 24. Schoenberg, Letters (note 23), 263–5 (undated letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Olin
6 Downes, [Dec. 1948]).
7 26. This letter cannot have been written after the official concert on 14 Dec. 1904, as
8 claimed by Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt in his biography of Schoenberg (Zurich 1974),
9 95. The date was corrected in Humphrey Searle’s Engl. trans. (London 1977), 103.
27. Stuckenschmidt, Schönberg (note 26), 95–6; Engl. trans. 103 (letter from Arnold
40 Schoenberg to Gustav Mahler, 12 Dec. 1904).
41R 28. AME 105; Engl. trans. 78.
NOTES to pp. 481–515 725
29. AME 140; Engl. trans. 112. 1

30. Hanns Eisler, Musik und Politik (Leipzig 1973), 15.
31. Webern’s views on Mahler may be found in Anton Webern, Weg und Gestalt (Zurich
2
1961), 15–17. 3
32. Webern, Weg und Gestalt (note 31), 19–21. 4
33. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Berg: Der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs’, Gesammelte Schriften
(note 15), xiii.359; trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey as Alban Berg: Master of 5
the Smallest Link (Cambridge 1997), 28. 6
34. Alban Berg, Briefe an seine Frau (Munich and Vienna 1965), 238–9; trans. Bernard Grun
as Alban Berg: Letters to His Wife (London 1971), 147–8 (emended) (undated letter from
7
Alban Berg to Helene Berg, [autumn 1912?]). 8
35. Berg, Briefe an seine Frau (note 34), 483; Engl. trans. 298 (letter from Alban Berg to 9
Helene Berg, 24 May 1922).
36. Adorno, ‘Berg’ (note 33), 352; Engl. trans. 22. 10
37. Schoenberg’s Prague speech on Mahler is reproduced in Arnold Schönberg, Stil und 1
Gedanke: Aufsätze zur Musik (Frankfurt 1976), 7–24. The English version that appears
in Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg (Berkeley 1984), 449–72, is the
2
1948 revision partially translated by Schoenberg himself and edited by Dika Newlin. 3
38. The complete version of the dedication is reproduced in Stuckenschmidt, Schönberg 4
(note 26), 127–8; Engl. trans. 137–8.
39. NLM 200–1; Engl. trans. 208–10. The text of Bernhard Scharlitt’s interview with Mahler 5
was first published in the Neue Freie Presse on 25 May 1911 and reprinted in 6
Musikblätter des Anbruch, ii (1920), 309–10.
40. This includes all of Mahler’s conducting commitments in Vienna and is based on the
7
statistics held by the IGMG that are also available online. 8
41. NLM 173–4; Engl. trans. 177. 9
42. NLM 214; Engl. trans. 225. Wellesz’s ‘Reminiscences of Mahler’ first appeared in The
Score on 28 Jan. 1961, 54–6. 20
43. Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Der Pilger (Prague 1955), 703; Engl. trans. from NLM 216–17 1
(emended).
44. GMBA 314; Engl. trans. 263.
2
45. The principal facts and documents relating to Mahler and the Netherlands have been 3
collected by Eduard Reeser (ed.) in Gustav Mahler und Holland: Briefe (Vienna 1980). 4
46. Reeser, Mahler und Holland (note 45), 8.
47. Reeser, Mahler und Holland (note 45), 10. 5
[20 Oct. 1904]).
49. GMBA 225; Engl. trans. 184 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
7
[21 Oct. 1904]). 8
[1 Oct. 1909]).
51. Reeser, Mahler und Holland (note 45), 29. 30
52. Reeser, Mahler und Holland (note 45), 108–10. 1
53. See HKBGM 173–4; Engl. trans. 236.
54. WMWO 172–88.
2
55. Richard Specht, Gustav Mahler (Berlin 1913), 24–5. 3
56. NLM 118–19; Engl. trans. 110–11 (emended). 4
58. Richard Specht, ‘Mahlers Feinde’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, ii (1920), 278–87. 5
59. HKBGM 190; Engl. trans. 246. 6
60. Paul Stauber, Vom Kriegsschauplatz der Wiener Hofoper: Das wahre Erbe Mahlers
(Vienna 1909), 46–7.
7
62. IGMG Hauptmann 1/985 (copy of letter from Gustav Mahler to Gerhart Hauptmann, 9
7 March 1904).
63. Arthur Schnitzler’s contribution to Paul Stefan (ed.), Gustav Mahler: Ein Bild seiner 40
Persönlichkeit in Widmungen (Munich 1910), 67. The first version of this tribute and 41R
726 NOTES to pp. 515–40
1 Schnitzler’s letter to Stefan are reproduced in Arthur Schnitzler, Briefe 1875–1912

(Frankfurt 1981), 625–7 and 955–6.
2 64. See Friedrich Pfäfflin, ‘Karl Kraus und Arnold Schönberg: Fragmente einer Beziehung’,
3 Karl Kraus (Munich 1975), 127–9.
4 65. Karl Kraus, Die Fackel, xxxiii (March 1932), 8.
5
Chapter 29. The Eighth Symphony
6
1. GMB 335; Engl. trans. 294 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Willem Mengelberg,
7 [18? Aug. 1906]).
8 2. GMBA 413; Engl. trans. 348 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, [1 Oct.
9 1909]).
3. GMBA 431–2; Engl. trans. 363 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
10 [20 June 1910]).
1 4. GMBA 424; Engl. trans. 356–7 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
[8 June 1910]).
2 5. Hans Mayer, ‘Musik und Literatur’, Gustav Mahler, ed. Rainer Wunderlich Verlag
3 (Tübingen 1966), 142–56, esp. 145–51.
4 6. Dieter Borchmeyer, ‘Gustav Mahlers Goethe und Goethes Heiliger Geist: Marginalie
zur Achten Symphonie aus aktuellem Anlaß’, NMF, xxxii (1994), 18–20.
5 7. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Sämtliche Werke nach Epochen seines Schaffens, ed. Karl
6 Richter and others, 33 vols (Munich 1985–98), xvii.749 (‘Maximen und Reflexionen’,
no. 762).
7 8. Richard Specht (1913), quoted in: Gustav Mahler, VIII. Symphony. Critical edition
8 (Universal Edition, Vienna 1977), Preface by Karl Heinz Füssl (unpaginated).
9 9. Hans and Rosaleen Moldenhauer, Anton von Webern (London 1978), 135.
10. Goethe, Sämtliche Werke (note 7), xvii.749 (‘Maximen und Reflexionen’, no. 1202).
20 11. TWAM 182–3; Engl. trans. 138–9.
1 12. GMBA 388–90; Engl. trans. 326–8 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 22(?)
June 1909).
2 13. Christian Wildhagen’s otherwise impressive analysis, Die ‘Achte Symphonie’ von Gustav
3 Mahler: Konzeption einer universalen Symphonik (Frankfurt 2000), tends in the same
4 direction.
5 [8 June 1910]).
6
7 Chapter 30. Annus Terribilis (1907)
8 1. Richard Wagner, ‘Das Wiener Hof-Operntheater’, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen,
9 10 vols (Leipzig 4/1907), vii.272–95, esp. 275; trans. William Ashton Ellis as Richard
Wagner’s Prose Works, 8 vols (London 1892–9, R1993–5), iii.361–86, esp. 366.
30 2. Ludwig Karpath, Begegnung mit dem Genius (Vienna and Leipzig 1934), 184–5.
1 3. Richard Specht, ‘Mahlers Feinde’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, ii/7–8 (1920), 285.
4. GMB 343; Engl. trans. 300 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Julius von Weis-Osborn,
2 [April 1907]).
3 5. See Juliane Wandel, Die Rezeption der Symphonien Gustav Mahlers zu Lebzeiten des
4 Komponisten (Frankfurt 1999), 120–2. The following quotations are all taken from this
study.
5 6. AME 145; Engl. trans. 117.
6 7. Manfred Wagner, Alfred Roller in seiner Zeit (Salzburg and Vienna 1996), 105 (letter
from Alfred Roller to his wife, 29 April 1907).
7 8. GMB 343; Engl. trans. 301 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Arnold Berliner,
8 [17 June 1907]).
9 9. Paul Stefan, Das Grab in Wien: Eine Chronik 1903–1911 (Berlin 1913), 79–80.
10. Quoted in WMWO 260–1.
40 11. See HKBGM 193–4; Engl. trans. 248.
41R 12. Karpath, Begegnung mit dem Genius (note 2), 183–5.
NOTES to pp. 540–77 727
13. Julius Korngold in the Neue Freie Presse of 4 June 1907, quoted in WMWO 262–7. 1
14. WMWO 272–5.
15. AME (1949) 405–7; Engl. trans. 300–1 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alfred
2
Montenuovo, [early summer 1907]). 3
16. AME (1949), 407–8; Engl. trans. 301–2 (letter from Alfred Montenuovo to Gustav 4
Mahler, 10 Aug. 1907).
18. GMB 85; Engl. trans. 107 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Friedrich Löhr, 6
[18 Feb. 1887]).
19. GMUB 105–6; Engl. trans. 96–7 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Lilli Lehmann,
7
[late April/early May 1898]). (The discovery of a copy of a letter among Alma Mahler’s 8
papers at the University of Pennsylvania provides a more accurate date than was avail- 9
able to Herta Blaukopf at the time when the German edition of this volume was
published in 1983.) 10
20. RMA 22. 1
21. RMA 30–3.
22. GMB 344; Engl. trans. 301 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Arnold Berliner, 4 July 1907).
2
23. GMBA 324–5; Engl. trans. 272–3 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 3
[18 July 1907]). 4
24. Bruno Walter, Briefe 1894–1962 (Frankfurt 1969), 95.
25. GMB 367–8; Engl. trans. 324 (emended) (letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, 5
18 July 1908). 6
26. Hans Bethge, Die Chinesische Flöte (Leipzig 1907), 103.
27. See GMBA 360; not in the Engl. trans.
7
[30 Oct. 1907]). According to Alma, the phrase ‘Pui Kaiki’ (‘Yuck’) was Gucki’s attempt 9
at the expression of disgust, ‘Pfui Teufel’).
29. WMWO 213; Engl. trans. from Kurt Blaukopf (ed.), Mahler: A Documentary Study, 20
trans. Paul Baker and others (New York and Toronto 1976), 250–1 (emended). 1
30. AME (1949), 421–6; Engl. trans. 310–13, esp. 311 (letter from Alfred Roller to Gustav
Mahler, 22 Jan. 1908).
2
31. A facsimile of this document appears in GMBA 351; not in the Engl. trans. 3
32. AME 155–6; Engl. trans. 126. 4
5
Chapter 31. Das Lied von der Erde
6
1. GMB 371; Engl. trans. 326 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, [early
Sept. 1908]).
7
2. See Eberhard Bethge, ‘Hans Bethge und das Lied von der Erde’, NMF xxxv (1996), 8
18–20. 9
3. The two most comprehensive accounts of the work are Hermann Danuser’s outstanding
study (Munich 1986) and Stephen E. Hefling’s Cambridge Music Handbook (Cambridge 30
2000). See also HDMZ 204–43. 1
4. HDMZ 204.
5. See the excellent analysis in HDMZ 212–43.
2
3
Chapter 32. Starting Afresh: New York (1908–11) 4
1. NLM 220; Engl. original 232. 5
2. Peter Brook, Threads of Time: A Memoir (London 1998), 84–5. 6
4. GMB 348; Engl. trans. 309 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alfred Roller, 20 Jan. 1908).
7
5. GMB 356; Engl. trans. 317 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alfred Roller, 27 Feb. 1908). 8
6. GMB 355–6; Engl. trans. 314 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Willem Mengelberg, 9
[24 Feb. 1908]). The final sentence is missing from the Engl. trans.
7. RMA 82 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Carl Moll, 16 Feb. 1908). 40
8. RMA 82 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Carl Moll, 16 Feb. 1908). 41R
728 NOTES to pp. 579–613
1 9. RMA 102 (letter from Kuhn, Loeb & Co. to Gustav Mahler, 18 March 1908).
10. GMB 361; Engl. trans. 319 (emended) (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Anna
2 Moll, [March 1908]).
3 11. Bruckmanns Illustrierte Reiseführer: Toblach und das Ampezzo-Thal (Munich n.d.), 6.
4 12. GMB 365; Engl. trans. 322 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter,
[summer 1908]).
5 13. AME (1949) 446–8; Engl. trans. 325–6 (letter from Arnold Schoenberg to Gustav
6 Mahler, 29 Dec. 1909).
14. RMA 151 (letter from Andreas Dippel to Gustav Mahler, 9 July 1908).
7 15. AME (1949) 431; Engl. trans. 316–17 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Andreas
8 Dippel, [July(?) 1908]).
9 16. BWTV 361; Engl. trans. 306.
17. Harvey Sachs, Toscanini (London 1978), 105.
10 18. GMUB 150–1; Engl. trans. 146 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to William Ritter,
1 [postmarked New York 8 Dec. 1908]).
19. The principal reviews are reproduced in RMA 181–3.
2 20. GMB 374–5; Engl. trans. 329–30 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter,
3 early 1909]).
4 21. GMBA 379; Engl. trans. 318 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, 13 June 1909).
The ‘joy and happiness’ mentioned by Mahler refer to Löhr’s announcement of the birth
5 of a son; the quotation is adapted from Ferdinand Freiligrath’s poem ‘Der Liebe Dauer’.
23. GMB 426; Engl. trans. 371 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Anna Moll, Jan./Feb.
7 1911]).
8 24. GMB 381; Engl. trans. 333 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Carl Moll, [10 March
9 1909]).
25. Alma’s previously unpublished diary entry quoted by Jonathan Carr, The Real Mahler
20 (London 1997), 154.
1 26. AME 181; Engl. trans. 151.
2 28. GMB 386; Engl. trans. 339 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Anna Moll, [summer
3 1909]).
4 29. NLM 235–6; Engl. trans. (emended) 251–2.
30. Excerpts from William Malloch’s ‘Mahlerthon’ currently available from Sony Classical
5 on Bernstein/Mahler: The Complete Symphonies (88697-45369-2).
[18 or 19 Dec. 1909]).
7 32. GMB 396; Engl. trans. 346 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, [18 or
8 19 Dec. 1909]).
[18 or 19 Dec. 1909]).
30 34. GMB 401; Engl. trans. 350 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Alfred Roller, 6 Jan. 1910).
1 35. GMB 398–400; Engl. trans. 348–9 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Guido Adler, 1 Jan. 1910).
36. Ferruccio Busoni, Briefe an seine Frau, ed. Friedrich Schnapp (Erlenbach-Zurich and
2 Leipzig 1935); trans. Rosamond Ley as Ferruccio Busoni: Letters to his Wife (London
3 1938), 161 (letter from Ferruccio Busoni to his wife, 12 March 1910).
4 37. RMA 333 (Henderson’s review in the New York Sun, 27 Jan. 1910).
5
Chapter 33. The Ninth Symphony
6
1. GMB 392; Engl. trans. 341 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, [Aug.
7 1909]).
8 2. Paul Bekker, Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin 1921), 340.
9 3. GMB 385; Engl. trans. 337 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Arnold Berliner,
[20 June 1909]).
40 4. GMBA 402–3; Engl. trans. 388–9 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
41R [8 July 1909]).
NOTES to pp. 614–36 729
5. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Ein Brief ’, Gesammelte Werke in zehn Einzelbänden, ed. 1
Bernd Schoeller (Frankfurt 1979–80), vii.461–71.
6. Hofmannsthal, ‘Ein Brief ’ (note 5), vii.471.
2
7. This is the line of argument adopted by Friedhelm Krummacher in his outstanding 3
analysis of this oft-examined movement, ‘Struktur und Auflösung: Über den Kopfsatz 4
aus Mahlers IX. Symphonie’, Gustav Mahler, ed. Hermann Danuser (Darmstadt 1992),
300–23. 5
8. GMB 375; Engl. trans. 329 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, [early 6
1909]).
9. HEMM 251–3.
7
10. HEMM 253. 8
11. George Steiner, Real Presences (London 1989), 226. 9
10
Chapter 34. Crisis and Culmination (1910)
1
1. Roger Nichols, Debussy Remembered (London 1992), 210.
2. GMUB 85; Engl. trans. 84 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Emil Gutmann, 31 Jan. 1911).
2
3. AMML 44; this passage is not included in the Engl. trans.; and AME 201; Engl. trans. 173. 3
4. AME 203; Engl. trans. 175. 4
5. Jonathan Carr, The Real Mahler (London 1997), 143.
6. Carr, The Real Mahler (note 5), 200. 5
7. The standard biography of Gropius is Reginald Isaacs’s two-volume Walter Gropius: 6
Der Mensch und sein Werk (Berlin 1983–4). Unfortunately, the posthumously published
American edition, which appeared in Boston in 1991 under the title Gropius: An
7
Illustrated Biography of the Creator of the Bauhaus, is compromised by three shortcom- 8
ings. First, the text was cut by around a third; second, the translations from the German 9
originals are often alarmingly inaccurate; and, third, a number of the documents
relating to the affair between Gropius and Alma are wrongly dated, a failing that also 20
affects the German edition. For the correct dates, see Jörg Rothkamm, ‘Wann entstand 1
Mahlers Zehnte Symphonie? Ein Beitrag zur Biographie und Werkdeutung’, Gustav
Mahler durchgesetzt?, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich 1999),
2
100–22 (= Musik-Konzepte 106). Writings on Gropius and Alma that predate Isaacs’s 3
study are compromised by their failure to take account of these decisive documents. 4
This is a failure that also affects Karen Monson’s biography of Alma.
8. Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 7), i.447 n.118; not in the Engl. trans. 5
[6 June 1910]).
7
[21 June 1910]). 8
11. GMB 410; Engl. trans. 359 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Anna Moll, [c. 20 June 9
1910]).
12. Copy of undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Hugo von Hofmannsthal in the Egon 30
Wellesz Collection, Lincoln College, Oxford, F 13 Wellesz 1397 (c. 1907). 1
13. Paul Stefan (ed.), Gustav Mahler: Ein Bild seiner Persönlichkeit in Widmungen (Munich
1910), 16.
2
14. GMBA 442–3; this editorial passage was not included in the Engl. trans., but see 3
DLG II iv.843. 4
15. See Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 7), i.99; Engl. trans. 33–4 (emended); for the correct
date see Rothkamm, ‘Wann entstand?’ (note 7), 108 (undated letter from Alma Mahler 5
to Walter Gropius, [31 July 1910]). 6
16. Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 7), i.99; Engl. trans. 34 (emended) (undated letter from
Alma Mahler to Walter Gropius, [summer 1910]).
7
17. Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 7), i.100; Engl. trans. 34 (emended) (undated letter from 8
Alma Mahler to Walter Gropius, [summer 1910]). 9
19. Rothkamm, ‘Wann entstand?’ (note 7), 109 (undated draft of a letter from Walter 40
Gropius to Gustav Mahler, [5 or 6 Aug. 1910]). 41R
730 NOTES to pp. 638–55
1 20. Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 7), i.102; Engl. trans. 35 (emended) (letter from Alma
Mahler to Walter Gropius, 27 Aug. 1910).
2 21. Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 7), i.103; Engl. trans. 35 (emended) (letter from Alma
3 Mahler to Walter Gropius, 27 Sept. 1910).
4 22. See GMBA 446–54; Engl. trans. 375–83. It is with some reluctance that the present
translator questions a colleague as distinguished as Antony Beaumont, but the word
5 ‘Saitenspiel’ that Mahler uses here and later surely means the instrument, not the act of
6 playing on it. Many writers of the Romantic period, from Chamisso and Eichendorff to
Grillparzer and Geibel, used ‘Saitenspiel’ in the sense of ‘lyre’.
7 23. NLM 172; Engl. trans. 175.
8 24. NLM 181; Engl. trans. 182–4.
9 25. Ernst Kris, Psychoanalytic Explorations in Art (New York 1952); and Selected Papers of
Ernst Kris (New Haven 1975), 263–71.
10 26. AME 204; Engl. trans. 176.
1 27. See Susanne Rode-Breymann, Die Komponistin Alma Mahler-Werfel (Hanover 1999) and
Jörg Rothkamm, ‘Wer komponierte die unter Alma Mahlers Namen veröffentlichten
2 Lieder? Unbekannte Briefe der Komponistin zur Revision ihrer Werke im Jahre 1910’, Die
3 Musikforschung, liii (2000), 432–45.
4 28. Rothkamm, ‘Wer komponierte?’ (note 27), 445.
29. Rothkamm, ‘Wer komponierte?’ (note 27), 445 (letter from Alma Mahler to Walter
5 Gropius, 16 Nov. 1910).
6 30. Rothkamm, ‘Wer komponierte?’ (note 27), 435 n.28 (letter from Alma Mahler to Walter
Gropius, 10 Aug. 1910).
7 31. Hans Wollschläger, ‘Scharf angeschlossener Kettenschmerz’, Frankfurter Allgemeine
8 Zeitung (5 Dec. 1995), L 9.
9 32. Carr, The Real Mahler (note 5), 219.
33. Hartmut Schaefer, ‘Die Musikautographen von Gustav Mahler’, Gustav Mahler: Briefe und
20 Musikautographen aus den Moldenhauer-Archiven in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek
1 (Munich 2003), 216.
34. Michael Gielen and Paul Fiebig, Mahler im Gespräch: Die zehn Sinfonien (Stuttgart and
2 Weimar 2002), 212.
3 35. Elias Canetti, The Play of the Eyes, trans. Ralph Manheim (London 1990), 51–2.
4 36. BWGM 53–4; Engl. trans. 61–2.
37. Sigmund Freud, ‘Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of his Childhood’, The Standard
5 Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey,
6 24 vols (London 2001), xi.57–137.
38. BWTV 213; Engl. trans. 181.
7 39. Theodor Reik, The Haunting Melody (New York 1953), 342–3 (letter from Sigmund
8 Freud to Theodor Reik, 4 Jan. 1935).
9 40. Ernest Jones, Sigmund Freud: Life and Work, 2nd edn, 3 vols (London 1956–8), ii.89.
41. AME 203–4; Engl. trans. 175.
30 42. Sigmund Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men’ and ‘On the
1 Universal Tendency to Debasement in the Sphere of Love’, The Penguin Freud Library,
ed. James Strachey, 15 vols (Harmondsworth 1991), vii.227–42 and 243–60.
3 44. Freud, ‘A Special Type of Choice’ (note 42), vii.235.
4 45. AME 203; Engl. trans. 175.
46. Freud, ‘On the Universal Tendency’ (note 42), vii.251.
5 47. GMBA 452; Engl. trans. 381 (undated poem from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler,
6 [27 Aug. 1910]).
48. Music, Continental Manuscripts and Printed Books (London 1985) (Sotheby’s catalogue
7 for auction on 9–10 May 1985), Lots 142 and 143. Freud’s invoice of 23 May 1911 was
8 auctioned again in New York on 17 June 1992, when the reserve was $12,000–18,000;
9 see Fine Books and Manuscripts (17 and 18 June 1992), Lot 29. The receipt is dated
24 Oct. 1911.
41R [5 Sept. 1910]).
NOTES to pp. 658–71 731
50. Peter Heyworth, Conversations with Klemperer (London 1973), 34. 1

51. BWGM 51–2; Engl. trans. 58–9. The two works referred to here are Das Lied von der
Erde and the Ninth Symphony, which Walter introduced to audiences in Munich and
2
Vienna in 1911 and 1912 respectively. 3
52. Thomas Mann, Briefe 1889–1936 (Frankfurt 1979), 88; Engl. trans. from AME 342 4
(undated letter from Thomas Mann to Gustav Mahler, [Sept. 1910]).
53. AME 210; Engl. trans. 182. 5
54. Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 7), i.104; Engl. trans. 35 (emended) (letter from Alma 6
Mahler to Walter Gropius, 12 Oct. 1910).
7
8
Chapter 35. The Fragmentary Tenth Symphony
9
1. For an analysis of the whole work see Jörg Rothkamm, Gustav Mahlers Zehnte
Symphonie: Entstehung, Analyse, Rezeption (Frankfurt am Main and New York 2003). 10
2. See the detailed account by Jörg Rothkamm, ‘Wann entstand Mahlers Zehnte Symphonie? 1
Ein Beitrag zur Biographie und Werkdeutung’, Gustav Mahler durchgesetzt?, ed.
Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich 1999), 100–22 (= Musik-Konzepte 106).
2
Rothkamm has also examined the performing edition of Deryck Cooke and Berthold 3
Goldschmidt, Berthold Goldschmidt and Gustav Mahler: Zur Entstehung von Deryck 4
Cookes Konzertfassung der X. Symphonie (Hamburg 2000).
3. This thesis is also advanced by Jörg Rothkamm in his otherwise convincing account of 5
the work in Gustav Mahlers Zehnte Symphonie (note 1). See also his analysis of the 6
symphony in Renate Ulm (ed.), Gustav Mahlers Symphonien: Entstehung – Deutung –
Wirkung (Munich and Kassel 2001), 302–11. For an examination of the latest state of
7
research on the sketches of the Tenth Symphony, see Hartmut Schaefer, Gustav Mahler: 8
Briefe und Musikautographen aus den Moldenhauer-Archiven in der Bayerischen 9
Staatsbibliothek (Munich 2003), 190–225.
4. Theodor W. Adorno, ‘Fragment als Graphik: Zur Neuausgabe von Mahlers Zehnter 20
Symphonie’, Gesammelte Schriften, 20 vols (Frankfurt 1997), xviii.253. 1
2
Chapter 36. ‘My heart is weary’ – The Farewell 3
1. Jean Paul, ‘Die unsichtbare Loge’, Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Norbert Miller 4
(Munich and Vienna 1987), i/3422.
2. H. C. Robbins Landon, Beethoven: Sein Leben und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern 5
und Texten (Zurich 1970), 391; Engl. trans. (London 1992), 233. (Hüttenbrenner’s report 6
first appeared in the Graz Tagespost on 23 Oct. 1868.)
3. Robbins Landon, Beethoven (note 2), 390; Engl. trans. 232. (Wawruch’s account first
7
appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on 12 June 1843.) 8
4. Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Mozart (Frankfurt 1980), 370; trans. Marion Faber as Mozart 9
(New York 1982), 359.
5. AME 230; Engl. trans. 201. 30
7. NLM 284; Engl. trans. 313–14.
2
9. GMB 367; Engl. trans. 375 (letter from Gustav Mahler to Bruno Walter, 18 July 1908). 3
10. Cliff Eisen (ed.), Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart: A Life in Letters, trans. Stewart Spencer 4
(London 2006), 527 (letter from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Leopold Mozart, 4 April
1787). 5
11. Gilbert Kaplan (ed.), The Mahler Album (New York and London 1995), plates 126–9 6
and 137–40. It may be added in passing that the figure identified by Thomas Mann’s
brother-in-law, Klaus Pringsheim, as his brother-in-law is more likely to be William Ritter.
7
12. NLM 275; Engl. trans. 301–2 (emended). 8
13. GMB 423; Engl. trans. 369 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Emil Freund, 9
[21 Nov. 1910]).
14. GMB 425; Engl. trans. 370 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Emil Gutmann, 40
[Dec. 1910–Jan. 1911]). 41R
732 NOTES to pp. 671–92
1 15. NLM 265–8; Engl. original 288–93.

16. See the detailed summary of Mahler’s last season in RMA 373–7.
2 17. Reginald Isaacs, Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk, 2 vols (Berlin 1983–4),
3 i.105; not in the Engl. trans. (letter from Alma Mahler to Walter Gropius, 8 Nov. 1910).
4 18. Isaacs, Walter Gropius (note 17), i.105; Engl. trans. (Boston 1991), 36 (emended) (letter
from Anna Moll to Walter Gropius, 13 Nov. 1910).
5 19. AME 214; Engl. trans. 186.
6 20. NLM 250–5; Engl. trans. 274–8.
7 22. DLG II iv.1230.
8 23. AME 227–8; Engl. trans. 198.
9 24. AME 221; Engl. trans. 192.
10 26. AME 225; Engl. trans. 195–6. Here he is described only as a ‘young Austrian’, who
1 remained unidentified under the partial publication of the uncensored version of
Alma’s reminiscences in DLG II.
2 27. Ferruccio Busoni, Briefe an Henri, Katharina und Egon Petri (Wilhelmshaven 1999), 146.
3 28. NLM 278; Engl. trans. 306.
4 29. AME 226; Engl. trans. 197.
5 31. BWGM 55; Engl. trans. 62–3.
6 32. AME 228; Engl. trans. 198.
33. Karl Kraus, ‘Der Ankläger’, Die Fackel (May 1911), 7.
7 34. NLM 283; Engl. trans. 312 (emended).
8 35. AME 230; Engl. trans. 200.
9 36. NLM 255; Engl. trans. 278.
37. Gustav Theodor Fechner, Zend-Avesta: Gedanken über die Dinge des Himmels und des
20 Jenseits vom Standpunkte der Naturbetrachtung, ed. Max Fischer (Leipzig 1922), 242–3.
1 Fechner’s book first appeared in 1851.
38. Eduard von Hartmann, Das Problem des Lebens (Bad Sachsa im Harz 1906), 289.
2 39. Hartmann, Das Problem des Lebens (note 38), 309.
3 40. Hartmann, Das Problem des Lebens (note 38), 309.
[?20 June 1909]).
5 42. Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens
6 (Berlin and Weimar 1982), 331–3; trans. John Oxenford as Conversations of Goethe with
Eckermann and Soret (London 1913), 423–4 (entry of 10 Jan. 1830).
7 43. Neues Wiener Tagblatt (20 May 1911), reproduced in GMBA 468; Engl. trans. 392.
8 44. GMBA 486; not in the Engl. trans. (Mahler’s last will and testament of 27 April
9 1904).
45. Josef Bohuslav Foerster, Der Pilger (Prague 1955), 706.
30 46. Foerster, Der Pilger (note 45), 706.
1 47. Hugo von Hofmannsthal/Ottonie Gräfin Degenfeld, Briefwechsel, ed. Marie Therese
Miller-Degenfeld (Frankfurt 1974), 142–4, esp. 144 (letter from Hugo von Hofmannsthal
2 to Ottonie Degenfeld, 26 May 1911).
3 48. Jean Paul, Sämtliche Werke, (note 1), i/3.800–1. Bruno Walter was the first to quote this
4 passage in the context of Mahler’s death. There is no more appropriate epitaph than this;
see BWTV 241; Engl. trans. 207.
5
6 Chapter 37. Mahler and Posterity
7 1. NBL 186; Engl. trans. 166. (The ‘friend’ is not identified and appears not to be Natalie
8 Bauer-Lechner herself.)
9 2. GMBA 129; Engl. trans. 100 (emended) (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma
Mahler, [31 Jan. 1902]).
40 3. GMB 331; Engl. trans. 290–1 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Josef Reitler,
41R [June 1906]).
NOTES to pp. 692–704 733
4. GMBA 220–1; Engl. trans. 179 (undated letter from Gustav Mahler to Alma Mahler, [14 1
Oct. 1904]).
5. Alldeutsches Tagblatt (31 May 1911), quoted in Juliane Wandel, Die Rezeption der
2
Symphonien Gustav Mahlers zu Lebzeiten des Komponisten (Frankfurt 1999), 233. This 3
study is admirably well documented and allows a deep insight into the battles 4
surrounding Mahler, a subject treated only cursorily in the present biography.
6. Gerhard Scheit and Wilhelm Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler: Zur antisemitischen 5
Abwehr der Moderne in Österreich (Vienna 2002), 77–8. 6
7. Ernst Bloch, Geist der Utopie (first published 1918) (Frankfurt 1973), 89–90.
8. Herta Blaukopf, ‘Amsterdam 1920: Sechs Zeitzeugen feiern Mahler’, Muziek & Wetenschap,
7
v (1995), 347–9. 8
9. C. Rudolf Mengelberg (ed.), Das Mahler-Fest Amsterdam Mai 1920 (Vienna and Leipzig 9
1920); and Donald Mitchell (ed.), Gustav Mahler: The World Listens (Haarlem 1995).
10. Adolf Weißmann, Die Musik in der Weltkrise (Stuttgart and Berlin 1922), 104. 10
11. Weißmann, Die Musik (note 10), 106. 1
12. Weißmann, Die Musik (note 10), 117.
13. Christa Maria Rock and Hans Brückner (eds), Das musikalische Juden-ABC (Munich
2
1935), 56. 3
14. See Scheit and Svoboda, Feindbild Gustav Mahler (note 6), 92–4. 4
15. Wilhelm Furtwängler, Aufzeichnungen 1924–1954 (Wiesbaden 1980), 186; trans. Shaun
Whiteside as Notebooks 1924–54 (London 1995), 114. 5
16. Wolfgang Stresemann, ‘Ein seltsamer Mann . . .’ Erinnerungen an Herbert von Karajan 6
(Frankfurt and Berlin 1990), 234–6.
17. Karl Heinz Ruppel, concert review in the Süddeutsche Zeitung (4 Oct. 1950), 3.
7
18. Erich Limmert, concert review in the Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung (8 May 1951). 8
19. Kurt Blaukopf, Gustav Mahler oder der Zeitgenosse der Zukunft (Munich 1980), 273–4; 9
trans. Inge Goodwin as Gustav Mahler (London 1973), 253. (The Engl. trans. is based
on the first German-language edition of 1969.) 20
20. Wolfgang Rihm, Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche, 2 vols (Winterthur 1997), 1
i.237–9.
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
30
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3
4
5
6
7 Select Bibliography
8
9
10
1
2
3
4 The literature on Mahler has grown to the point where it is no longer possible to
5 retain an accurate overview of it, although Simon Namenwirth attempted to do so
6 in 1987 (see Bibliography). More recent writings are covered by the Nachrichten
7 zur Mahler-Forschung (see Journals), which at least for German speakers remains
8 the most useful pointer to new publications, in many cases also including a review.
9 What follows is by necessity a mere fraction of what is available.
20
1 Works
2 Gustav Mahler: Sämtliche Werke. Kritische Gesamtausgabe, published by the Internationale
Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft of Vienna in association with Bote & Bock, C. F. Peters,
3 Schott Musik International, Universal Edition and Josef Weinberger. (For a full list of
4 contents, see www.gustav-mahler.org)
5
Bibliography
6
7 Filler, Susan M. Gustav and Alma Mahler: A Research and Information Guide, 2nd edn
(New York and London 2008)
8 Namenwirth, Simon Michael. Gustav Mahler: A Critical Bibliography, 3 vols (Wiesbaden 1987)
9
30 Journals
1 Nachrichten zur Mahler-Forschung, ed. Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft of Vienna
(published approximately twice a year since 1976; unfortunately the British Union
2 Catalogue of Music Periodicals lists no complete sets in Great Britain)
3
4 Iconographical Studies
5 Kaplan, Gilbert (ed.). The Mahler Album (New York and London 1995; rev. edn New York
6 and London 2011)
Roller, Alfred. Die Bildnisse von Gustav Mahler (Leipzig and Vienna 1922)
7
8 Discographies
9
Fülöp, Peter (ed.). Mahler Discography (New York 1995; rev. edn Toronto 2010)
40 Smoley, Lewis. The Symphonies of Gustav Mahler: A Critical Discography (Westport 1986)
41R ——. Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies. Critical Commentary on Recordings since 1986 (Westport
2000)
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY 735
Handbooks 1
Barham, Jeremy (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Mahler (Cambridge 2007) 2
Mitchell, Donald and Andrew Nicholson (eds). The Mahler Companion, 2nd edn (Oxford 3
2002)
Sponheuer, Bernd and Wolfram Steinbeck (eds). Mahler Handbuch (Stuttgart 2010) 4
5
Documentation 6
Blaukopf, Herta and Kurt (eds). Gustav Mahler: Leben und Werk in Zeugnissen der Zeit 7
(Stuttgart 1994) (this is a revised edition of the following entry, but with the plates 8
removed)
Blaukopf, Kurt (ed.). Mahler: Sein Leben, sein Werk und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern 9
und Texten (Vienna 1976); trans. Paul Baker and others as Mahler: A Documentary Study 10
(New York and Toronto 1976)
Brenner, Helmut and Reinhold Kubik. Mahlers Welt: Die Orte seines Lebens (Salzburg and 1
Vienna 2011) 2
Dvořák, Petr (ed.). Počátek cesty: Gustav Mahler a Jihlava v archivních pramenech/Journey’s 3
Beginning: Gustav Mahler and Jihlava in Written Sources (Jihlava 2000) (this invaluable
collection of documents is unfortunately rendered unusable by the poor Engl. trans.) 4
Karbusicky, Vladimir. Mahler in Hamburg: Chronik einer Freundschaft (Hamburg 1996) 5
Klemm, Eberhardt. ‘Zur Geschichte der Fünften Sinfonie von Gustav Mahler’, Jahrbuch
Peters 1979 (Leipzig 1980), 9–116 6
Klukanová, Ludmila. Jihlava Gustavu Mahlerovi (Jihlava 2000) 7
Kuna, Milan (ed.). Gustav Mahler a Praha/Gustav Mahler und Prag: Zur 110. Wiederkehr 8
seines Wirkens in Prag 1885/1886 (Prague 1996) (contains two articles in Czech, with
German translations, by Erich Steinhard and Jitka Ludvová) 9
Lebrecht, Norman. Mahler Remembered (London 1987); trans. into German as Gustav 20
Mahler im Spiegel seiner Zeit (Zurich and Sankt Gallen 1990)
Martner, Kurt. Mahler’s Concerts (London 2010) 1
Meylan, Claude (ed.). William Ritter: Chevalier de Gustav Mahler. Écrits, correspondance, 2
documents (Berne 2000) 3
Reeser, Eduard (ed.). Gustav Mahler und Holland: Briefe (Vienna 1980)
Reilly, Edward R. (ed.). Gustav Mahler and Guido Adler: Records of a Friendship (Cambridge 4
1982); trans. into German as Gustav Mahler und Guido Adler: Zur Geschichte einer 5
Freundschaft (Vienna 1978)
Roman, Zoltan. Gustav Mahler’s American Years (1907–1911): A Documentary History 6
(Stuyvesant, NY, 1989) 7
——. Gustav Mahler and Hungary (Budapest 1991) 8
Schaefer, Hans Joachim and others. Gustav Mahler: Jahre der Entscheidung in Kassel 1883–1885
(Kassel 1990) 9
Vondenhoff, Bruno and Eleonore (eds). Gustav Mahler Dokumentation: Sammlung Eleonore 30
Vondenhoff. Materialien zu Leben und Werk, 3 vols (Tutzing 1978–97)
1
Catalogues
2
3
Kubik, Reinhold and Thomas Trabitsch (eds). Gustav Mahler und Wien (Vienna 2010)
Kühn, Hellmut and Georg Quander (eds). Gustav Mahler: Ein Lesebuch mit Bildern (Zurich 4
1982) 5
La Grange, Henry-Louis de (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Un homme, une œuvre, une époque (Paris
1985) 6
Mengelberg, Rudolf (ed.). Das Mahler-Fest Amsterdam Mai 1920: Vorträge und Berichte 7
(Vienna and Leipzig 1920) 8
Mitchell, Donald (ed.). Gustav Mahler: The World Listens (Haarlem 1995)
Moisy, Sigrid von and Ulrich Montag (eds). Gustav Mahler: Briefe und Musikautographen 9
aus den Moldenhauer-Archiven in der Bayerischen Staatsbibliothek (Munich 2003) 40
41R
736 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Stephan, Rudolf (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Werk und Interpretation. Autographe, Partituren,
Dokumente (Cologne 1979)
2 Wiener Festwochen (ed.). Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit (Vienna 1960)
3
4 Letters
5 Blaukopf, Herta (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Unbekannte Briefe (Vienna and Hamburg 1983);
6 trans. Richard Stokes as Mahler’s Unknown Letters (London 1986)
—— (ed.). Gustav Mahler – Richard Strauss: Briefwechsel 1888–1911 (Munich 1988); trans.
7 Edmund Jephcott as Gustav Mahler – Richard Strauss: Correspondence 1888–1911 (London
8 1984)
9 ——. Gustav Mahler: Briefe, rev. edn. (Vienna 1996); partial Engl. trans. by Eithne Wilkins,
Ernst Kaiser and Bill Hopkins as Selected Letters of Gustav Mahler, ed. Kurt Martner
10 (London 1979)
1 Halban, Dési (ed.). Selma Kurz: Die Sängerin und ihre Zeit (Stuttgart and Zurich 1983)
Hansen, Mathias (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Briefe (Leipzig 1981)
2 Isaacs, Reginald. Walter Gropius: Der Mensch und sein Werk, 2 vols (Berlin 1983–4); partial
3 Engl. trans. as Gropius: An Illustrated History of the Creator of the Bauhaus (Boston 1991)
4 La Grange, Henry-Louis de and Günther Weiβ (eds). Ein Glück ohne Ruh’: Die Briefe Gustav
Mahlers an Alma (Berlin 1995), in collaboration with Knud Martner; trans. Antony
5 Beaumont as Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife (London 2004)
6 McClatchie, Stephen (ed.). Gustav Mahler: ‘Liebste Justi!’ Briefe an die Familie (Bonn 2006);
trans. as The Mahler Family Letters (Oxford 2006)
7 Mahler, Alma Maria (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Briefe 1879–1911 (Berlin 1924)
8 ——. Gustav Mahler: Erinnerungen und Briefe (Amsterdam 1940, rev. 1949); trans. Basil
9 Creighton as Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, ed. Donald Mitchell and Knud
Martner, 4th edn (London 1990)
20 Willnauer, Franz (ed.). Gustav Mahler: ‘Mein lieber Trotzkopf, meine süβe Mohnblume’:
1 Briefe an Anna von Mildenburg (Vienna 2006)
—— (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Verehrter Herr College! Briefe an Komponisten, Dirigenten,
2 Intendanten (Vienna 2010)
3
4 Contemporary Accounts and Memoirs
5 Bahr-Mildenburg, Anna. Erinnerungen (Vienna and Berlin 1921)
6 Eckstein, Friedrich. ‘Alte unnennbare Tage!’ Erinnerungen aus siebzig Lehr- und Wanderjahren
(Vienna 1936)
7 Foerster, Josef Bohuslav. Der Pilger: Erinnerungen eines Musikers (Prague 1955)
8 Gutheil-Schoder, Marie. Erlebtes und Erstrebtes: Rolle und Gestaltung (Vienna and Leipzig
9 1937)
Karpath, Ludwig. Begegnung mit dem Genius (Vienna and Leipzig 1934)
30 Kienzl, Wilhelm. Meine Lebenswanderung (Stuttgart 1926)
1 Killian, Herbert (ed.). Gustav Mahler in den Erinnerungen von Natalie Bauer-Lechner
(Hamburg 1984); trans. Dika Newlin as Recollections of Gustav Mahler by Natalie Bauer-
2 Lechner, ed. Peter Franklin (London 1980)
3 Klemperer, Otto. Meine Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler und andere autobiographische
4 Skizzen (Zurich 1960); trans. J. Maxwell Brownjohn as Minor Recollections (London 1964)
Mahler-Werfel, Alma. Mein Leben, ed. Willy Haas (Frankfurt 1960) (the Engl. original was
5 written in collaboration with E. B. Ashton and published in 1958 under the title And
6 the Bridge is Love: Memories of a Lifetime; there are substantial differences between the
two publications)
7 ——. Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler, ed. Donald Mitchell (Zurich 1971); for an Engl.
8 trans., see Letters
9 ——. Tagebuch-Suiten 1898–1902, ed. Antony Beaumont and Susanne Rode-Breymann
(Frankfurt 1997); trans. Antony Beaumont as Diaries 1898–1902 (London 1998)
40 Pfohl, Ferdinand. Gustav Mahler: Eindrücke und Erinnerungen aus den Hamburger Jahren,
41R ed. Knud Martner (Hamburg 1973)
Stefan, Paul. Gustav Mahlers Erbe (Munich 1908) 1

—— (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Ein Bild seiner Persönlichkeit in Widmungen (Munich 1910)
——. Das Grab in Wien: Eine Chronik 1903–1911 (Berlin 1913)
2
Walter, Bruno. Thema und Variationen: Erinnerungen und Gedanken (Frankfurt am Main 3
1947); trans. James A. Galston as Theme and Variations (New York 1946) 4
——. Gustav Mahler: Ein Porträt (Wilhelmshaven 1981); trans. Lotte Walter Lindt as Gustav
Mahler (London 1990) 5
Zuckerkandl, Bertha. Österreich intim: Erinnerungen 1892–1942, ed. Reinhard Federmann 6
(Frankfurt 1970)
7
8
Biographies and General Studies on Life and Works
9
Adler, Guido. Gustav Mahler (Vienna 1916)
Blaukopf, Kurt. Gustav Mahler oder der Zeitgenosse der Zukunft (Vienna 1969, repr. 2011); 10
trans. Inge Goodwin as Gustav Mahler (London 1973) 1
Carr, Jonathan. The Real Mahler (London 1997); trans. into German as Gustav Mahler:
Biographie (Düsseldorf and Munich 1997)
2
Feder, Stuart. Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis (New Haven 2004) 3
Floros, Constantin. Gustav Mahler, 3 vols (Wiesbaden 1977–85); the third volume was 4
translated into English by Vernon and Jutta Wicker as Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies
(Portland, Oregon 1993) 5
——. Gustav Mahler: Visionär und Despot (Zurich and Hamburg 1998) 6
Franklin, Peter. The Life of Mahler (Cambridge 1997)
Hilmes, Oliver. Witwe im Wahn: Das Leben der Alma Mahler-Werfel (Munich 2004)
7
Karbusicky, Vladimir. Gustav Mahler und seine Umwelt (Darmstadt 1978) 8
Keegan, Susanne. The Bride of the Wind: The Life and Times of Alma Mahler (London 1991) 9
Kennedy, Michael. Mahler, 2nd edn (Oxford 2000)
La Grange, Henry-Louis de. Mahler: A Biography (London 1974) 20
——. Gustav Mahler: Chronique d’une vie, 3 vols (Paris 1979–84) 1
——. Gustav Mahler. Vienna: The Years of Challenge (1897–1904) (Oxford and New York
1995)
2
——. Gustav Mahler. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904–1907) (Oxford and New York 3
1999) 4
——. Gustav Mahler: A New Life Cut Short (1907–1911) (Oxford and New York 2008)
Lebrecht, Norman. Why Mahler? How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World 5
(London 2010) 6
Mitchell, Donald. Gustav Mahler: The Early Years, ed. Paul Banks and David Matthews
(Woodbridge 2003)
7
——. Gustav Mahler: The Wunderhorn Years: Chronicles and Commentaries (Woodbridge 2005) 8
——. Gustav Mahler: Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death: Interpretations and Annotations 9
(Woodbridge 2002)
——. Discovering Mahler: Writings on Mahler 1955–2005, ed. Gastón Fournier-Facio 30
(Woodbridge 2007) 1
Monson, Karen. Alma Mahler: Muse to Genius. From Fin-de-Siècle Vienna to Hollywood’s
Heyday (Boston 1983) (a German trans. was published in Munich in 1985)
2
Müller, Karl-Josef. Mahler: Leben – Werke – Dokumente (Mainz 1988) 3
Niekerk, Carl. Reading Mahler: German Culture und Jewish Identity in fin-de-siècle Vienna 4
(Rochester, NY 2010)
Principe, Quirino. Mahler (Milan 1983) 5
Schiedermair, Ludwig. Gustav Mahler: Eine biographisch-kritische Würdigung (Leipzig 1901) 6
Schreiber, Wolfgang. Gustav Mahler in Selbstzeugnissen und Bilddokumenten (Reinbek 1971)
Seele, Astrid. Alma Mahler-Werfel (Reinbek 2001)
7
Specht, Richard. Gustav Mahler (Berlin 1905) 8
——. Gustav Mahler (Berlin 1913) (not identical to the foregoing title) 9
Stefan, Paul. Gustav Mahler: Eine Studie über Persönlichkeit und Werk (Munich 1910,
R1981) 40
Wagner, Manfred. Alfred Roller in seiner Zeit (Salzburg and Vienna 1996) 41R
738 SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
1 Wagner, Mary H. Gustav Mahler and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra Tour America
(Lanham 2006)
2 Willnauer, Franz. Gustav Mahler und die Wiener Oper (Vienna 1993)
3
4 Musical Style, Works
5 Adorno, Theodor W. Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik (Frankfurt 1960); trans.
6 Edmund Jephcott as Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy (Chicago 1992)
Andraschke, Peter. Gustav Mahlers IX. Symphonie: Kompositionsprozeβ und Analyse
7 (Wiesbaden 1976)
8 Barham, Jeremy. Perspectives on Gustav Mahler (Aldershot, Hants 2005)
9 Bekker, Paul. Gustav Mahlers Sinfonien (Berlin 1921)
Cardus, Neville. Gustav Mahler: His Mind and his Music (London 1965)
10 Cooke, Deryck. Gustav Mahler: An Introduction to his Music (London 1980)
1 Danuser, Hermann. Gustav Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (Munich 1985)
——. Gustav Mahler und seine Zeit (Laaber 1991)
2 —— (ed.). Gustav Mahler (Darmstadt 1992)
3 Del Mar, Norman. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony (London 1980)
4 Duse, Ugo. Gustav Mahler (Turin 1973)
Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich. Die Musik Gustav Mahlers, 2nd edn (Munich 1986)
5 Franklin, Peter. Mahler: Symphony No. 3 (Cambridge 1991)
6 Geck, Martin. Von Beethoven bis Mahler: Die Musik des deutschen Idealismus (Stuttgart and
Weimar 1993)
7 Gielen, Michael and Paul Fiebig. Mahler im Gespräch: Die zehn Sinfonien (Stuttgart and
8 Weimar 2002)
9 Greene, David B. Mahler: Consciousness and Temporality (New York 1984)
Hansen, Mathias. Gustav Mahler (Stuttgart 1996)
20 Harten, Uwe (ed.). Hans Rott (1858–1884) (Vienna 2000)
1 Hefling, Stephen E. Mahler Studies (Cambridge 1997)
——. Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) (Cambridge 2000)
2 Hilmar-Voit, Renate. Im Wunderhorn-Ton: Gustav Mahlers sprachliches Kompositionsmaterial
3 bis 1900 (Tutzing 1988)
4 Hilmes, Oliver. Im Fadenkreuz: Politische Gustav-Mahler-Rezeption 1919–1945 (Frankfurt
2003)
5 Indorf, Gerd. Mahlers Sinfonien (Freiburg im Breisgau, Berlin and Vienna 2010)
6 Johnson, Julian. Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies (Oxford
2009)
7 Kolleritsch, Otto (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Sinfonie und Wirklichkeit (Graz 1977)
8 Krummacher, Friedhelm. Gustav Mahlers III. Symphonie: Welt im Widerbild (Kassel
9 1991)
Matter, Jean. Connaissance de Mahler: Documents, analyses et synthèses (Lausanne 1974)
30 Metzger, Christoph. Mahler-Rezeption: Perspektiven der Rezeption Gustav Mahlers
1 (Wilhelmshaven 2000)
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus and Rainer Riehn (eds). Gustav Mahler (Munich 1989) (= Musik-
2 Konzepte Sonderband)
3 —— (eds). Gustav Mahler: Der unbekannte Bekannte (Munich 1996) (= Musik-Konzepte 91)
4 —— (eds). Gustav Mahler durchgesetzt? (Munich 1999) (= Musik-Konzepte 106)
Nikkels, Eveline and Robert Becqué (eds). A ‘Mass’ for the Masses: Proceedings of the Mahler
5 VIII Symposium Amsterdam 1988 (Rijswijk 1992)
6 Odefey, Alexander. Gustav Mahlers ‘Kindertotenlieder’: Eine semantische Analyse (Frankfurt
1999)
7 Op de Coul, Paul (ed.). Fragment or Completion? Proceedings of the Mahler X Symposium
8 Utrecht 1986 (The Hague 1991)
9 Painter, Karen (ed.). Mahler and His World (Princeton and Oxford 2002)
Partsch, Erich Wolfgang (ed.). Gustav Mahler: Werk und Wirken (Vienna 1996)
40 Reed, Philip (ed.). On Mahler and Britten: Essays in Honour of Donald Mitchell on his
41R Seventieth Birthday (Woodbridge 1995)
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(New York 1953, R1983)
Revers, Peter. Gustav Mahler: Untersuchungen zu den späten Sinfonien (Hamburg 1985)
2
——. Mahlers Lieder: Ein musikalischer Werkführer (Munich 2000) 3
Revers, Peter and Oliver Korte (eds). Gustav Mahler: Interpretationen seiner Werke, 2 vols 4
(Laaber; announced for 2010)
Rothkamm, Jörg. Gustav Mahlers Zehnte Symphonie: Entstehung, Analyse, Rezeption 5
(Frankfurt am Main 2003) 6
Ruzicka, Peter (ed.). Mahler – eine Herausforderung (Wiesbaden 1977)
Samuels, Robert. Mahler’s Sixth Symphony: A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge 1995)
7
Schadendorf, Miriam. Humor als Formkonzept in der Musik Gustav Mahlers (Stuttgart and 8
Weimar 1995) 9
Schäfer, Thomas. Modellfall Mahler: Kompositorische Rezeption in zeitgenössischer Musik
(Munich 1999) 10
Scheit, Gerhard and Wilhelm Svoboda. Feindbild Gustav Mahler: Zur antisemitischen 1
Abwehr der Moderne in Österreich (Vienna 2002)
Schoenberg, Arnold and others. Gustav Mahler (Tübingen 1966)
2
Sponheuer, Bernd. Logik des Zerfalls: Untersuchungen zum Finalproblem in den Symphonien 3
Gustav Mahlers (Tutzing 1978) 4
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Jahrhunderts (Frankfurt 2000) 5
Stephan, Rudolf. Gustav Mahler: IV. Symphonie G-Dur (Munich 1966) 6
——. Gustav Mahler: II. Symphonie c-Moll (Munich 1979)
——. Mahler-Interpretation: Aspekte zum Werk und Wirken von Gustav Mahler (Mainz 1985)
7
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Tadday, Ulrich (ed.). Gustav Mahlers Lieder (Munich 2007) 9
Ulm, Renate (ed.). Gustav Mahlers Symphonien: Entstehung – Deutung – Wirkung (Munich
and Kassel 2001) 20
Unger, Anette. Welt, Leben und Kunst als Themen der ‘Zarathustra-Kompositionen’ von 1
Richard Strauss und Gustav Mahler (Frankfurt 1992)
Vogt, Matthias Theodor (ed.). Das Gustav-Mahler-Fest Hamburg 1989: Bericht über den
2
Internationalen Gustav-Mahler-Kongreβ (Kassel 1991) 3
Wandel, Juliane. Die Rezeption der Symphonien Gustav Mahlers zu Lebzeiten des Komponisten 4
(Frankfurt 1999)
Weiβ, Günther (ed.). Neue Mahleriana: Essays in Honour of Henry-Louis de La Grange on 5
His Seventieth Birthday (Berne and New York 1997) 6
Wildhagen, Christian. Die ‘Achte Symphonie’ von Gustav Mahler: Konzeption einer universalen
Symphonik (Frankfurt 2000)
7
Wilkens, Sander. Gustav Mahlers Fünfte Symphonie: Quellen und Instrumentationsprozeβ 8
(Frankfurt 1989) 9
Wollschläger, Hans. Der Andere Stoff: Fragmente zu Gustav Mahler (Göttingen 2010)
Zychowicz, James L. (ed.). The Seventh Symphony of Gustav Mahler: A Symposium 30
(Cincinnati 1990) 1
——. Mahler’s Fourth Symphony (Oxford 2000)
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
40
41R
1
2
3
4
5
6
7 Index
8
9
10
1
2
3
4 NOTE: GM = Gustav Mahler; Alma refers to his wife, Alma Mahler. In the subheadings
5 Mahler’s symphonies are ordered numerically.

6 Abbado, Claudio 704 Ahasuerus figure 272
7 Abravanel, Maurice 704 Albani, Emma 591
Accademia di Santa Cecilia, Rome 622 Albert, Eugen d’ 172, 501
8 Adler, Alfred 648 Allmers, Hermann 168
9 Adler, Guido 31, 481, 632, 689 Altenberg, Peter 358
20 and band music in Iglau 30 Alvary, Max 218–19, 545
and Budapest appointment 181–2 Amsterdam
1 and letter on GM’s hardships in America Concertgebouw Orchestra 491, 495,
2 607, 609 497–8, 694
and Mahler Festival in Amsterdam 694 Mahler Festival 694–5, 696
3 musicology chair at Vienna 74, 182, 511 Ansermet, Ernest 251–2, 256, 705
4 and Viennese Academic Wagner Ansorge, Conrad 632
5 Society 63 anthropology, Lotze’s evolutionary ideas
Adler, Louis 371 398–400
6 Adler, Salomon 76 anti-Semitism
7 Adler, Victor 76, 77, 84, 230, 259, 344, 345–6 Alma Mahler 261, 361, 364–5, 371, 380,
Adorno, Theodor W. 129, 391, 449, 695 381, 517–18, 627, 628–9
8 on Second Symphony 207 and anti-modernity 198
9 on Third Symphony 274, 276, 279 in Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy 15,
30 on Fourth Symphony 336 344–5
on Fifth Symphony 388 in Budapest 180, 183, 186
1 and Sixth Symphony 410, 415 and critical responses to GM 82–3, 124,
2 on Seventh Symphony 461–2 145, 198, 252–7, 298, 429, 467, 507, 510
on Eighth Symphony 523, 524–5, 659 and economic uncertainty 51, 52
3 on Tenth Symphony fragment 665 emergence after Austro-German dual
4 and Alma Mahler 361, 410, 643, 644 alliance 46
5 on Berg and GM 483, 485 fate of Jewish composers under Third
‘The Heine Wound’ 706 Reich 692
6 on Jewish element in GM’s work 266, foetor judaicus 370, 628
7 267, 270, 271 and gesticulation of Jews and conductors
and Mann’s Doktor Faustus 415 198, 253
8 monograph on GM 702 GM as target 248, 252–7, 261–2, 294,
9 and Second Viennese School 699–700 296, 316, 465, 467–8, 507, 510
40 on Strauss 475 GM as target after death 692–3, 693–4,
on Webern 481 696–7
41R
INDEX 741
GM’s indifference to in those he Vienna and attitudes towards GM 1

admired 60, 104, 132, 247, 258 341–3, 347–8
historical roots and emancipation of Bahr-Mildenburg, Anna see Mildenburg
2
Jews 255, 257, 706 Balzac, Honoré de 276, 350 3
and Jewish lack of creative energy 82–3, band music 25–6, 30–1, 266 4
251, 255, 258 Barbirolli, Sir John 315, 704
and linguistic stereotyping 253, 254–5 Barenboim, Daniel 705 5
and Pan-German nationalism in Austria Barshai, Rudolf 704 6
46, 63–4, 344, 345 Bartók, Béla 186
rise of Third Reich and GM’s reputation Baudelaire, Charles 130
7
696–7 Bauer, Rudolf 256–7, 700 8
in Vienna 47, 49, 51, 250, 252–3, 254, Bauer-Lechner, Natalie 2, 5, 695, Ill 21 9
259, 288–9, 296, 344–5, 465, 692–3 breach with GM on marriage to Alma
and Vienna Philharmonic post 316 236, 383–4, 386, 502 10
Wagner and circle 60, 63, 80, 83, 104, and GM’s First Symphony 148, 150, 151 1
141, 157, 247, 248, 257–8 and GM’s Second Symphony 204–5,
see also Jews 448–9
2
Appia, Adolphe 416, 418, 419 and GM’s Third Symphony 275, 277, 278 3
Apponyi, Albert 284, 287, 289 and GM’s Fourth Symphony 335, 336 4
Aristotle 402 and GM’s Fifth Symphony 385, 386
Arnim, Achim von 126–7, 129, 170, and Die drei Pintos 164 5
172, 174 and GM’s affair with Marion von 6
Arnoldson, Sigrid 144 Weber 166
art in Vienna of 1870s 42–54 on GM’s appearance and characteristics
7
see also Secessionist art and artists 5, 7 8
Astor family 568–9 on GM’s childhood 13, 25, 32 9
Attersee, Austria 228, 230–2, 236–7, 301, 443 and GM’s childhood compositions 27–8
Austria on GM’s collaboration with Wolf 64–5 20
Mahlerian conductors and shifts in on GM’s compositional method 153–4, 1
allegiance 698–9 173, 448–50, 452
resistance to memorial to GM 696–7 on GM’s health 319–20, 326, 328
2
Ständestaat and GM’s reputation 697–8 and GM’s life-threatening haemorrhage 3
see also Austro-Hungarian Dual 319–20 4
Monarchy on GM’s musical sensibilities as child 20
Austro-German dual alliance (1879) 46 on GM’s praise for Vienna Opera 5
Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy performers 298–9 6
Ausgleich (1867) 12–13, 46–7 on GM’s views on Bruckner’s limitations
Jews in 13–15, 19, 31 72–3
7
political uncertainty at fin de siècle 343–6 on GM’s views on Rott’s talent 57 8
rivalry between Vienna and Budapest on GM’s views on Verdi 469 9
179–80 on GM’s Wandering Jew 272
tensions and Vienna of 1870s 46–52 holidays with Mahlers 230, 232, 30
see also Budapest and GM’s Royal Opera 318–19, 444 1
post; Franz Joseph; nationalist on Justine’s family burden 228–9
movements and dual monarchy; on Anna von Mildenburg’s move to
2
Prague; Vienna Vienna 241–2 3
as musician 383 4
Bach, David Josef 695 on polyphony at fair 128–92
Bach, Johann Sebastian 157 reminiscences and insight into GM’s 5
Bad Hall and GM’s summer post 90–8, 105 work 386 6
Badeni, Kasimir Felix von 343 reminiscences and reliability of 20,
Baehr, George 677 383, 384
7
Bahr, Hermann 132, 210, 237, 358, 359, on Rückert Lieder and GM’s emotions 175 8
658, 689 unrequited love for GM 165, 236, 9
and anti-Semitism in Vienna 345, 506 242, 383–4
defends GM 506, 513, 538 and Vienna Opera appointment 282 40
on Roller’s designs 419, 424–5 Bauernfeld, Edward von 103, 358 41R
742 INDEX
1 Baumbach, Rudolf 170–1, 172 Bezecny, Baron Josef von 283, 285–7, 289,
Baumfeld, Maurice 577–8, 670, 678 296, 464
2 Baumgarten, Moritz 86, 93, 99, 108 Bianchi, Bianca 189
3 Bayreuth Festival 57, 142–3 Bie, Oskar 658, 694
4 GM recommends Anna von Mildenburg Bierbaum, Otto Julius 168, 278
233, 247, 248 Bigelow, Poultney 609
5 GM visits 113, 134, 230, 247–8 Birrenkoven, Willi 247, 288
6 and Neumann’s touring company 141 Bittong, Franz 286
Parsifal as preserve of 548–9 Bizet, Georges 184, 293, 294, 309, 314, 609
7 Roller’s designs 420–1 Bland, Elsa 476
8 and Wagner’s total artwork ideas Blaukopf, Herta 131, 133, 474, 694, 702
9 417–18, 419 Blaukopf, Kurt 701–2
Beaumont, Antony 366 Blavatsky, Helena 674
10 Bechstein, Ludwig 97 Blech, Leo 488
1 Beer-Hofmann, Richard 358, 538 Bloch, Ernst 694
Beethoven, Ludwig van 25, 115 Blumenthal, Carl Victor 323, 551, 552, 553
2 account of death 666–7 Böcklin, Arnold, Pan Frightens a
3 conducting style 195–6 Shepherd 277
4 GM and Roller’s Fidelio staging Bodanzky, Artur 458, 582, 585
427–9, Ill. 20 Bohemia 12–13
5 and Secession art 351, 353–5, 424, Ill. 22 Jews in 14, 15, 19, 31
6 veneration and anti-Semitism 253, 254 linguistic divisions 141–2, 343
Behn, Hermann 243, 246, 518 musical influences on GM 266–7
7 Bekker, Paul 461, 612, 695 nationalist movements 46, 343
8 Bellini, Vincenzo 30, 37, 292 Böhler, Otto 197
9 Benedix, Roderich 52 Böhm, Karl 698, 705
Beniczky, Ferenc von Boito, Arrigo 493
20 and GM in Budapest 180, 181, 184, Bonci, Alessandro 573
1 185, 189 Bondy, Abraham 16
and Vienna appointment 284, 287–8, 289 Borchardt, Rudolf 130–1
2 Benjamin, Walter 136 Borchmeyer, Dieter 521
3 Berg, Alban 475, 480–1, 560, 658, 689 Börne, Ludwig 134
4 and Adorno 270, 483, 699 Bossi, Marco Enrico 673
and Alma Mahler 643 Boston Symphony Orchestra 580
5 and GM’s work 207, 388, 482–4 Bote & Bock (music publishers) 454,
6 Lulu 131, 663 455, 701
on soul of man and animals 400 Boulez, Pierre 703, 704
7 Wozzeck 129 Brahm, Otto 416
8 Berg, Helene (née Nahowski) 207, 400 Brahms, Johannes 337, 380
9 Berio, Luciano 703 as Beethoven Prize judge 58, 105
Berkhan, Wilhelm 246 and Bruckner 72, 73–4
30 Berl, Heinrich 269 as child prodigy 25
1 Berlin, Wagner Theatre plan 593 friendship with GM 73–4, 246–7
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra 203, 204, GM’s respect for work 73–4
2 249, 390, 704 impressed with GM in Budapest 187, 283
3 Berliner, Arnold 536, 550, 613, 658 and Leipzig Gewandhaus 157
4 GM’s letter from London 219–20 and New German School 61, 62,
as source of scientific information 71–2, 182
5 126, 518 and ‘New Symphony’ 57
6 visits dying GM 684 and rebuttal of Rott 58
Berlioz, Hector 61, 62, 125, 195 and ‘Schoenberg circle’ 482
7 Bernays, Martha 368 songs and choice of poets 168
8 Bernstein, Leonard 195, 199, 266, 336, status in Vienna 61
9 699, 701, 704 on symphony problem 149–50
Bertini, Gary 704 Wagner rivalry 61, 62, 63, 71–2
40 Besant, Annie 674 Brecher, Gustav 613
41R Bethge, Hans 554–6, 562–3, 564 Brehm, Alfred Edmund 126, 133, 394
INDEX 743
Brentano, Clemens 126–7, 129, 138, 170, on Alma Mahler 361, 364, 643, 644, 645, 1
172–3, 174 646–7, 674
Brentano, Franz 74 on conductors 192–3
2
Breuer, Hans 307 Carltheater, Vienna 12 3
Brioschi, Anton 422, 423 Caruso, Enrico 6, 545, 546, 573, 578 4
Brioschi, Carlo 422 Casella, Alfredo 694
Broch, Hermann 346, 348 Celibidache, Sergiu 705 5
on Vienna 42–3, 53–4 Celtic culture and Telyn Society 76–7 6
Brod, Max 269 Cervantes, Miguel de 126, 138, 276
Brook, Peter 572 Chailly, Riccardo 495, 704
7
Broz, Jan (Johannes Brosch) 26, 29 Chaliapin, Fyodor 546, 573 8
Bruckner, Anton 154, 246, 705 Chantemesse, André 677, 678, 682 9
and Brahms 72, 73–4 Charpentier, Gustave 470–1
as Conservatory teacher 55, 59 Chinese poetry 554–6, 562–4, 566, 567 10
GM’s ambivalent view of 72–3, 73–4 Chopin, Frédéric 69, 458 1
and New German School 62, 72 Chotzinoff, Samuel 571
support for Rott and ‘New Symphony’ Christian Socialists in Vienna 344
2
57–8 Chvostek, Franz 682, 684 3
Brückner, Gotthold 113, 143, 418 Claar, Emil 310 4
Bruneau, Alfred 620 claque and GM’s reforms 303, 313, 506–7
Büchner, Georg 95, 129, 173, 174 Clemenceau, Georges 358, 517 5
Budapest and GM’s Royal Opera post 167, Clemenceau, Paul 312, 358, 517, 595, 6
178–90, 222–3 620, 658
Hungarian nationalism 179–80, 183, Clemenceau, Sophie 312, 358, 517, 595,
7
189–90 620, 658, 683 8
linguistic problems 179, 180, 183, 184, Colonne, Édouard 620 9
185–6 Colonne Orchestra, GM conducts 620, 621
press responses to appointment and Concertgebouw Orchestra in Amsterdam 20
work 183, 184, 185, 189, 190 491, 495, 497–8, 694 1
secret negotiations to leave for Hamburg Conried, Heinrich 544–9, 573, 574–5, 578,
187–8, 190, 211 579, 580
2
Bülow, Cosima von see Wagner, Cosima Conservatory see Vienna Conservatory and 3
Bülow, Hans von 67, 125, 145, 196, GM as student 4
213–15 Cooke, Deryck 662–3, 665
admiration for GM’s conducting 209, Corning, Leon 578 5
213–14, 215 Cottenet, Rawlins 576 6
antipathy to GM’s work 164–5, 214–15, Craig, Edward Gordon 416, 418–19
217, 474 Czech nationalism 141
7
death and memorial service 205, 215 and anti-Semitism 15 8
rebuffs GM’s youthful effusion 118–20 and linguistic divisions 141–2 9
Burckhard, Max 370, 376, 539 tension in dual monarchy 46–7, 343–4
advises Alma against GM 365 Czech Philharmonic Orchestra, GM 30
Alma’s liaison with 359, 362, 366, conducts 585–6 1
375, 432, 433
and Burgtheater 287, 466 Damisch, Heinrich 693–4
2
on GM’s diet 446 Damrosch, Leopold 545, 580 3
Burrian, Carl 570, 573, 580 Damrosch, Walter 580, 591 4
Busoni, Ferruccio 1–2, 125, 138, 609–10, 673 Danuser, Hermann 563, 702
and GM’s final voyage 679–80 Death in Venice (film) 389, 702–3 5
Busse, Carl 170 Debussy, Claude 620, 621–2, 698 6
Buths, Julius 206, 333, 410 Decsey, Ernst
on Third Symphony 278
7
Cahier, Sarah Jane 563 on GM in Toblach 133, 601 8
Caine, Uri 704 on GM’s conducting style 198–9 9
Calderón de la Barca, Pedro 205, 341 on GM’s faith 394, 407
Callot, Jacques 151 on GM’s feelings towards Wolf 66 40
Canetti, Elias on GM’s literary tastes 132, 133, 134 41R
744 INDEX
1 Defaux, Clément 682 Falk, Johann Daniel 134, 404–5

Dehmel, Ida 488 Farrar, Geraldine 573, 590
2 Dehmel, Richard 168, 488 Fauré, Gabriel 620
3 d’Elvert, Christian 22 Fechner, Gustav Theodor 78, 331, 332, 399,
4 Delius, Frederick 158 400, 401, 594
Demuth, Leopold 307, 471 on death 685
5 Destinn, Emmy 573, 610 GM’s belief in entelechy 260, 397, 407
6 Dickens, Charles 126, 138, 276 Zend-Avesta and GM’s interest in 395–8
Didur, Adamo 591 Ferenczi, Sándor 648
7 Diepenbrock, Alphons 261, 491, 658, 689 Feuchtersleben, Ernst von 553
8 friendship with GM 493–4, 496, 497, Fibich, Zdenek 142
9 498, 519–20 Fiebig, Paul 646
Diepenbrock, Elisabeth 495, 497, 498 Fischer, Franz 113
10 diphtheria 550–1 Fischer, Heinrich A. 29
1 Dippel, Andreas 575, 576, 579, 587, 588, Fischer, Ivan 704
589, 593 Fischer, Theodor
2 Doblinger (music publishers) 454–5 on character of GM 32, 39
3 Doepler, Carl Emil 143 childhood memories 23, 29, 30–1,
4 Donizetti, Gaetano 104, 117, 184, 292, 39, 96, 97
305, 589 Literary Club member 75
5 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 77, 129, 133, 136–8, on Mahlers’ home in Iglau 22–3
6 260, 346 on student days 68
Downes, Olin 479 Fischer-Dieskau, Dietrich 65, 698
7 Draeseke, Felix 411 Floros, Constantin 702
8 Dreyfus, Alfred 358, 517–18 Foerster, Josef Bohuslav 205, 475,
9 Dual Monarchy see Austro-Hungarian 490, 518
Dual Monarchy friendship with GM in Hamburg
20 Dudamel, Gustavo 704 208–10, 211, 214, 215, 245
1 Dukas, Paul 219, 620, 621, 658 on funeral of GM 689–90
Duncan, Isadora 353 on GM’s conducting skills 200–1
2 Duse, Eleonora 236, 306 Foerster-Lauterer, Berta 208, 307, 471,
3 Dvor̆ák, Antonín 469, 646 518, 689
4 Dyck, Ernest van 295, 305, 561 Fornaro, Carlo di 609
Förstel, Gertrude 307
5 Eames, Emma 591 Forster, Josef 470, 471
6 Eberle (printing house) 455 Fraenkel, Joseph 324, 578, 609, 675–6,
Eckermann, Johann Peter 402, 403, 404 677, 678
7 ‘mothers’ theory 687–8 Frank, Adolf 114
8 Eckert, Karl 292–3 Frank, Betty 143–4, 147
9 Eckstein, Friedrich 84 Frank, Gustav (cousin) 75, 91, 99
Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich 271, 386–7, Franz Joseph, emperor of Austria and
30 618–19, 702 king of Hungary 12, 13, 45–6, 50,
1 Ehrlich, Josef 78 288–9, 343
Eichendorff, Joseph von 459–60, 462 and Vienna Opera 303, 464, 465–6, 541,
2 Eisler, Hanns 482 542
3 Elgar, Edward 176 Fremstad, Olive 570
4 Elizza, Elise 107 Freud, Anna 261
Elmblad, Johannes 143 Freud, Sigmund 34, 272, 347, 349–50,
5 entelechy 137, 260, 397, 400–8, 520, 526, 539, 641
6 687–8 GM’s consultation 372, 497, 626, 627,
Epstein, Julius 40–1, 54, 55, 67, 636–7, 647–55
7 70, 689 and Jewish identity 263–4
8 Erkel, Ferenc 180, 186 on woman’s role 368
9 Erkel, Sándor 180–1, 182, 186, 190 Freund, Emil 94, 108, 613, 660
Essen Orchestra, GM conducts 409, 410, and disturbed state of GM 100, 101
40 411, 489 as friend and correspondent 99, 100,
41R evolutionary ideas 398–400, 686 101, 380, 511, 671
INDEX 745
as GM’s legal adviser and executor 455, Faust and Eckermann’s ‘mothers’ 1
511, 600, 655, 689 theory 687–8
GM’s letters to 101, 217–18, 455, 671 GM’s admiration and interest in 133–4,
2
Literary Club member 75 137, 260, 393, 397, 400, 401–7 3
Freytag, Gustav 258 GM’s setting of ‘Anchorites’ Scene’ 4
Fricsay, Ferenc 705 521–4, 525, 526, 598
Fried, Oskar 261, 393–4, 410, 613, 640, 695 GM’s youthful identification with 5
Friedjung, Heinrich 48–9, 76 Werther 94–5 6
Fritsch, Theodor 697 Göhler, Georg 335, 385, 456, 634
Fuchs, Johann Nepomuk 291, 294, 314 Goldberg, Albert 166–7
7
Fuchs, Robert 54, 55, 59, 67, 105 Goldmark, Karl 80, 105, 222, 283, 289 8
Furtwängler, Wilhelm 698, 699, 705 Goldschmidt, Berthold 662 9
Füssl, Karl Heinz 457 Goll, Claire 361
Gounod, Charles 104, 146, 294, 305 10
Gabrilovich, Ossip 410, 438, 629 Graetz, Heinrich 253 1
Gade, Niels Wilhelm 158 Graf, Ferdinand 467
Gadski, Johanna 573 Graf, Max 424, 508
2
Gallen-Kallela, Akseli, portrait of GM 558 Grau, Maurice 544, 545 3
Galli-Bibiena, Francesco 292 Great Berlin Opera Society offer 593 4
Gareis, Fritz 198 Greater New York Orchestra 581
Gast, Peter (Heinrich Köselitz) 658 Gregor, Hans 660, 689 5
Gatti-Casazza, Giulio 575, 576, 579, 587, Greif, Martin 97–8 6
589, 676 Grengg, Karl 219
Genée, Richard 52 Grieg, Edvard 158
7
Gergiev, Valery 704 Grimm, Jacob 96–7, 114–15 8
Gericke, Wilhelm 294 Grimm, Wilhelm 96–7, 114–15 9
Gerigk, Herbert 697 Gropius, Manon (Alma’s daughter) 361, 434
German nationalism Gropius, Martin (Alma’s son) 645 20
and Telyn Society 76–7 Gropius, Walter 1
and tension in Dual Monarchy 343–4 affair with Alma 272, 329, 361, 374,
German Reich 438, 628
2
anti-Semitism 253–4 meets Alma in Tobelbad 629–31 3
Austro-German dual alliance (1879) 46 mistaken letter to GM and fallout 627, 4
economic depression 51–2 634–45, 663, 664–5
German Romanticism 98, 172–3 mother fixation and unattainable women 5
‘German-Jewish symbiosis’ 267–8 630, 652 6
Gernsheim, Friedrich 59 in Munich for Eighth Symphony 657, 658
Gesamtkunstwerk (total artwork) 353, ongoing affair after revelation 654, 657,
7
416–18, 421, 424, 427 660–1, 670, 674 8
Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde 54 unpublished correspondence with 9
Gibson, Charles Dana 609 Alma 641–2, 643
Gielen, Michael 415, 459, 614, 646, 662, 704 Gruber, Max von 76 30
Gilman, Lawrence 592 Grünfeld, Alfred 140 1
Gilsa, Baron Adolph von und zu 112, 115, Grünfeld, Heinrich 140
118, 120, 123, 124 Grünfeld, Moritz and family 34
2
Giorgione, The Concerto 209–10 Gutheil-Schoder, Marie 199, 306, 308, 430, 3
Giroud, Françoise 361 471, 531, 534 4
Giulini, Carlo Maria 704 Gutmann, Emil 326, 458, 563, 656, 671
Gluck, Christoph Willibald 116, 142, 147, and Eighth Symphony Munich première 5
243, 292, 305, 470, 507, 529, 530, 535, 623, 624, 625 6
557
Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von Haas, Willy 630
7
accounts of death 667, 668 Habsburg Empire and role of Vienna 45–6 8
on Des Knaben Wunderhorn poems 173–4 Haeckel, Ernst 394, 594 9
and entelechy 401–7, 687–8 Haffner, Karl 52
Faust 401–3, 405–7, 521–4, 525, 526, Haitink, Bernard 390, 495, 701, 704 40
593–4, 598 Halban, Dési 308, 313 41R
746 INDEX
1 Halban, Josef 313 Hermann, Marie see Mahler, Marie (mother)

Halévy, Ludovic 52, 257 Hermann, Theresia (grandmother) 17
2 Hamburg Hertz, Alfred 570, 571, 588
3 First Symphony performed in 149, 150–1 Hertzka, Emil 600, 623, 671, 689
4 friends in 245–6 Herzl, Theodor 340
GM’s post at Stadttheater 208–50 Hesch, Wilhelm 246, 307
5 GM’s success in post 218, 225–6, Heuckeroth, Martin 491, 492–3
6 248–9, 296–7 Hevesi, Ludwig 44, 356, 430
history of opera house 211 Heyworth, Peter 67
7 repertory and work load 245 Hildesheimer, Wolfgang 667
8 secret negotiations to leave Budapest Hilgermann, Laura 143
9 187–8, 190, 211 Hiller, Ferdinand 157
Vienna appointment and departure for Hinrichsen, Henri 454–6, 458
10 240–4, 284–5, 286, 296–7 Hirschfeld, Robert 508, 532
1 Hammerstein, Oscar 545–6, 547 Hitler, Adolf 344, 345, 420–1
Hamperl, Franz 323–4 Hoffmann, Anna (Nina), see Spiegler, Nanna
2 Handel, George Frideric 211, 604, 609 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 1, 138, 151
3 Hansen, Mathias 154, 173, 176, 278, 281, Hoffmann, Josef 223, 352, 538, 680
4 413, 462 Hoffmann, Joseph 143, 418
and Fifth Symphony 389–90, 391 Hoffmann-Matscheko, Nina 136
5 Hansen, Theophil von 54 Hofmann, Leopold von 293
6 Hanslick, Eduard 310, 512 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von 358, 658
admiring review of Vienna Opera ballet 359–60
7 Dalibor 300–1 and burial of GM 689, 690
8 as ‘Brahmin’ 62, 71 ‘Chandos Letter’ 614, 615
9 on Bruckner’s Third Symphony 72 on decadence of fin-de-siècle era 350–1
GM’s appraisal of 221 Elektra and Anna von Mildenburg 233–4
20 negative review of First Symphony festschrift contribution 633
1 156, 317 GM’s attitude to work of 131–2
university teaching 74 Roller’s designs 420
2 and Vienna appointment 156, 289–90 and Young Vienna movement 346
3 and Wagner 60, 71, 290 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich 138
4 Harding, Daniel 704 Holländer, Hans 98
Harris, Sir Augustus 219 Hollnsteiner, Johannes 392
5 Hartmann, Alois 467 Homer, Louise 573
6 Hartmann, Eduard von 331, 407, 686–7, Horenstein, Jascha 704
688 Horwitz, Karl 560
7 Hartmann, Karl Amadeus 703 Hrabanus Maurus 521, 522–3, 598
8 Hasslinger, Carl 467 Hülsen, Botho von 112, 115, 118
9 Hassmann, Carl 609 Humperdinck, Engelbert 593
Hassreiter, Josef 534 Hungarian nationalism 179–80, 183, 189–90
30 Hauptmann, Gerhart 126, 131, 511, Hüttenbrenner, Anselm 666–7
1 512–13, 632, 658 Huysmans, Joris-Karl 350
Havemeyer, Louisine 608
2 Haydn, Joseph 72, 215, 532, 604 Ibsen, Henrik 133, 136
3 Hearst, William Randolph 569 Iglau (Jihlava) 12, 13–14, 17–19, Ill. 6
4 Hebbel, Friedrich 47 cultural life 30
Heine, Heinrich 19, 256, 259, 706 GM conducts in 108
5 Heinzel, Richard 56, 74 GM performs in 69, 113
6 Hellmesberger, Joseph (‘Pepi’), Junior GM’s childhood 22–41
291, 294, 314, 317 GM’s visits home as young man 99–100,
7 Hellmesberger, Joseph, Senior 54, 108, 113, 124, 147, 166, 230
8 68–9, 294 Jewish community 259
9 Helsinki, GM conducts in 557, 558 Mahler family homes 21–3, 165
Henderson, W. J. 570, 592, 610 Municipal Archives and GM’s
40 Herbeck, Johann 72, 293 schooling 33–6
41R Hermann, Abraham (grandfather) 16–17 music of 266–7
INDEX 747
Inbal, Eliahu 704 Kaiser, Emil 109 1

Indy, Vincent d’ 252 Kajanus, Robert 558
International Exhibition, Paris (1900) Kalbeck, Max 107, 153, 512, 532
2
312, 316 Kalischt (Kalištĕ), Bohemia 12, 13, 14, 17, 99 3
International Gustav Mahler Society 454, 701 Kann, Robert A. 46, 47 4
Iradier, Sebastián de 279 Kant, Immanuel 126, 446
Isaacs, Reginald 630, 634 Kaplan, Gilbert 3 5
Italy, GM visits 299–300, 535–6, 536–7, 622 Karajan, Herbert von 698–9, 705 6
Karbusicky, Vladimir 266
Jahn, Wilhelm 61, 195, 234, 283, 291, Karpath, Ludwig 109, 296, 297–8, 557
7
299, 316 GM on Wunderhorn poems 172 8
and GM’s succession 286–7, 297–8, on GM’s arrival at Budapest Opera 182–3 9
301, 305 and GM’s churlishness 505, 506
and Vienna Opera golden age 293–5 interview with GM on leaving 10
Jalowetz, Heinrich 481, 560 Vienna 528, 539–40 1
Jansons, Mariss 495, 704 and Vienna appointment 283–4, 289,
Jauner, Franz 60–1, 293 505, 506
2
Jean Paul (pseud. of Johann Paul Friedrich Kassel theatre and GM’s post 68, 112, 3
Richter) 133, 134–6, 137, 175, 226, 113, 114–24 4
666, 690 anti-Semitic newspaper article 252
on friendship of books 138–9 strict working and moral ethic 115–16 5
GM visits birthplace 113, 134 wide-ranging repertory and work load 6
‘humouresque’ and Fourth Symphony 116–17
335, 336, 338–9 Keegan, Susan 361
7
and titles in GM’s First Symphony Keglevic, Count István 180 8
135, 150 Kes, Willem 491 9
Jews Khnopff, Fernand 362
attraction of Wagner 83, 258 Khvolson, Orest Danilovich 394 20
conditions in pre-war Austria-Hungary Kienzl, Wilhelm 186, 249 1
13–15, 19, 259, 345 Kittel, Hermine 423
end of liberalism after 1879 German Kitzbühel as holiday destination 301
2
alliance 46, 259 Kiurina, Bertha 307 3
fate of composers under Third Reich 692 Kleiber, Carlos 705 4
Jewish music question 264–73, 697 Kleiber, Erich 158–9, 705
klezmer music 31, 266 Klein, Herman 220 5
legal definition and identification Kleist, Heinrich von 116, 136 6
as 262–3 Klemperer, Otto 67, 212, 458, 582
respect for education in pre-war conducting style 195
7
Europe 19 and GM in Prague 585–6 8
see also anti-Semitism on GM’s striving for perfection 657–8 9
Joachim, Joseph 61, 73, 157 Kletzki, Paul 704
Jochum, Eugen 705 klezmer music 31, 266 30
Johner, Theodor 672–3 Klimt, Gustav 341, 347, 359, 421, 539 1
Jones, Ernest 649, 651, 653 and Alma Schindler 353, 357, 362,
Jörn, Karl 591 365, 433
2
Joseph II, Kaiser 15, 16, 292, 527 attends GM’s send-off from Vienna 3
Joukowsky, Paul von 113 560, 561 4
Jude, Der (journal) 269 and GM’s death 684, 689
Jugendstil 43, 352 knight image and GM 354, 357, 632 5
Jung, Carl Gustav 648 Secession and Beethoven frieze 351, 6
352–5, 356, Ill. 22
Kafka, Franz 329–30 Klinger, Max 351, 353–4, 355, 356, 424
7
Kahn, Otto H. 546, 573, 579 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb 128, 205, 215 8
Kahnt, Christian Friedrich 455 Knappertsbusch, Hans 254, 705 9
Kaim Orchestra in Munich 289, 333, Kneisel, Franz 609
557, 623 Knote, Heinrich 307, 570, 573, 578, 625 40
Kainz, Josef 539 Knüpfer, Paul 161 41R
748 INDEX
1 Kokoschka, Oskar 352, 353, 361, 628, latecomers and GM’s reforms 225, 302–3,
629, 645 313, 466, 507
2 Komlóssy, Ferenc 186 Lauterer, Berta see Foerster-Lauterer, Berta
3 Kompass, Robert 467 Lazarus, Henriette 246
4 Kondrashin, Kirill 704 Leadbeater, Charles 674
Konzertverein Orchestra in Munich 623, 624 Lefler, Heinrich 422–4, 426
5 Korngold, Erich Wolfgang 176, 429, 512 Lehár, Franz, 461, 562, 563
6 Korngold, Julius 429, 512, 532, 540 Lehmann, Lilli 186–7, 326–7, 487, 539,
Kovacs, Friedrich 323, 324, 552, 553 545, 546, 656, 658
7 Kralik, Heinrich 83 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm 402, 403, 405
8 Kralik, Richard 82–3 Leiden
9 Kraus, Felix von 536 GM conducts in 644
Kraus, Karl 131, 268, 341, 349, 531, 540 GM consults Freud in 647–55
10 admiration for GM’s Contes d’Hoffmann Leipzig
1 516–17 Conservatory 157–8
defence of GM 515–16, 683 Gewandhaus Orchestra 157, 158, 161
2 Die Fackel 295, 362, 516, 683 GM’s position at Stadttheater 123,
3 poetry and spiritual message 130 146–7, 157–67
4 positive review of Vienna appointment Neumann as opera promoter 141, 158
295–6 performance of Die drei Pintos 164
5 Krauss, Clemens 698 performance of Don Giovanni 165
6 Krehbiel, Henry E. 572, 591, 604 Lemcke, Karl 168
Krenek, Ernst 662, 695, 697, 698 Lenau, Nikolaus 278
7 Krenn, Franz 54–5, 67 Lenbach, Franz von 44
8 Kris, Ernst 641 Leonardo da Vinci 126, 647, 730
9 Krisper, Anton Leoncavallo, Ruggero 299, 300, 314
as friend in Vienna 55, 56, 64, 86 Leschetitzky, Theodor 54
20 GM lodges with parents in Laibach 103 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim 27–8
1 GM’s letters 56, 86, 93, 94–5, 98, 101 Levi, Hermann 113, 165, 167, 247, 265
venereal disease and insanity 56, 100, Levine, James 704
2 101, 102 Lewy, Gustav 92, 100, 102, 109, 112
3 Kroyer, Theodor 334 liberalism in Austria
4 Krzyzanowski, Heinrich 510 crisis and 1879 defeat 46, 49–50, 343–4
as friend in Vienna 55, 56, 59 GM and student critiques 83–4
5 walking tours 95, 113, 164, 166 Ringstraße as expression of 48–9, 50
6 Krzyzanowski, Rudolf 69, 72, 510 Libman, Emanuel 324, 676–7
conducting career 56 Lichtenberg, Georg Christoph 205
7 as friend in Vienna 55, 56, 62, 64 Liebstöckl, Hans 508, 533
8 walking tours 95, 164 Liechtenstein, Prince Rudolf von und zu
9 Kubelík, Rafael 704 259, 283, 287, 288, 301, 303, 465–6
Kubik, Reinhold 457 Liliencron, Detlev von 168
30 Kurz, Selma (later Halban) 199, 302, Lipiner, Clementine 380
1 308–13, 371–2, 435, 468, 531, Ill. 12 Lipiner, Nanna see Spiegler, Nanna
Lipiner, Siegfried 100, 126, 243, 259,
2 La Grange, Henry-Louis de 634, 702 264, 318, Ill. 7
3 Labor, Josef 366 Alma on GM’s regret at friendship
4 Lachner, Vincenz 162 680–1
Ladies’ Committee of New York Alma’s introduction and GM’s break
5 Philharmonic Society 580–1, 592–3, with 379–80, 381–3, 502
6 605, 673 and Anna von Mildenburg 436
Laibach (Ljubljana) and GM’s position anti-Semitic responses to work 79,
7 102–5, 108 80, 82–3
8 Lallemand, Baron Guillaume de circle in Vienna 55, 63–4, 75–84, 278–9,
9 517, 595 381–3, 502, 511, 681
Lange, Friedrich August 126, 394 failure to achieve potential 80–1, 597
40 Lange-Eichbaum, Wilhelm 329 influence on GM’s ideas and beliefs
41R Langhans, Carl Ferdinand 158 395, 407
INDEX 749
Nietzsche and Prometheus Unbound 78, appearance and beauty 240, 361, 363 1
79, 81, 82 appraisal of GM’s work 371, 381, 391,
reconciliation with GM and poem 80, 436–7, 626, 681
2
594, 596–8, 606, 681, 687 artistic talent 363 3
Renatus poem 79, 81–2 birth of children 434–5 4
as translator 203 on breach with Natalie Bauer-Lechner 384
and Vienna appointment 283, 285 Catholicism 392 5
views on death and GM 594, 597, 617, on Charpentier 471 6
669, 686, 687 on Chinese poetry and grieving GM 554–5
Wagner and visit to Wahnfried 79–80 on Christianity of GM 260, 392–3
7
Liszt, Franz 149, 186, 474 and clothes for GM 8 8
and New German School 61–2, 106, 182 and completion of Tenth Symphony 9
Literary Club in Vienna 75 fragment 662
Loew Sanatorium, Vienna 683, 684 as composer and GM’s demand for 10
Löhr, Friedrich 123, 164, 264, 380, 689 renunciation 363, 366–9, 371, 375–9, 1
on affair with Marion von Weber 163 433–4, 626–7
as family friend 188, 216, 217, 230, as composer and GM’s rediscovery of
2
510, 511 her songs 641–3, 676 3
GM on Bülow 215 copies music for GM 442 4
GM on Lieder eines fahrenden courtship period 370–84, 431–4
Gesellen 170 cult of Mahler after his death 645, 5
on GM’s conducting 146 646–7, 668, 674, 696, 705 6
GM’s letters to 109, 111, 113, 117–18, and death of daughter Maria 550–3
121, 124, 125, 140, 143, 148, 259, dedication of Eighth Symphony to 646
7
285, 325, 511 descriptions of 361–2 8
visits GM in Prague 144, 146 as distant mother 434, 599–600 9
Löhr family 188, 189 dreams 434–5, 628
Löhr, Uda 188, 216, 230 and Dreyfus Affair 517–18 20
Lombroso, Cesare 329 drinking and alcoholism 361, 369, 1
London, GM conducts in 219–20 598, 630
Loos, Adolf 43–4, 48, 352 father figure attraction 627, 651
2
Lortzing, Albert 157, 469 on female lack in creative arts 366–7 3
Lösch, Josef 231 and final illness and death of GM 667, 4
Lotze, Hermann 398–400, 407, 594 668, 674, 676, 677, 678–9, 680–1, 684,
Louis, Rudolf 254–5 688, 689 5
Löwe, Ferdinand 315, 316, 586, 624 first meeting(s) with GM 359–61, 370 6
Lueger, Karl 49, 288–9, 294, 344, 531 and Fraenkel in New York 578
Ludwig II, King of Bavaria 363, 548 as freethinker 392
7
on French rudeness during GM’s Second 8
Maazel, Lorin 704 Symphony in Paris 621 9
McCormack, John 671 and Freud’s analysis of GM 627, 651–2
Mach, Ernst 349 539 frivolous nature and effort of ‘rising to 30
Mackay, John Henry 168 meet’ GM 432–4, 437 1
Maeterlinck, Maurice 132, 350, 376 generation gap with husband 75, 374,
Magyar nationalism in Budapest 179–80, 432, 582, 627, 645, 651
2
183, 189–90 GM defends against Adler’s gossip 607 3
Mahler, Abraham (great-great-grandfather) GM’s poems to 639–40, 654, 664–5 4
16 on GM’s view of Toscanini 590
Mahler, Alma (wife, née Schindler, later Gropius affair see Gropius, Walter 5
Gropius then Werfel) Ills 14 & 24 on harsh childhood of GM 24, 34 6
advice against marrying GM 328, 329, and Hauptmanns 513
371, 374 health during marriage 434, 439, 537,
7
‘Alma’s theme’ in Sixth Symphony 410 557–8, 578, 598–9, 630, 638 8
ambivalent feelings towards GM and and health of GM 323, 324, 326, 328, 9
crisis in marriage 626–9, 636–7 329, 331, 432, 439
anti-Semitism 261, 361, 364–5, 371, 380, honeymoon in St Petersburg 438–9 40
381, 517–18, 627, 628–9 humour lost on 227–8 41R
750 INDEX
1 Mahler, Alma (cont.) on student life at Conservatory 62

as influence on GM’s work 390, 410 and Toblach and GM’s domestic
2 difficulties 613
and interpretation of GM’s work 410, 414
3 jealousy and denial of GM’s previous tonsillectomy 602
4 relationships 210–11, 235, 372, 384, as unreliable witness 20, 24, 263, 439,
435–6 555, 629–30, 674
5 on Jewish identity of GM 261 and ‘unsympathetic smell’ of GM
6 and Justine 229, 375, 379, 384, 441, 627, 628
443, 681 Wagner worship 363–4
7 and Werfel 192
lack of commentary on GM’s
8 work 386 on Wolf ’s breakdown 65
9 lack of descriptive powers 1 Mahler, Alois (brother) 21, 23, 188, 216,
and Das Lied von der Erde 563, 612 229, 322–3
10 life as young woman 361–70, 431–4 Mahler, Anna Justine (daughter) 138, 330,
1 and Lipiner friendship and 434, 598, 697, Ills 24 & 25
reconciliation 596, 680–1 and Canetti 192
2 distant relations with mother 561,
love affairs and flirtations 85–9, 306,
3 362–3, 364, 365–6, 369, 392, 438, 599–600
4 609, 629 and father’s death 684
and Maiernigg holiday home 443, 445, memories and memoirs of father 11,
5 446, 447, 552, 553 226–7, 656–7, 675
6 and markings on Tenth Symphony scarlet fever 537, 550
manuscript 645–7 in Tobelbad 630, 631
7 tonsillectomy 602
marriage to GM: early years 431–47;
8 feelings of isolation and crisis of Mahler, Bernard (great-grandfather) 16
9 1910 438, 599, 600, 625–32, 634–56 Mahler, Bernhard (father) Ill. 2
and Anna von Mildenburg 210–11, 234, background and family 13–19
20 235, 238, 371–2, 423, 435–6 birth of GM 13, 14, 17
1 on Montenuovo and GM’s departure as book-lover 19, 22, 133
from Vienna 535 as distiller 14–15, 17–18
2 enterprising nature 18
in New York 577–8, 608–9
3 Nietzsche reading and GM’s disapproval illness and death 100, 110, 113, 188,
4 279, 372, 392 228–9, 322
on parents-in-law 20 Jewishness 14–15, 19–20, 22, 259
5 ‘passed in review’ evening 379–83 marriage 16–17, 20
6 and Pfitzner 472–4 photograph of 23
as pianist 363–4 and son’s distractedness 32
7 and son’s musical talent 27, 29, 39–40,
publication of GM’s letters 234, 361,
8 644–5, 695, 702 41, 68
9 publication of memoirs 477, 478, 626, as strict disciplinarian 20, 33
629–30, 636, 674 Mahler, Emma Marie Eleonor (sister, later
30 published diaries 359–61, 361–2, 366, Rosé) 21, 188, 216, 229, 439, 441
1 369, 371, 432, 433–4 death 322
on Puccini 470 and Dostoevsky test 137
2 family holidays at Attersee 230
repulsion at GM’s physical presence 600,
3 626, 627–8 marriage to Eduard Rosé 228,
4 and Roller’s meeting with GM 422–3 302, 445
and Rome cancellation 622 Mahler, Ernst (brother) 21, 22–3, 37–8,
5 and Rückert Lieder 176 216, 322–3, 669
6 on Secessionist exhibition 355 Mahler, Gustav
on send-off from Vienna 560–1 admiration of ‘Schoenberg circle’ 479–85
7 appearance and characteristics 1–11, 59,
sexual nature 363–4, 369, 371, 626,
8 628, 637–8 109, 133, 140; Alma’s shock on
9 sexual relations with GM 328, 329, convict’s haircut 600; bad habits 6,
374, 435, 437–8, 626, 627, 629, 637, 7–8, 268, 371; beard and incarnations
40 638, 650 8, 84, 91–2, 144–5, 196; and clothing
41R and Strauss 361, 477–8 8–9; and The Concerto painting
INDEX 751
209–10; as conductor 196–7, 198–9, 373–4, 375–9, 627; sense of humour 1

493; ‘demonic’ impressions 2, 198–9; and irony 162, 220, 226–8, 275, 280,
in final days 679; height and stature 3; 333, 334, 336–7, 338–9; sociability on
2
laughter 5, 9–10; as non-Aryan holiday 230, 613; social skills and 3
conductor 294; physical activity and tactlessness 161–2, 222, 227, 240, 4
fitness 3–5, 9, 95, 110–11, 230, 318, 497–8, 502–3; unsympathetic
323, 442, 446–7, 583, 584; seriousness impression 221 5
and melancholic aspect 10–11, 24; childhood and early youth 12–41; 6
shape of skull 6–7; short-sightedness accordion playing and love of band
8, 31–2, 91; tone of voice and accent music 25–6, 30–1, 266; Ahasuerus
7
10, 84; ‘twitching foot’ and gait 2, 5–7, dream 272; background as German- 8
84, 324–5; see also portraits and speaking Jew 13–15, 259, 263, 267; 9
likenesses below birth 13, 14, 17; early childhood in
books and reading 32–3, 75, 77–9, 82–3, Iglau 23–41; education in Judaism 19, 10
125–39, 394; see also literary 20; estrangement from Judaism 20, 88; 1
influences below family history 16–18, 264; first
character 187, 220–32; ambitious streak compositions 27–8, 69, 84–5;
2
118, 160–1, 226, 243–4, 250, 287–8; imaginative feats 36–7; music lessons 3
anger 10, 224–5, 308, 502, 503, 504–5; 26–7, 29; musical sensibilities and 4
anxiety over work and money 167, skills 20, 24–9, 33–4, 36–7, 103–4;
181, 215–16, 217, 284; as child 32, piano recitals 26, 33–4, 37, 39; school 5
36–7; childlike ego regression during days 33–6, 67, 140; Schwarz’s 6
marital crisis 640–1; childlike petitioning of parents 39–41;
egocentrism 502–3, 640, 641; childlike simultaneous studies in Iglau and
7
naïveté in Vienna post 540; danger of Vienna 34–5, 67, 69–70; as Vienna 8
drawing parallels with music and state Conservatory student 28, 34–5, 37, 9
of mind 612–14; day-dreaming and 39–41, 54–89
distractedness 32, 221, 222, 600; compositional practice and process 20
defeatism and self-doubt 217, 249, 447–57; Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s 1
410, 452; ‘difficult’ reputation 285, accounts of 153–4, 173, 448–50, 452;
287, 313; discipline of daily routine ‘composing houses’ and holiday
2
441–2, 445–7; disconcerted by arrangements 173, 228, 230, 231, 236–7, 3
prostitute 221–2; disconcerting 245, 318–19, 441, 443–7, 520–1, 4
directness with friends 501–3; 582–90; eagle in composing hut 647–8;
dismissal of birthdays 632; energy and fear of misinterpretation of work 452–3, 5
impatience in career 178–9, 222, 446; 488–91; instrumentation problem 6
expediency and economy with truth 451–2, 453–4, 488–9, 657–8; and living
70–1, 112, 243, 250; Freud’s analysis quarters in Hamburg 209–10; need for
7
and ‘Mary complex’/mother fixation silence 62, 231; and opera house 8
650–4; high standards cause schedules 111–12, 178, 189, 231, 318, 9
misjudgement as tyrant 187, 194, 224; 441–2; plans to devote more time to
high-handedness with friends 381–2; 670, 681; publication of work 454–7, 30
insecurity and Jewish background 622–3, 701; revisions 451–2, 454, 456, 1
268; intensity and constant striving 489, 532; stages in writing score 450–1;
601; introspective nature 32, 93, 636; use of sketchbook/notebook 173, 447,
2
lack of vanity 8, 9, 110, 503; loneliness 448, 555 3
in Hamburg 217–18; loneliness in as conductor 191–201; acquisition of skills 4
New York 577–8; love of animals and 67–8; Bad Hall as first appointment
nature 221, 226, 398, 601; love and 90–8, 105; Budapest Opera post 167, 5
extremes of emotion 86–9, 121–2, 178–90, 222–3; calmer style in later 6
238–40; melancholy and despair career 200, 224, 498; concert tour
100–2, 181, 218–19, 268–9; mood before Vienna post 289; conducting
7
swings and volatility 86–9, 93–5, style 109–10, 145, 146, 195, 196–201, 8
99–102, 217–18, 222, 223–4, 468; 253, 498; critical responses see critical 9
moral standards 132, 226; patronizing and public reception of work below;
approach to young women in life dedication and empathy with 40
237–8, 240, 310–12, 366, 367–8, 371, performers 198, 199, 211–12, 213, 308, 41R
752 INDEX
1 Mahler, Gustav: as conductor (cont.) 124, 145, 198, 252–7, 296, 298, 429,
571; disappointment at New York 467–8, 507, 510; Bülow’s negative
2 musicians 572, 590, 605; distant responses 164–5, 214–15, 217; as
3 relations with colleagues 245–6, 578; on conductor in Budapest 185, 189, 190;
4 emotions on conducting own work as conductor in Hamburg 212–13,
606; energetic working method 110–11, 296–7; as conductor in Kassel 117,
5 146, 195, 196, 197–9, 200, 224–5, 253; 252; as conductor in London 219, 220;
6 exacting standards and demands on as conductor in New York 570–1,
performers 103–4, 111, 117–18, 145, 579–80, 592, 604–5, 610; as conductor
7 160–1, 187, 193–4, 198, 208, 223–6, in Prague 145–6; as conductor in
8 307–8, 528–9, 605, 622; foreign concert Vienna 295–6, 298, 300–1, 304–5,
9 tours and performances 299–300, 532–3, 557; Das klagende Lied 107;
535–6, 536–7, 557, 620, 621, 622; posthumous evaluations 696–7;
10 foreign tour absences compromise Vienna Opera staging reforms 424–5,
1 Vienna post 486–91, 510, 533, 541–2; 429, 430, 533, 534, 559–60; see also
guest conducting concerts in America performance of work below
2 580–1, 602–6; Hamburg Opera and death of daughter Maria 550–4
3 position 187–8, 190, 208–50; heavy and death of Wagner 110
4 work load 116–17, 245, 317–18, 321–2, early compositions 27–9, 69, 84–5, 95
486–8, 490–1, 528–9; Kassel position English language skills 219–20, 518, 578
5 68, 112, 113, 114–24, 252; lack of as father 9–10, 675
6 leadership skills 194–5; Laibach season festschrift for 50th birthday 357, 512,
as principal conductor 102–5, 108; 514–15, 632–4
7 Leipzig Opera position 123, 146–7, final illness and death 6, 321, 324, 327,
8 157–67; London season 219–20; 666–90; attention to Alma and Anna
9 ‘magnetism’ and charisma 220, 225–6, 674–5; fatal illness 675–8, 682, 684;
313, 511; nervous agitation 187, 193, Grinzing burial 680, 688, 689–90; and
20 198, 253; New York see New York presentiment of death 668–9, 670–1,
1 Metropolitan Opera post and see New 680–1; professional commitments in
York Philharmonic Orchestra; Olmütz New York 671–3, 675–6; regrets 680–1;
2 position 104, 105, 108–12; opera likes voyage home 6, 678–90; will 689
3 and dislikes 104–5; of own work financial circumstances: anxiety over
4 199–200, 203, 254, 309–10, 316–17, work and money 181, 215–16, 217,
390, 451, 486–91, 510, 606, 610, 622–5, 284, 531, 542; Budapest salary and
5 655–9; and pay and conditions for pay-off 183, 190, 216; as Conservatory
6 musicians 224, 503; performance from student 68; early conducting positions
memory in Prague 146; in Prague 105, 108, 112; Hamburg salary 216,
7 140–7, 167; return to Prague 585–6; 224; and New York contracts 547, 549,
8 and Secessionist exhibition (1902) 354, 577, 579, 580; publication fees and
9 355–7; in Vienna see Vienna Court royalties 455; and success of Die drei
Opera appointment and tenure and see Pintos 166; Vienna Opera contract
30 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra; and and benefits 301–2, 440–1, 540, 542,
1 Wagner repertory 142–3, 159–60, 543; Vienna Opera years 440–7, 543
184–6, 212–13, 218–20, 297–8, 303–5, friends 501–18; Alma’s account of GM’s
2 569–70, 571; Wagner repertory and regret 680–1; Conservatory circle
3 reinstatement of cuts 303–4, 559; 55–66; direct honesty and
4 Wagner repertory and restaging in egocentrism 501–4; enemies in
Vienna 314, 423–6; Wagner repertory Vienna 504–10; familiarity and use of
5 and Toscanini in New York 575, ‘Du’ 511–12; isolation during Gropius
6 587–90, 591 affair 636–7; Lipiner/Pernerstorfer
critical and public reception of work: circle 55, 63–4, 75–84, 278–9, 381–3,
7 First Symphony 155, 156, 249, 317, 502, 511, 681; reconciliation with
8 700–1; Second Symphony 203, 249, Lipiner 596–8, 681, 687; and social life
9 316, 333–4, 591–2, 621; Fourth in New York 577–8, 608–9
Symphony 333–4, 482, 672; Fifth health and lifestyle 321–32, 498;
40 Symphony 558; Sixth Symphony abscesses and operation to remove
41R 532–3; anti-Semitic responses 82–3, 241, 301, 325–7; cycling skills 227;
INDEX 753
delicate digestive system 329, 331, 614–15, 617; Fechner 260, 395–8, 400, 1
446; eating and drinking habits 222–3, 401; German nationalist sympathies
322, 329, 331, 359, 442, 446, 613, 675; 64, 76–7; Goethe 133–4, 260, 393,
2
endocarditis as fatal illness 676–8, 397, 401–7, 593–4, 598, 687–8; Lotze 3
682; family history 322–3, 583; final 398–400; Nietzsche 77–9, 83–4, 279, 4
illness and contributing factors 188, 355; pantheistic view of nature 87,
321, 322, 324, 325–7, 644, 673, 675–8, 93–4, 232, 260, 398; socialist 5
682, 684; genius and ailments 329–30; sympathies 345–6; views on racial 6
haemorrhoids and internal bleeding difference in America 576–7, 671;
188, 222, 317, 319–20, 327–8; heart work and divine purpose 393–4,
7
problems 5, 21, 223, 321, 322–7, 552, 399–408; see also Jewishness below 8
644, 676–7; hypochondria after intellectual energy 74–84, 222 9
diagnosis of heart condition 553–4, Jewishness 14, 31, 226, 251–73;
583–4; life-threatening haemorrhage Ahasuerus figure 272; ambivalent 10
319–20, 328; loss of libido and attitude towards 259–60, 261–2, 263, 1
marital crisis 626, 627, 629, 637, 638, 264, 272–3; anti-Semitic attitudes
650, 653; and Maiernigg composing towards 248, 252–7, 261–2, 296, 371,
2
hut 446; migraines 8, 222, 312, 3 465, 467–8, 507, 510, 692–3, 696; 3
28–9, 438–9, 549; New York and appearance and comments on 2, 198, 4
routine in 577; physical activity and 294; and Budapest position 180, 183,
fitness 3–5, 9, 95, 110–11, 230, 318, 186; conversion to Catholicism 228, 5
321, 323, 442, 446–7, 583, 584, 601; 248, 250, 252, 259–60, 289; critics and 6
possible causes of ‘twitching leg’ 5–6, anti-Semitism 82–3, 124, 145, 198,
324–5; and professional work load 252–7, 296, 298, 429, 466, 507, 510;
7
317, 321–2, 326–7, 487; robust family background 259, 263, 264; 8
attitude to illness 330–1, 503; smoking impact in childhood 19, 20; 9
223, 322; throat illnesses and indifference to anti-Semitism in those
tonsillitis 241, 297, 301, 322, 325–7, admired 60, 104, 132, 247, 258; Jewish 20
638–9, 655–6, 670, 675–6, 682; music question 264–73, 697; and 1
vegetarianism 64, 83, 101, 110, 222, ‘Jewish self-hatred’ 260–1; prejudice
675 towards German Jews in America
2
holidays 123, 167; composing 576–7; as threat to Vienna 3
arrangements in Steinbach 228, appointment 287, 288–9 4
230–2, 236–7, 245, 301, 443; daily literary influences 27–8, 38, 88, 125–39,
routine 443, 445–7; isolation in 202–3; Chinese poetry 554–6, 562–4; 5
Scandinavia 218, 230; Maiernigg and Eichendorff 459–60, 462; 6
‘composing hut’ 173, 318–19, 441, Hofmannsthal’s ‘Chandos Letter’ 614,
443–7, 520–1, 543, 551, 552, 553; 615; and Das klagende Lied 96–9; Des
7
preference for mountains and lakes Knaben Wunderhorn 126–9, 170–1, 8
100, 230; Toblach and ‘composing hut’ 172–3, 232, 277, 280, 335; Jean Paul 9
301, 582–5, 600–1, 611, 613, 632, 647; 134–6; and redefinition of symphony
walking and physical activity 4, 9, 95, 135–6; titles of Third Symphony 276; 30
113, 164, 230, 318, 442, 446–7, 583, and youthful angst 94–5; see also 1
584, 601 Goethe; see also Rückert; and see
ideas and beliefs 260, 392–408; attitude books and reading above
2
to Christianity and God 260, 392–5, love affairs and relationships: early 3
397, 406–8; childhood prayers 24, 27; tragedy of unrequited lover 100; first 4
compassion as religion 77, 129, 137–8, loves 85–9, 94–5, 99, 100–1; Betty
226, 260, 263, 398; conversion and Frank in Prague 143–4; Selma Kurz 5
Catholicism 228, 248, 250, 252, 308–13; Anna von Mildenburg in 6
259–60, 289, 394–5; and creative Hamburg 210–11, 223–4, 228,
works 331–2, 400–8; on death and 234–44; Johanna Richter in Kassel
7
immortality 331, 332, 396–8, 403–8, 114, 118, 120–3, 170; Marion von 8
595, 612, 617, 668–9, 684–8; entelechy Weber as first great love 148–9, 162–4, 9
and striving for perfection 137, 397, 166; youth and sexual reticence 102
400–8, 520, 526, 687–8; and marriage to Alma: composing skills and 40
existential crisis in New York 593–5, letter demanding renunciation 366, 41R
754 INDEX
1 Mahler, Gustav: marriage to Alma (cont.) revisions 451–2, 456, 458, 532; songs
367–8, 371, 375–9, 433–4; concern in Vienna repertoire 309–10; see also
2 over age gap 374, 432, 627, 645, 651; critical and public reception of work
3 courtship and preparation for above
4 wedding 370–84, 431–4; crisis of as pianist 26–7, 33–4, 37, 39, 67, 68, 69,
1910 438, 599, 600, 625–32, 634–56, 104, 108, 113
5 663; daily routine 441–2, 445–7; early as piano teacher and accompanist 26–7,
6 years 431–40; family and friends 68, 86, 108
introduced to 379–83; first meeting(s) poems 88–9, 122–3, 239–40, 639–40,
7 Alma Schindler 359–61; honeymoon 654, 664–5
8 in St Petersburg 438–9, 443; ignorance portraits and likenesses 3; caricatures
9 of Gropius affair and visit to Tobelbad and Jewishness 253; Caruso sketch 7;
631–2; last months and attempts to as conductor 197, 198; death mask 7,
10 please 645–6, 674–5; mistaken letter 684; Gallen-Kallela portrait 558;
1 and fallout from Gropius affair 627, Klimt’s knight 354, 632; photographs
634–45, 663, 664–5; renewed interest 6–7, 7–8, 9, 10–11, 223, 228, 535, 670;
2 in Alma’s compositions 641–3, 676; photographs in childhood and youth
3 see also Mahler, Alma 24, 31–2, 91; photographs in Vienna
4 musical influences: band music 25–6, Opera years 341; photographs on
30–1, 266; Chinese poems 555, 556, voyage home 678–9; Rodin’s bust 6,
5 562–4, 566, 567; deserter imagery 129, 595–6, 602, 632
6 173, 616; early loves 85–9, 94–5, posterity and reputation 572, 691–706;
148–9; fairy stories as source 96–8; festivals and celebrations 694–5, 696,
7 folk element in music 266–7, 270, 671; 701, 704; as influence on other
8 grand passion for Marion von Weber composers 703–4; and ‘My time will
9 163, 166; historical turbulence 52; come’ statement 691–2; popularity of
Jewish music 31; literary influences Death in Venice 702–3; postwar lack
20 126–31, 135–6, 170–1, 202–3; love for of enthusiasm for 699–701; present-
1 Alma 390; love of nature 93–4, 172–3, day conductors’ attitudes to 704–5;
231–2; marital crisis and Tenth publications and scholarship 702;
2 Symphony 663, 664–5; Rott’s resistance to memorial in Austria
3 contemporary work 57, 59; Wagnerian 696–7; revival of interest in late
4 passion as young man 62–3, 113, 258 twentieth century 490, 692, 701–6;
operatic works: Argonauts overture 84, stereo recordings of work 701–2, 704;
5 95; Die drei Pintos (‘out of Weber’) Third Reich and ‘problem of race’
6 162, 164–6, 167, 474; Herzog Ernst von 696–7; twentieth-century conductors
Schwaben (unknown fragment) 28–9, and interpretations 662–3, 665, 698–9,
7 38, 85; Rübezahl 64–5, 84–5, 95, 108 701–2, 703
8 performance of work: First Symphony pride in Eighth Symphony 519–20
9 156, 249, 317, 605–6, 700–1; Second prizes and competitions 58, 67, 69, 84, 105
Symphony 203–4, 246, 249, 316, programme music and symphonic work
30 333–4, 489, 591–2, 620, 621, 697; 135–6, 149–50, 151–3, 156, 202–3,
1 Fourth Symphony 333, 495–6, 605–6, 203–6, 448
672; Fifth Symphony 389, 456, 488, religion see Jewishness and see ideas and
2 495, 496, 558, 605–6; Sixth Symphony beliefs above
3 409, 410, 411, 489, 532–3; Seventh responsibility for brothers and sisters
4 Symphony in Prague 585–6; Eighth 100, 167, 188, 216–17, 441, 543, 577
Symphony 622–3, 624–5, 655–9, 697; songs 126–31, 168–77, 188; conservative
5 Ninth Symphony 693–4; Das klagende choice of material 168–9; Des Knaben
6 Lied 106–7; foreign tours and absences Wunderhorn songs 126–9, 169, 170,
compromise Vienna post 486–91, 510, 171–5, 204, 206, 231, 309–10, 335, 394,
7 533, 541–2; Kindertotenlieder 496, 497, 448; interrelation with symphonies
8 610; Das Lied von der Erde 693–4, 697; 169, 173, 175, 204, 206, 335, 412, 448,
9 in Netherlands 491–8; in New York 563, 618; Kindertotenlieder 129–30,
591–2, 605–6, 610; posthumous 131, 169, 170, 176–7, 319, 412, 496,
40 performances and interpretations 497, 610, 618, 685–6; Das klagende
41R 662–3, 665, 698–9, 701–2, 703; and Lied cantata 29, 85, 93, 95–8, 105–7,
INDEX 755
150; Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen 88, Mahler, Marie (mother, née Hermann)13, 1
114, 122, 124, 126–8, 147, 148, 153, 19, Ill. 3
155, 169–72, 256, 309–10; Lieder und close relationship with son 20–1, 23, 24
2
Gesänge 170, 172; ‘Revelge’ 173–5, 412; health 20–1, 38, 322, 583 3
Rückert Lieder 129–31, 168, 170, illness and death 100, 113, 188, 228–9, 322 4
175–7, 556 marriage 16–17, 20
symphonies: First Symphony 135, 136, photograph of 23 5
148–56, 165, 167, 188, 202, 249, 317, and son’s musical abilities 27 6
449–50, 700–1; Second Symphony 166, Mahler, Otto (brother) 217, 229, 230, 441
188, 202–7, 215, 231, 246, 249, 316, Brahms and Bruckner debate 73–4
7
333–4, 394, 397, 399–400, 447–9, 482, inconsistent character 216 8
489, 591–2, 620, 621, 697; Third musical talent 21, 29, 188, 216 9
Symphony 173, 231–2, 236–7, 270, suicide 21
274–81, 480, 492, 493; Fourth Mahler, Simon (grandfather) 14–15, 16, 17 10
Symphony 266, 274, 318, 319, 333–9, Mahler (film) 20, 683 1
482, 495–6, 672; Fifth Symphony 135, Mahler Festival in Amsterdam 694–5, 696
319, 385–91, 442, 454, 455–7, 488, 495, Mahler Orchestra plan in New York 580–1,
2
496, 558, 702–3; Sixth Symphony 592–3, 605, 673 3
409–415, 454, 462, 489, 532–3; Seventh Maiernigg on Wörthersee 173, 312, 4
Symphony 458–63, 479, 497–8, 585–7; 318–19, 441, 443–7, 520–1, 543, 551,
Eighth Symphony 135, 249, 394, 409, 552, 553, Ill. 13 5
437, 519–26, 598, 622–3, 624–5, 646, Maikl, Georg 307 6
655–9, 697; Ninth Symphony 135, 169, Makart, Hans 44–5
280–1, 483, 520, 611–19, 693; Tenth Malloch, William 728
7
Symphony fragment 625, 645–6, Manhattan Opera House, New York 8
662–5; Das Lied von der Erde (song- 545–6, 547 9
symphony) 169, 482–3, 520, 555, 556, Manheit, Jacques (Jakob) 109–11
562–7, 585, 612, 617–18, 693, 697; Mann, Thomas 321, 330, 513, 669 20
‘Todtenfeier’ movement 166, 447–8 Aschenbach and GM’s similarities 1
on tradition and slovenliness 145, 416 688, 703
‘vocabular music’ 271, 386–8 bitterness of schooldays 36
2
Mahler, Isidor (brother) 21 Buddenbrooks 321 3
Mahler, Justine Ernestine (sister, later Doktor Faustus and GM’s Sixth 413, 415 4
Rosé) 23, 216, 246, 373–4, 689, Ill. 10 and first performance of the Eighth
and Alma 229, 375, 379, 380, 384, 441, Symphony 658, 659 5
443, 681 reaction to Wagner lecture 253–4 6
appearance 228 Visconti’s Death in Venice 389, 702–3
and Natalie Bauer-Lechner 384 Wolf and art from life 66
7
death 21, 322 Marcus, Adele 246, 585, 687–8 8
and family holidays 230, 318–19, 444–5 Marie Louise, Archduchess of Austria 466 9
financial management and GM’s Marschalk, Margarete 513
debts 441 Marschalk, Max 95, 96, 148–9, 151–2, 202, 30
Freudian relationship with GM 443, 653 204, 275, 475, 512 1
illness after nursing parents 4, 188, 228–9 Marschner, Heinrich 116, 144
marriage to Arnold Rosé 21, 228, 302, Martucci, Giuseppe 673
2
439, 443 Marx, Karl 268, 345 3
on response to Second Symphony 203 Mascagni, Pietro 296 4
shares house with GM 21, 188, 228, 238, Massenet, Jules 286, 294, 295, 305, 529,
297, 302, 380, 439, 441 609, 620 5
Mahler, Leopoldine (sister, later Quittner) Materna, Amalie 294–5, 305, 545 6
21, 22–3, 441 Matthews, Colin and David 662
death 188, 216, 322 mauscheln as derogatory term 253, 255
7
Mahler, Maria Anna (daughter) 10–11, Mayer, Hans 521 8
268, 434, Ill. 24 Mayr, Richard 307, 423 9
illness and death 323, 414, 550–4 Mehta, Zubin 705
Mahler, Marie (Maria, grandmother, née Méhul, Étienne-Nicolas 110, 112 40
Bondy) 16, 17 Meilhac, Henri 52 41R
756 INDEX
1 Mendelssohn, Felix 157, 257, 258, 260, 266 and courtship of Alma and GM 359,
Mendelssohn, Moses 253 360, 378, 653
2 Mendelssohn, Fanny 367 and death of granddaughter 323, 550,
3 Mengelberg, Tilly 494, 495 551–2
4 Mengelberg, Willem 409, 657, 658, 689 and Gropius affair 637, 674
conducting career 491–2, 497, 580, help in GM’s final illness 678, 680
5 622, 694 shared appreciation of Rosegger with
6 friendship with GM 491, 495, 496, GM 132
497–8, 519–20 Moll, Carl (Alma’s stepfather) 223, 362,
7 and Mahler Festival in Amsterdam 694 365, 379, 384, 472, 481, 511, 585, 631,
8 and tempo for Fifth Symphony 390 658, 680, Ill. 23
9 Merezhkovsky, Dimitri 126 and death of GM 684, 689, 690
Metropolitan Opera see New York and death of granddaughter 550
10 Metropolitan Opera post GM’s letter on life in New York 577
1 Metternich, Pauline 540 and Gropius affair 637
Meyerbeer, Giacomo 104, 162, 257, 258, 266 and National Socialists 364
2 Meysenbug, Malwida von 79, 81–2, 418 and Rodin bust of GM 595, Ill. 30
3 Michalek, Margarete 333, 371–2, 435 and Secession 341, 352, 354, 355, 356
4 Mickiewicz, Adam 80, 202–3, 276 monadism and entelechy 402–3, 405, 520
Mihalovich, Ödön von 245, 259 Mondheim-Schreiner, Alexander 103
5 and Budapest appointment 182, 184 Monson, Karen 361
6 and Vienna appointment 250, 284, 286, Montenuovo, Prince Alfred 283, 464,
287–8, 289 465–6, 487, 501
7 Mildenburg, Anna von (later Bahr- and GM’s departure from Vienna Opera
8 Mildenburg) 55, 120, 186–7, 658, 689, 535, 536–7, 541–3, 547–8, 557
9 Ill. 11 and press attacks on GM 533–4
achievement and talent as singer 232–4, Monteux, Pierre 705
20 243, 299, 305–6 Moravia 12–13
1 affair with GM in Hamburg 210–11, Jews in 14, 15, 19, 31
223–4, 228, 234–44 musical influences on GM 266–7
2 and Alma’s ‘passed in review’ evening nationalist movements 46, 343
3 379, 380, 381 Morena, Berta 546, 573, 580
4 Alma’s view of 210–11, 234, 235, 238, Mörike, Eduard 97, 168
371–2, 423, 435–6 Moscheles, Ignaz 158
5 appearance 235–6 Moser, Kolo 352, 357, 379, 380, 421, 423,
6 discreet memoirs 244 539, 658
fading of affair and move to Vienna 235, Mottl, Felix 247, 539
7 240–4, 284, 302, 309 as applicant for Vienna post 248, 288,
8 first impression of GM 223–4, 234 289, 290
9 GM recommends for Bayreuth 233, as candidate to succeed GM in Vienna
247, 248 540, 547–8
30 and GM’s dedication in work 198, 199 refuses Budapest position 181, 182
1 on GM’s delight in nature 398 Viennese Academic Wagner Society 63
on GM’s sense of humour 227 Mozart, Leopold 336, 731
2 letters from GM 210–11, 234–5, 236–7, Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 24–5, 29, 292
3 238–9, 242–3, 244, 276–7, 326, 560 death and burial 667, 669
4 and Maiernigg holiday home 318 GM conducts 104–5
marriage to Bahr 342 Don Giovanni: restaging of in Vienna
5 and Pollini’s exploitation of performers 429–30; performance of in Leipzig 165
6 211–12, 233 and Rodin bust 595
and power as attraction 436 Muck, Karl 142–3, 249, 580
7 and Vienna Court Opera 241–3, 423, 430 Muhr, Felix 329
8 Miller, William 563 Müller, Wilhelm 88, 122, 171
9 Mitchell, Donald 702 Multatuli (i.e. Edward Douwes Dekker)
Mitropoulos, Dimitri 479, 705 126, 494
40 Moll, Anna (Alma’s mother, formerly Munch, Charles 705
41R Schindler) 362, 364, 379, 511, 561, 613 Münden Grand Music Festival 123–4
INDEX 757
Munich preliminaries to 544–9 1

Exhibition (1910) and Eighth Symphony refusal of director’s post 574–5
623–4, 657–9, Ill. 28 second season and impending departure
2
GM’s work in 289, 333–4, 585, 623–5, 590–6 3
655–9 singers and GM’s conducting 570, 571, 4
reactionary music scene 253–4 572–3
see also Kaim Orchestra in Munich third and last season in New York 673 5
Munich Philharmonic Orchestra 623, 625 Tristan und Isolde as opening 6
music publishers 454–7 performance and signature 569–71,
Musical ABC of Jews 697 588–90
7
Musil, Robert 347, 348 Wagner repertory and conflict with 8
Muti, Riccardo 705 Toscanini 575, 587–90, 591 9
wealthy sponsors 568–9, 573, 574–5, 580
Nadel, Arno 269 work load 602, 603, 607 10
Nagano, Kent 705 New York Philharmonic Orchestra 1
Nahowski, Helene see Berg, Helene GM conducts 580–1, 592, 602–6,
Napoleon, accounts of death 667 609–10, 671–3, 675–6
2
National Socialism 255–7, 261, 365 relations end on low point 672–3 3
and GM’s posthumous reputation 692, New York Philharmonic Society 671 4
697, 698–9 Ladies Committee and Mahler
nationalist movements and Dual Monarchy Orchestra plan 580–1, 592–3, 5
46–7, 343–4 605, 673 6
and anti-Semitism in Austria–Hungary New York Symphony Orchestra, GM
15, 63–4, 344 conducts 580, 591–2, 605
7
German nationalism and Telyn Society Nicolai, Otto 116, 315 8
76–7 Nielsen, Carl August 694 9
Hungarian nationalism 179–80, 183, Niemann, Albert 545
189–90 Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm 27, 214, 260, 20
linguistic divisions in Budapest 179, 183, 355, 372 1
184, 185–6 Brahms faux pas 63
linguistic divisions in Prague 141–2 condemnation of Jean Paul 134
2
Naumann-Gungl, Virginia 120 GM and Reading Society 77–9, 83–4 3
Nepallek, Richard 552, 649 GM’s Third Symphony and Zarathustra 4
Nestroy, Johann Nepomuk 91 278–9
Netherlands Lipiner and Prometheus Unbound 78, 79, 5
GM meets Freud 647–55 81, 82 6
GM visits 491–8 ‘Nietzsche societies’ 78, 83
Nettl, Paul 269 and Wagner 77–8, 83, 279
7
Neuilly clinic 682 Nikisch, Arthur 67, 145, 166, 212, 390, 544 8
Neumann, Angelo 219 conducting style 158–9, 196 9
festschrift contribution 633 conducts GM’s work 488
in Leipzig 141, 158 rivalry with GM in Leipzig 146–7, 158–61 30
in Prague 123, 141, 142–3, 144, 145, 146, Nodnagel, Ernst 512 1
160, 167 Norrington, Sir Roger 705
as Wagner promoter 141 Nott, Jonathan 705
2
Neumann, Vaclav 705 Novalis 493 3
New German School 61–2, 71–2, 106, 182 4
‘New Symphony’ 56–8, 150 Offenbach, Jacques 52, 91, 515, 516
New York Metropolitan Opera post 497, Olbrich, Joseph Maria 351, 352, 356, 362 5
602, 608–10 Oldenboom-Lutkemann, Alida 493 6
dissatisfaction with achievements at 572, Olmütz and GM’s position 104, 105, 108–12
576–7, 579–80, 590–2, 671–2 Osler, William 676
7
first season 568–82 operettas 91, 104 8
guest conducting opportunities 580–1, orchestral musicians, working conditions 9
591–2 224, 503
hopes for collaboration with Roller in ornament in Vienna 43–5, 48, 346 40
574, 575–7, 580, 588 Ozawa, Seiji 705 41R
758 INDEX
1 Painlevé, Paul 358, 517, 595 GM as conductor at Landestheater

Palladino, Eusapia 608 140–7, 167
2 Panizza, Oskar 168 GM returns to conduct own work 585–6
3 Pan-German sentiment in Austria 46, linguistic divisions and cultural life 141–2
4 63–4, 76–7, 344, 345, 353 Pressburg, Wenzel 29
and press campaign against GM 531–4 Pringsheim, Klaus 349–50, 410, 489, 695
5 Paoli, Betty 82 Proksch, Anna 18
6 Papier, Rosa 55, 124, 234, 241–2, 282, Przistaupinsky, Alois 283, 467
289, 309 psychoanalysis
7 Paris 561 death wish attributed to GM 668–9
8 French antipathy towards German music and ego regression 640–1
9 620–2 Kris and theory of creativity 641
GM conducts Second Symphony in see also Freud, Sigmund
10 620, 621 Puccini, Giacomo 470
1 GM’s final visit for treatment 680, Puchstein, Hans 531
682, 683
2 GM’s supporters in 358–9, 517–18, Quittner, Ludwig 188
3 595, 683
4 International Exhibition (1900) 312, 316 Rachmaninov, Sergei 753
visits for Rodin bust 595–6, 602, Ill. 30 Rameau, Jean-Philippe 604
5 Pauline (first love) 85, 88 Raimund, Ferdinand 53
6 Paumgartner, Bernhard 55 Rattle, Sir Simon 705
Paumgartner, Hans 55 Ratz, Erwin 456, 701
7 Pernerstorfer, Engelbert 230 Raul, Emanuel 109
8 circle in Vienna 55, 75, 83–4 Ravel, Maurice 492, 694
9 political leanings 63, 76, 77, 259, 344, 345 ‘Reading Society of Viennese German
and Telyn Society 76, 77 Students’ 77–9, 82, 83
20 Perron, Karl 161 Redlich, Hans Ferdinand 413
1 Peters, C. F. (music publishers) 454–5, Reger, Max 633–4, 658, 698
456–7, 458 Reichmann, Theodor 295, 305, 467
2 Pfitzner, Hans 168, 223, 254, 629, 658, Ill. 23 Reichwein, Leopold 698
3 GM and production of Die Rose vom Reik, Theodor 650, 651, 653
4 Liebesgarten 469, 471–4 Reinecke, Carl 157
Pfohl, Ferdinand Reiner, Fritz 705
5 on appearance of GM 2, 4, 5, 6 Reinhardt, Heinrich 507, 510, 533
6 on character of GM 221, 222–3 Reinhardt, Max 223, 416, 420, 472, 516,
and First Symphony 156, 249 658, Ill. 23
7 friendship with GM 209, 221–3, 224, Renard, Marie 295, 305, 306
8 243, 245 Reni, Guido 380, 382
9 on voice and laugh of GM 9–10 Reszke, Édouard de 545
Picquart, Georges 358, 517–18, 595 Reszke, Jean de 545
30 Pierné, Gabriel 620, 621 Richter, Hans 61, 67, 105, 220, 248, 304
1 Piloty, Karl von 44 and Budapest Opera 180, 181
Plappart von Leenheer, Baron August 283, conducting style 195, 198
2 464–5, 499, 500, 501, 557 and Vienna Opera 286, 287, 291, 293,
3 Poisl, Josephine 85, 86, 94, 95, 99, 100–1 294, 314–15
4 Pollak, Theobald 555 and Vienna Philharmonic 315–16
Pollini, Bernhard (Baruch Pohl) 219, 241, Richter, Johanna 114, 118, 120–3, 170
5 286, 309, 475 Rihm, Wolfgang 703–4
6 exploitation of performers 211–12, 233 Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay 558
GM’s difficult relationship with 211–12, Ringer, Alexander L. 264
7 240, 284, 286 Ritter, William 438, 586, 591–2
8 secret negotiations with GM 187–8, 211 Rode-Breymann, Susanne 641
9 polyphony 128–9, 279 Rodin, Auguste 658
Popper, David 182 bust of GM 6, 595–6, 602, 632, Ill. 30
40 Prague Rohde, Erwin 78
41R GM boards as schoolboy in 34, 140 Roller, Alfred 223, 327, 585, 658, 689, Ill. 20
INDEX 759
and appearance of GM 2–4, 5, 8 GM’s song settings 129–31, 168, 175–7, 1

and ballet productions 534 556, 685–6
Bayreuth Festival designs 420–1 Ruppel, Karl Heinz 700
2
costs of designs 500 Russell, Ken, Mahler 20, 683 3
and dying GM 684 Ruzicka, Peter 704 4
on GM and immortality of fly 398
GM’s appreciative letter 426 Sachs, Curt 265 5
on GM’s desire to leave Vienna Opera 535 Sageder, Carl 467 6
GM’s formal relations with 511 St Petersburg
GM’s hopes of collaboration in concerts before New York 557–8
7
New York 574, 575–7, 580, 588 honeymoon and concerts in 438–9, 443 8
on GM’s Jewishness 261, 263 Saint-Saëns, Camille 658 9
GM’s New York appointment and role in Salten, Felix 513–14, 538, 694
420, 547, 548, 574–6 Salter, Norbert 543, 544, 546–7 10
on GM’s religious beliefs 394–5 Salvi, Matteo 293 1
iconographic study of GM 2, 695 Salzburg Festival 420, 487, 528, 693–4
lack of diplomacy 496–7, 534 Samaroff, Olga 137
2
Munich Exhibition designs 657 Sandig, Anton 684 3
New York post 588 Sartre, Jean-Paul 262 4
Salzburg Festival designs 420 Sawallisch, Wolfgang 705
and Secession 352, 354, 356–7, 419–20, Scandinavian holiday 218, 230 5
422, 424 Scaria, Emil 113, 295, 305, 306–7 6
and ‘tradition is slovenliness’ scarlet fever 550
statement 416 Schalk, Franz 314, 315, 495–6, 529, 658
7
tribute to GM’s artistic integrity and and Tenth Symphony fragment 662, 695 8
collaboration 431 Scharlitt, Bernhard 485, 528 9
Vienna Opera collaboration and reform Scheffel, Joseph Victor von 116
291, 416, 419–21, 422–31, 496–7, 500, Schelling, Ernest 609 20
528–9, 530, 533, 534, 557, 559–60 Scherchen, Hermann 192, 695, 705 1
on Weingartner’s productions 560 Schertel, Anton 574, 576
Rome, GM visits and conducts in Schiedermair, Ludwig 152–3, 512
2
535–6, 622 Schiele, Egon 352, 353 3
Roosevelt, Theodore 608 Schiller, Friedrich 19, 116, 255, 282, 354 4
Rosé, Alma (niece) 21 Schillings, Max von 633, 658
Rosé, Arnold 264, 317, 318, 379, 380, 511 Schindler, Alma see Mahler, Alma 5
dispute with Franz Schmidt 504 Schindler, Emil Jakob (Alma’s father) 362 6
and GM’s burial 689, 690 Schinkel, Karl Friedrich 211, 424
as GM’s orchestra confidant 672 Schlenther, Paul 466
7
marriage to Justine 21, 228, 302, 439, 443 Schließmann, Hans 197 8
Rosé, Eduard 302, 445, 511 Schmedes, Erik 307, 423, 570, 658, 689 9
Rosé, Emma see Mahler, Emma Marie Alma’s flirtation with 306, 362,
Eleonor 364, 365 30
Rosé, Justine see Mahler, Justine Ernestine in New York 573 1
Rosé Quartet 21 Schmidt, Franz 504–5
Rosegger, Peter 132 Schmidt, Jochen 406
2
Rossini, Gioachino 104 Schnittke, Alfred 703 3
Roth, Joseph 349 Schnitzler, Arthur 4, 358, 658 4
Rothkamm, Jörg 641–2, 643 diaries and depth of feeling for GM
Rott, Hans 150 514, 515 5
as friend in Vienna 55, 56–9, 64 festschrift contribution 514–15 6
mental instability 58, 100, 101, 102 GM’s attitude to work of 131–2
possible influence on GM’s work 57, 59 GM’s belated friendship with 649
7
responses to work 56–8 Jewishness and sense of community 8
Rubinstein, Anton 65, 470, 629 263, 264 9
Rubinstein, Josef 247, 253, 258 on plight of Jews 345
Rückert, Friedrich 32, 126, 414, 562–3 and sexual ‘problem’ of times 102 40
and Fechner’s ideas 397, 407 Schnitzler, Johann 358 41R
760 INDEX
1 Schopenhauer, Arthur 77, 79, 80, 370, 376, Simmel, Georg 268
392, 686 Sinigaglia, Leone 673
2 Schoenberg, Arnold 260, 335, 479–85, 658 Sinopoli, Giuseppe 705
3 on Brahms and Wagner 71–2, 73, 482 Sittard, Josef 212–13
4 and burial of GM 689, 690 Sladky, Jakob 29
circle of friends and admiration for GM Slezak, Leo 199, 307, 471, 570, 625, 689
5 480–5 in New York 546, 573, 610
6 as defender of GM 479–81, 484, 516, 539 Slovenia and nationalism 103
friendship with GM 480–1, 484–5, Smetana, Bedřich 142, 469
7 560, 660 Smyth, Ethel 163, 369
8 GM’s Dostoevsky challenge 136 social democracy in Austria 76, 77, 83,
9 and GM’s music 479–80, 481–2, 586–7 344, 345
GM’s practical support for 481, 660, 687 Solti, Sir Georg 699, 701, 705
10 and Jewish music question 264, Specht, Richard 18, 409–10, 512, 514, 689
1 266, 269 on Dostoevsky and GM 136
and Mahler Festival in Amsterdam 694 on enemies of GM 507–8
2 and Tenth Symphony fragment 662 and GM on intention in Eighth
3 Scholem, Gershom 267–8 Symphony 521–2
4 Schönaich, Gustav 304, 424 on GM’s beliefs in immortality 408
Schöne, Albrecht 406, 407, 524 on GM’s childlike egocentrism 502,
5 Schönerer, Georg von 63–4, 344, 345, 531 503, 640
6 Schorske, Carl E. 348–9 and GM’s resignation from Vienna
Schott (music publishers) 454 Opera 530, 538
7 Schratt, Katharina 243, 466 guide to GM’s work 657
8 Schreker, Franz 54, 469 and Mahler Festival in Amsterdam 694
9 Schrödter, Fritz 471, 535–6, 539 on Seventh Symphony 461
Schubarth, Karl Ernst 403 Speidel, Ludwig 62
20 Schuber, Hermann 90 Spetrino, Francesco 470, 529, 587
1 Schubert, Franz 171–2, 177, 616–17 Spiegler, Albert 88, 379, 511
Schuch, Ernst von 123, 204, 476, 488 Spiegler, Nina (‘Nanna’)(née Hoffmann,
2 Schuler, Alfred 81 formerly Lipiner) 379–80, 445, 511, 594
3 Schumann, Robert 98, 125, 157, 335 Spiering, Theodore 596, 602, 673
4 Schumann-Heink, Ernestine 193–4 Spitzweg, Carl 460
Schuricht, Carl 705 Spohr, Louis 115, 195, 196
5 Schütz, Heinrich 115 Staegemann, Max 147, 159, 160–1, 162,
6 Schwarz, Gustav 39–40, 41 164, 184
Schwarzenberg, Prince Friedrich 47 and Goldberg affair 166–7
7 Schwind, Moritz von 151, 358, 424 Stauber, Paul 508–9, 510
8 Scott, Sir Walter 96 Stefan, Paul
9 Scotti, Antonio 573 and burial of GM 668, 689
Secessionist art and artists 341, 351–7, 359, on GM’s weariness and resignation in
30 419–20, 424, 427 Vienna 537–8
1 reaction against ornament 43–4, 48 and Mahler Festival in Amsterdam 694
Seelau 99 Mahler’s Legacy and defence of GM
2 Seidl, Anton 145, 158, 160, 219 468–9, 508, 509
3 creates opening for GM in Prague 142–3 organizes festschrift 357, 512, 514–15,
4 and New York Met 544, 545, 573 632–4
Sembrich, Marcella 573 organizes send-off from Vienna 560–1
5 Semper, Gottfried 45, 48 Stein, Erwin 481
6 Senius, Felix 625 Stein, Lorenz von 77
sex and threat of venereal disease 101–2 Steinbach, Austria 228, 230–2, 236–7,
7 Shakespeare, William 133 301, 443, Ill. 9
8 Shaw, George Bernard 67, 220 Steiner, George 619
9 Sheldon, Mary (Mrs George R.) 580–1, 673 Steiner, Josef 39, 99
Shiloah, Amnon 265 Herzog Ernst von Schwaben story 28, 38
40 Shostakovich, Dmitri 266, 662, 703 letters from GM 86–8, 93–4
41R Sibelius, Jean 558 Steinitzer, Max 164, 181, 474, 518, 633
INDEX 761
Stekel, Wilhelm 648 Tauber, Richard 562 1

Stengel, Theo 697 Tausenau, Richard 102
Stephan, Rudolf 207 Tausig, Carl 247, 258
2
Sterne, Laurence 126, 276 Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich 166, 213, 165, 593 3
Stokowski, Leopold 137, 658, 705 Telyn Society 75–7, 83 4
Stoll, August 304, 467, 534 Tennstedt, Klaus 705
Strauß, Johann, conducts Wagner in Thalberg, Sigismond 37 5
Vienna 60 theatre reforms 416–20 6
Die Fledermaus 45, 52–3, 294 Theuer, Alfred 318, 444
Strauss, Pauline 477 Thielemann, Christian 705
7
Strauss, Richard 215, 470, 616, 633, 658 Third Reich and GM’s work 697, 698–9 8
and Alma Mahler 361, 477–8 Thomas, Michael Tilson 705 9
Also sprach Zarathustra 278, 475 Thuille, Ludwig 255
anti-Semitism 254 Tiffany, Louis 608 10
as conductor 67, 196, 203, 247, 474, 498 Titian 209–10, 715 1
Diepenbrock on 494 The Concerto 209–10
Don Juan as symphonic poem 149, 150 Toblach holiday home 301, 582–5, 600–1,
2
Elektra and Anna von Mildenburg 233–4 611, 613, 632, 647 3
first meeting with GM in Leipzig 164 Gropius affair and confrontation 635–6 4
GM’s relations with man and work 64, Tolstoy, Leo 350
132, 167, 471, 474–9, 530, 691–2 tone poems 150 5
GM’s view of difference to self 475, Toscanini, Arturo 498, 572, 573, 579, 592, 6
477, 691 672, 705
and GM’s work 164–5, 167, 214, 249, conflict with GM in New York 575,
7
390, 410, 474 587–90, 591 8
materialistic outlook 475, 477, 478, 691 total artwork (Gesamtkunstwerk) 353, 9
and modern conductors 698, 699 416–18, 421, 424, 427
and music publishers 455 train travel and foreign tours 486–7, 488 20
posterity and reputation 691–2, 698 Treiber, Wilhelm 115, 116, 119 1
published correspondence with GM 702 feud with GM in Kassel 117–18, 120,
and Roller 420 123, 124
2
Salome and Vienna Opera 469, Treitschke, Heinrich von 261 3
475–6, 529–30 Trenker family 583 4
songs and choice of poets 168, 172 Troubetzkoy, Prince Paul 609
Third Reich and view of 698 Turner, Maud 550 5
Till Eulenspiegel 336 6
and Wagner family 247, 248 Überhorst, Karl 112
Stravinsky, Igor 558, 699, 703 Ujházy, Ede 184
7
Streicher, Theodor 172 Unger, Rabbi 33, 35 8
Stresemann, Wolfgang 699 Universal-Edition (music publishers) 454, 9
Strindberg, August 136 600, 623, 657, 671, 694
Stritzko, Josef 455 University of Vienna 74–5, 354 30
Sturm, Franz 26, 29 Untermeyer, Minnie 673, 678 1
Sucher, Rosa 219 Urlus, Jacques 307
Suk, Josef 208, 586, 694 Utrecht Orchestra 409
2
Sullivan, Sir Arthur 158 3
summer theatres in resorts 90–1 Vancsa, Max 532 4
Suppé, Franz von 91, 104 Vanderbilt family 569, 573
Svoboda, Wilhelm, 733, 739 Varnhagen, Rahel 246 5
symphonic music and ‘New Symphony’ vegetarianism and Wagnerism 64, 83, 101, 6
57, 150 110, 222
syphilis 102 venereal disease and effects 56, 58, 100,
7
Szilágyi, Arabella 185 101–2 8
Szell, George 705 Venice, GM visits 299–300 9
Verdi, Giuseppe, GM’s neglect 104, 469,
Taaffe, Eduard Franz Joseph von 343 469–70 40
Tak, Max 497–8 Verhagen, Balthazar 498 41R
762 INDEX
1 Victorin, Franz 29 GM at see Vienna Court Opera

Vienna 42–54 appointment and tenure
2 anti-Semitism in 47, 49, 51, 250, 252–3, historical background 291–5
3 254, 259, 288–9, 296, 344–5, 465, 692–3 presence at GM’s funeral 689
4 architecture 42, 48–9 repertory and conservatism 468–70, 499,
art and Secession 351–7, 359, 419–20, 500–1
5 424, 427 rumours of GM’s return 660
6 Bahr’s critique 341–3 strength of singers 294–5
cholera epidemic (1873) 51 Wagner tradition 60–1, 293, 314
7 fin-de-siècle era 340–57 Wagner’s critique 527–8, 529
8 genius and city’s tolerance of 347–8 and Wolf ’s Der Corregidor 65–6, 427
9 GM as student in see Vienna Vienna Court Opera appointment and
Conservatory and GM as student tenure 240, 248, 249–50, 259,
10 GM’s changes of address as young man 282–320, 419–31, 464–518
1 92–3, 108 anti-Semitic attacks on GM 252–3, 254,
GM’s homesickness for 284–5, 606–7 296, 465, 466–7, 507–10, 516
2 GM’s marital home 439–40, 601–2 campaign behind appointment
3 GM’s plans to return after America 282–91, 505
4 606–7, 660 campaign to remove 490–1, 506–10,
GM’s return for death 682–90 531–4, 535–7, 539, 558, 683
5 Grinzing grave 680, 688, 689, Ill. 31 compromising absences to conduct own
6 opera see Vienna Court Opera work 486–91, 510, 533, 541–2
ornament and reaction against 43–5, conducting roster 294, 314–15,
7 48, 346 529–30
8 political role and building of Ringstraße delight with responsiveness of musicians
9 47–9, 50 298–9
political uncertainty 343–6 as director and finances of opera house
20 press and anti-Semitism on death of GM 499–501, 530, 539–40
1 692–3 directorial authority and administrative
press campaign against GM 507–10, 516, duties 464–8, 499–501, 534–5, 536
2 531–4, 536, 539, 558, 683 and dual post as director 301–2, 316,
3 press and return of dying GM 682–3 464–8, 499–501
4 salons 357–8 festschrift as tribute to 633
stock market collapse (1873) 50–2 final performance and farewell 244, 557,
5 ‘value vacuum’ in fin-de-siècle era 558–61
6 348–51 friends and enemies 501–18
and Wagner cult 59–64, 83 GM’s ‘difficult’ reputation 285, 287,
7 World Fair (1873) 50, 51 313, 465
8 Vienna Conservatory and GM as student opening performance 297–8
9 28, 34–5, 37, 54–89 plans for opera reform 299, 302–8,
absence of conducting classes 67 313–20, 466
30 circle of friends 55–66 reforms in staging and productions 314,
1 compositions and state of mind 69, 347, 416–31, 528–9, 533, 534,
84–9 559–60
2 course change from piano to repertory and contemporary composers
3 composition 67 468–85, 499, 501, 530
4 and musical backdrop in Vienna 71–4 resignation and interim period before
nature of studies and achievements New York 543–9
5 66–71, 74–5 resignation and prelude to 485–91,
6 petitioning of parents and entrance to 527–43
39–41 resignation and supporters’ tributes
7 prizes 67, 69, 84 538–9, 540–1
8 Vienna Court Opera Ill. 17 reviews of GM 295–6, 298, 300–1,
9 dual posts of conductor and director 304–5, 532–3
286–7, 292–3, 301–2, 316 singers and GM’s administration
40 finances and deficit 499–501, 529, 530, 305–8, 466, 467–8, 506–7, 509,
41R 539–40 531–2, 533, 535–6
INDEX 763
Vienna Philharmonic duties 316–17, reception in Vienna 60–4, 83 1

319, 486, 504–5 total artwork concept
work load 317–18, 486, 490–1, 528–9 (Gesamtkunstwerk) 353, 416–18, 421
2
Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra 161, vegetarianism 64, 83, 101, 222 3
315–17, 486, 684 and Vienna Opera 293, 527–8, 529 4
anti-Semitism and GM’s productions 253 see also Mahler, Gustav: as conductor,
reluctance to perform Bruckner 72–3, 74 and Wagner repertoire 5
resignation on health grounds 317 Wagner, Wieland 314 6
trials of GM’s relations with 224, 316–17, Wagner, Siegfried 248, 470, 658
319, 333, 355, 465, 504–5 Walker, Edyth 305
7
Walter’s posthumous performances of Wallaschek, Richard 508, 533 8
GM’s work 693 Wallerstein, Lothar 420 9
Vienna University, GM studies at 74–5 Walter, Bruno (formerly Schlesinger)
Vienna Werkstätte 43, 352 and Third Symphony 231–2, 269–70, 10
Viennese Academic Wagner Society 63, 64 274, 280 1
Viotta, Henri 491 and Seventh Symphony 458
Visconti, Luchino, Death in Venice 389, and Ninth Symphony 611, 612, 693
2
702–3 age gap and GM’s formal relations 512 3
‘vocabular music’ 271, 386–8 on Alma’s beauty 240 4
Vogel, Carl 667 and anti-Semitism 509
Volkelt, Johannes 81 and appearance of GM 2, 5, 210 5
and burial of GM 668, 688, 689 6
Wagner, Cosima (formerly Bülow) 113, on concentration of GM 222
119, 185, 233 conducting studies 67
7
anti-Semitism 248, 288 on conducting style of GM 199, 200, 201 8
GM visits Wahnfried 247–8 as conductor 192, 390 9
on hearing Mahler’s Tannhäuser in as conductor at Vienna Opera and
Leipzig 165, 247 Philharmonic 315, 470, 486, 529, 20
and Vienna appointment 248, 288 534, 693 1
Wagner, Otto 49, 352, 356, 439 conducts GM’s work after death 451,
Wagner, Richard 125, 162 563, 611, 693, 694, 697–8, 705
2
admiration felt by GM and circle 57, on critical remarks and GM’s despair 410 3
59–60, 62–3, 83, 161 on demands of GM on performers 225–6 4
anti-Semitism 60, 63, 80, 83, 104, 141, on dying GM’s pessimism 681–2
157, 257–8 festschrift contribution 634 5
Brahms rivalry 61, 62, 63, 71–2 first impression of GM 1 6
and Bülow 119 and Freud consultation 649
conducting style 196 friendship with GM 245, 560, 585
7
effect of death on GM 110 on GM’s choice of singers in 8
French antipathy towards 620 Vienna 468 9
influence on Secession art 353, 354–5, 424 on GM’s view of Toscanini 590
‘Jews in Music’ article 104, 157, 257–8 on Goethe and GM 134, 404 30
as late starter 25 on health of GM 327 1
on Leipzig and ‘Jewish music’ 157 ignorance of Dostoevsky 137
Lipiner at Wahnfried 79–80 Jewishness and GM’s advice on
2
Makart visit 45 259–60 3
Mann’s lecture on 253–4 letters from GM 156, 268–9, 280, 562, 4
Neumann’s promotion of work 141 584–5, 593–4, 600–1, 611, 614, 617
and New German School 61–2, 71, 72 and Das Lied von der Erde 482, 562, 563, 5
in New York Met repertoire 545 612, 693, 697 6
Nibelungenlied 76 on Lipiner 82
and Nietzsche 77–8, 83, 279 on Lotze’s influence on GM 398
7
Opera and Drama 258 on Maria’s death and effect on GM 8
and opera reform 303–5, 416–18, 527–8 551, 552–4 9
Parsifal and Bayreuth 113, 548–9 on Montenuovo 466
performance cuts and GM’s and Munich Exhibition performance 40
reinstatement 303–4, 559 658–9 41R
764 INDEX
1 Walter, Bruno (cont.) Witeschnik, Alexander 243

New York letters from GM 592–3, 593–5 Wlassack, Eduard 259, 282, 289, 291,
2 303, 464
and New York Philharmonic concert
3 programme 603 Wolf, Hugo 92, 111
4 and Pfitzner’s work 473–4 anti-Semitism 60, 63, 64
and players for New York Philharmonic choice of poets for songs 168
5 and collaboration on Rübezahl 64–5, 84
592–3
6 and posthumous reputation of GM 697–8 Der Corregidor 64, 65, 427
on programme music and GM’s enforced departure from Conservatory
7 68–9
views 152–3
8 and reconciliation with Lipiner 596–7, as fervent Wagnerian 59–60, 62, 63
9 681 as friend of GM in Vienna 55,
and religious belief of GM 392 59–61, 62
10 friendship breaks down 64–6, 68–9,
and Nanna Spiegler 379
1 Steinbach visit 231–2 427, 586
and Werfel poem 192 nervous breakdown and insanity 65–6,
2 101, 102, 427
Wand, Günter 705
3 Wandering Jew figure 272 Wolff, Hermann 214
4 Wassermann, Jakob 261, 538 Wolf-Ferrari, Ermanno 501
Wawruch, Andreas Johann 667 Wollschläger, Hans 131, 361, 643–4
5 Wondra, Hubert 283, 467
Weber, Captain Carl von 162, 163–4
6 Weber, Carl Maria von 104–5, 114, 115 World Fair in Vienna (1873) 50, 51
Die drei Pintos and completion by GM Wörthersee see Maiernigg on
7 Wörthersee
162, 164–6
8 Weber, Caroline von 162 Wüllner, Ludwig 610
9 Weber, Marion von 148–9, 162–4, 165
Weber, Max Maria von 162 Yiddish and mauscheln 253, 255
20 Young Vienna movement 346, 349, 350,
Webern, Anton 130, 480–83, 522, 560,
1 658, 660 425, 514
2 and GM’s work 481, 482–3, 523, 695
Wedekind, Frank 126, 131 Zasche, Theo 341
3 Weidemann, Friedrich 306, 430 Zelter, Carl Friedrich 521
4 Weidt, Lucie 307, 435–6 Zemlinsky, Alexander 54, 136, 658
Weinberger, Josef (music publishers) 454–5 and Alma Schindler 359, 362–3, 364–5,
5 370, 372, 376, 433, 627, 629
Weingartner, Felix von 334, 451
6 as GM’s successor in Vienna 540, 541, Alma’s hesitation before marriage
543, 548, 559–60, 586, 660 to GM 436
7 on Alma’s musical talent 366
and Stefan’s defence of GM 468–9, 508
8 Weininger, Otto 64, 260 Alma’s unflattering description 1
9 Weis-Osborn, Julius 530, 535, 726 ballet composition 359–60
Weißmann, Adolf 696 and Brahms 482
30 conducts at Vienna Opera 315, 529
Wellesz, Egon 481, 489
1 Werfel, Franz 192, 392, 628, 629, 645 friendship with GM 480, 512, 560, 660
Wieland, Christoph Martin 134, 314, 405 and GM’s legacy 695
2 and performing version of Tenth
Wiener Werkstätte 43, 352
3 Wiesenthal, Grete 534–5 Symphony 662
4 Wieland, Christoph Martin 134, works performed at Vienna Opera
314, 405 470, 471
5 Zichy, Count Géza 189–90
Wild, Dortchen 96
6 Wilde, Oscar 132 Zinne, Wilhelm, 227, 716
Wilhelm I, Kaiser 165 Zola, Emile 363, 517, 620
7 Zuckerkandl, Bertha 350, 356, 357, 358–61,
Wilhelm II, Kaiser, 609
8 Willnauer, Franz 210, 469, 499 517, 539, 683
9 Winkelmann, Hermann 66, 295 Zuckerkandl, Emil 356, 358, 359, 539
Winter, Josef and Josefine Zweig, Arnold 345
40 Zweig, Stefan 101, 102, 192, 538, 658
von 631
41R Winternitz, Rudolf 547, 548 and GM’s final voyage 679, 680
Acknowledgements
OETS RARELY NEED advisers or colleagues willing to cast a careful and crit-
P ical eye over their manuscripts, whereas the writers of biographies can
generally not get by without them. The author feels obliged to list a whole
series of individuals and institutions.
My first debt of gratitude is to Herta Blaukopf, the doyenne of international
Mahler scholarship (now no longer alive), whose unparalleled knowledge of
every aspect of Mahler’s life and works proved invaluable. Together we were
also able to share memories of her late husband, Kurt Blaukopf, whose biog-
raphy of 1969 was the first to open many readers’ eyes to the composer’s
personality. It continues to occupy a crucial place in the history of responses
to Mahler. Tobias Heyl was more than merely a professional and outstanding
editor: his own enthusiasm for this music and for its composer was both
inspiring and immensely helpful.
It is more than fifty years since Arnfried Edler introduced me to the name of
a composer that at the time meant as little to me as it did to many others. To
Bruno Maderna and Michael Gielen I owe my first life-affirming encounters
with Mahler’s symphonies – and I am tremendously grateful for the fact that
today I am able to speak to Michael Gielen about the composer. I am no less
grateful to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, who in the 1960s was responsible for my
earliest impressions of Mahler’s songs and with whom I have more recently held
many an amiable discussion. Today no one sings Mahler’s songs better than
Thomas Hampson – it is not least because of this that the present study is dedi-
cated to him. It was Michael Krüger who on the Orient Express between
Salzburg and Munich gave this book its first important impetus and who has
kept it on track since then. In Berlin, Efim Etkind lent me a helping hand at the
start of what was to prove a very long journey, and I am only sorry that he did
not live to witness its completion. Yosef and Ophra Yerushalmi likewise offered
me their encouragement. Wolfgang Rihm gave me one particularly important
766 GUSTAV MAHLER
1 piece of advice – his music has repeatedly cast its spell on me whenever Mahler
2 has not been playing next to my desk. Peter Roth advised me on medical ques-
3 tions, which unfortunately play such a major part in this book. Many years ago
4 I asked Hermann Danuser whether he thought that a longer study of Mahler
5 made any sense, and he answered with an emphatic ‘yes’. Mahler’s English biog-
6 rapher, Jonathan Carr (who died in 2008), lent me his support as a colleague. At
7 the Bavarian State Library, Sigrid von Moisy and Hartmut Schaefer generously
8 allowed me to examine the material that they were preparing for an exhibition
9 of the library’s Mahlerian holdings. The priceless documents that are now avail-
10 able in Munich, especially those from the collection of Hans Moldenhauer,
1 have turned the city into one of the principal centres of international Mahler
2 scholarship – a development that came just in time to benefit the present study.
3 The late Günther Weiß generously allowed me to see his catalogue essay before
4 it went to press. The eminent Mahler scholar Knud Martner made a number of
5 helpful corrections and comments.
6 Many institutions have supplied me with material and factual information.
7 The Internationale Gustav Mahler Gesellschaft in Vienna granted me access to its
8 important holdings and provided me with a complete list of all Mahler’s appear-
9 ances as a conductor at the Vienna Court Opera. (I am especially grateful to
20 Frank Fanning in this respect.) Other institutions to which I am indebted are the
1 Bavarian State Library, Munich; the University of Western Ontario, which
2 currently houses the Mahler–Rosé Collection; the Bibliothèque Musicale Gustav
3 Mahler in Paris; the Austrian Theatre Museum in the person of Frau Weiβenböck
4 for the then unpublished papers of Anna Bahr-Mildenburg; the Austrian
5 National Library; the Municipal and Regional Library of Vienna; the Van Pelt
6 Library at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, for the Mahler-Werfel
7 Collection; the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the Metropolitan Opera
8 Archives and the New York Public Library for the Bruno Walter Collection.
9 I am especially grateful to the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin, where
30 I was able to give the present study its initial shape while working on other
1 projects. I am also deeply grateful to the Hampsong Foundation for funding
2 the English translation.
3 I do not need to explain what this book owes to my wife – to quote from
4 Mahler’s ‘Blicke mir nicht in die Lieder’, ‘Bees, when they build their cells, let
5 no one watch them either’.
6 This book is no more than the fulfilment of a promise that I once made to a
7 large grey stone in Vienna.
8
9
40
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1

1 18 The Third Symphony 274

1 (between pages 502 and 503)

operatic reforms in Vienna. Although Roller got to know Mahler at a relatively 1

1 Roller’s enthusiastic account gains in credibility when we recall Mahler’s

1 Roller reports an additional feature that he thought might be connected

simple manual worker to successful industrialist: Abraham belonged to the 1

1 Manufactory’, a ﬁne-sounding name for what was initially a small-scale enter-

1 Our ﬁrst evidence of Mahler’s musical sensibilities is bound up with the

of Bavaria as a keyboard virtuoso. By the age of eight he had learnt notation 1

to us conveys a picture of a highly gifted child expressing himself with 1

decisive importance in terms of his own development, as it is in that of any 1

1 to Gustav Schwarz on 28 August 1875.20 Mahler must have made it clear to

endeavours of these decades reveal the most remarkable mixture of rationalism, 1

1 whole audience in a spirit of delightful thoughtlessness and quintessential

1 of music, the Vienna Conservatory was a tiny institution, so that students of

There was also an institutional side to the Wagnerian enthusiasms of 1

1 Mahler. But when Schönerer began to promote anti-Semitism as an essential

1 started to cry uncontrollably in a scene that Thomas Mann took over in

1 remedied. By the time that he arrived in Kassel at the age of twenty-three, he

1 conceptual process. Brahms ‘the progressive’ ushered in a period of progress in

Conservatory were shortly joined by two further groups of acquaintances, 1

emerging proletariat. This mixture of nationalism and socialism, both of 1

1 Meysenbug, reﬂected identical ideas, it is not surprising that Nietzsche was

survived, but the impression that it leaves is one of immaturity, which is 1

trotz Winters Tücken! 1

moved again, this time to 12 Wipplingerstraße in an entirely different part of the 1

1 For a ﬁrst work, Das klagende Lied is undoubtedly a tremendous achieve-

1 Mahler attended a ‘performance’ of Greif ’s ballad, probably a semi-staged

1 impossible outside marriage. Sex with a prostitute was accompanied by the

operatic stage in Vienna, where he single-handedly invented the modern 1

In July he and Heinrich Krzyzanowski undertook a walking tour from Eger 1

1 superior was ‘the cheerfullest four-square time-beater ever to have come my

initially championed the works of Wagner by conducting the world premières 1

1 at the opening concert of a Grand Music Festival to be held in Kassel on and

1 worked: an edition of Goethe’s works, or at least the conversations with

generally illustrating a wondrous world of inner life such as no other nation 1

1 Hofmannsthal sympathetic as individuals, his contacts with them were not

prospects, arriving in the second-largest city in the Austro-Hungarian Empire 1

that the programme booklet included an ‘explanation’ of the work’s ‘content’, 1

1 understanding and much to its obfuscation. In symphonic music, he went

1 movement of a solo sonata, quartet or symphony. In the opening movement of

1 principal conductor, and a division of labour is as unusual now as it was in the

1 At another party, an ambitious young composer performed a new piece called

works. As we have already seen, Mahler was in general no revolutionary keen 1

Gackeleia to his daughter clearly believed unconditionally in the Romantic 1

von Mildenburg. In her colourful reminiscences, translated into English as My 1

In March 1901 a caricature by Hans Schließmann appeared in the humorous 1

1 hitherto unknown because he was tormented by the not entirely unjustiﬁed

contrabassoon and seeming to come from a mysterious distance, so that 1

1 Saxony on the occasion of the ﬁrst performance of the symphony in Dresden, a

narrative function, even if that function is retrospective, whereas ‘Urlicht’ 1

1 to be the work of Titian. It depicts a monk playing a keyboard instrument, a rapt,

1 musical and dramatic interpretation were dismissed as completely pointless

1 that he received in New York. He hated the coercive constraint of having to

His work with Mahler culminated in a series of guest appearances in 1