Mahler: A Biography
by Jonathan Carr
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Book Summary Information
Author: Jonathan CarrEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1997-09-22
ISBN: 0879518022
Number of pages: 320
Publisher: Overlook Hardcover
Book Reviews of Mahler: A Biography
Book Review: Gustav Mahler's meeting with Sigmund Freud remains a mystery
Summary: 5 Stars
The Author describes, at appreciable length, why Gustav Mahler was widely misunderstood both as man and musician. More than 50 years after his death his works were left apart until, restored to life prompted by interest and performance, Mahler took his deserved place in the repertoires.
Mahler's tempestuous marriage to Alma Schindler is of particular interest. Alma claimed she was for decades the main authority of Mahler's works, values, character and his day-to-day actions and movements.
For many years, Alma's various publications quickly became the central source of information and references for Mahler scholars and music-lovers alike.
But, unfortunately, many writers have treated her accounts as unreliable, false, misleading and often impaired soundness. It is a fact that these imperfect accounts have nevertheless had a great influence upon several generations of music-lovers, hence the legend: "Alma's Problem"".
Mahler's youth, as described in the first two chapters is fascinating, like the reader's watching a live short resume cast by History Channel. There begins Mahler's occupation as summer composer "" in isolated huts in the country, and his revolutionary achievements as director of Vienna Opera. In 1907 Mahler resigned his post, many claimed he was driven from it, and went with Alma to America. Four years later his health in ruin and his marriage crumbling, he returned to Vienna and died there on the 18th of May 1911, a few weeks before his 51st birthday. He was buried four days later in Grinzing cemetery next to his daughter Maria (died in 1907)""
""On the day he died, that teeming rain on that blustery Monday afternoon, hundreds of ordinary Viennese crowded outside the little church where the service was held and the coffin blessed. Only minority had come to pay tribute to Mahler the composer. His gigantic Symphonies had rarely gone down well in Vienna and not a single one had been premiered there. But Mahler -the Opera Director- that was another matter. In a few stormy years he had lashed the institution at the heart of the city's cultural life to a peak of excellence it might never reach again. Many Viennese had acknowledged as much while Mahler was still at the helm. Now some erstwhile critics were starting to do so too. As one contemptuous Mahler fan put it, `'the same sneering somebody's'' who had attacked every Mahler production were now `'keen to belong to the exclusive circle of Mahlerites'""
The talented, ambitious and ruthless conductor is often degenerated in Alma's memoirs as a sickly and cerebral recluse; Arnold Schoenberg called him a `saint'. For some of Mahler's friends and disciples, he was a great creative artist. Mahler was even suicidal, often called `the Jewish Monkey'' because he was committed to his interpretations of Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, even Georges Bizet and many more. His violent conducting gesticulations had been subject to laughter from his peers, pupils, viewers and musicians. The man was simply very absorbed (committed) in his work; for instance he believed he made-up for Beethoven's deafness by offering interpretations that he felt was necessary in the Ninth Symphony which Beethoven must have had in mind. Yet one described Mahler's dynamite conducting `'Like a cat with convulsions"' He had many clashes with fellow conductors, theater directors, and even composers; something else, early on Mahler had a row with Brahms .While at the university, he worked as a music teacher and made his first major attempt at composition with the cantata Das klagende Lied. The work was entered in a competition where the jury was headed by Johannes Brahms, but failed to win a prize. (Did he feel the brunt of Jewish curse?? It could be!!)
(In later years, however, Brahms was greatly impressed by Mahler's conducting of Don Giovanni.). Similarly Mahler had noisy discussions with Richard Strauss on Strauss's tone poem `'Sinfonia Domestica'', Mahler simply couldn't hold his row.
Now, the author pinpointed inscriptions that go: To the `'holy Gustav Mahler'' and the `'immortal example of his works and deeds'' dedicated on one of the hundreds of wreaths lay beside the route between church and graveside. ""It came from Arnold Schonberg, often helped Mahler with cash and counsel, and other pioneers of the atonal school, including Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Arnold Schonberg was one of those who, huddled under the umbrellas, trudged slowly behind the coffin as it was borne away from the church. So was the conductor Bruno Walter, destined to fight for wider recognition of Mahler's music on two continents over the half a century. So was Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Mahler's greatest love before his marriage and transformed by him from a promising young singer into a dramatic soprano without peer. ""
Many more attended, there too was Mahler's revolutionary stage designer Alfred Roller, the poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the painter Gustav Klimt, one of Alma's old flames. Alma herself did not attend - on doctors' orders, it was said. How cruel of Mahler's wife not to attend her husband's funeral! Had she really loved him? Had she really respected him despite all his flaws? Alma wrote two books (memoirs) - My Life, My Loves, and My Diaries 1898-1902) - and their impact on Mahler's studies was great for at least some 40 years.
Alma was a graceful, well-connected and influential woman who outlived Mahler by more than 50 years. (This reminds me of Cosima and Wagner. Cosima outlived Wagner by 47 years). How trustworthy is any story laid by women who outlive their notorious husbands for so long? Shouldn't they be given credence, though there may not have been full and final grain of truth in it?) - The greatest difficulty in writing one's memoirs is to keep a certain detachment at a time when passions were running high. True in her old age Alma wouldn't admit that her apprehensions with the past `'husband and wife"" days had been influenced with the benefit of hindsight when she now perceived the significance of events after they have occurred. Within 50 years Alma's reminiscences of past events couldn't pass without nostalgia or without an urging wistful desire to return, at least in written thoughts (modified and garbled), to a former time in one's life when young.
Enigmatic, though, was Mahler's meeting with Freud:
Gustav and Sigmund were Jews by birth. They had much more in common. Their thoughts had no relation to religion and did not oppose it. They were very strict, thoughtful and rigorous in observance of moral matters, often excessively so; rigidly austere Viennese gentlemen - by adoption.
When Freud had been a medical trainee in Vienna, Mahler was a student at the Conservatory. When met for the first and last time in the summer of 1910, Freud was 54 and Mahler at 50. With his heart troubles Mahler had less than a year to live. The time of the encounter was in the middle of a significant event in Mahler's life: the composer's marital problems with the young and beautiful Alma. Mahler was then very busy with his Tenth Symphony (he left it unfinished) and suddenly found Alma in total defiance and reticence towards him although he always wanted to be `good and loving husband''. Alma had, she complained in her memoirs" submitted to his tyranny and neglect long enough; she felt used, drained by his self-absorption"". (Music) The truth of her rebellion is perhaps accentuated by Mahler's chronic inability to attain an erection for the performance of their sexual act. Mahler had in him duel sense of guilt and panic - panic that was painful in the presence of Walter Gropius on the scene. Mahler therefore decided to take immediate action and he conceived Freud as his only savior.
During that summer of 1910, Sigmund Freud was spending his vacation in Leyden, Holland when he received a telegram asking for an appointment. The following day Herr Doctor received another telegram cancelling the first one. Mahler was in a state of indecision, unsteadiness and fluctuating mood. This was well drawn by his unbalanced behaviors in dispatching too many telegrams before he managed to get over his ever-present opposition to any attempt to bring his repressed thoughts into consciousness. Mahler and Freud met in a Leyden hotel and spent some four hours loitering about the town. Freud, the thickset and trusted doctor and Mahler, the slender, ailing and vehement composer - were devouring their cigars as they walked and talked. The Doctor conducted a brief analysis of the conductor's grievances: ""A mother fixation "" Freud ruled. On the one hand "" Mahler was attracted by his wife's youthful beauty but resented the fact that she was not old and careworn like his mother"". Alma, on the other hand, ""had a father complex and found her husband's age appealing"". Mahler was twenty years her senior.
Jonathan Carr describes this episode with additional clarity: ""Gustav's father, Bernhard, had a travelling sales job too but he went one better than his mother (G. Mahler's Grandma) and got hold of a horse and cart. Reckoning that knowledge was power he read books voraciously, even studied French, in spare moments on trips. It was no love match on either side when in 1857 he married Maria Hermann (usually called Marie), daughter of a soap-boiler and, at nineteen, ten years his junior. She limped and had a weak heart but arguably it was a step up socially for Bernard and he would have got a dowry. The first child, Isidor, died soon after birth in 1858. The second was Gustav.
An authoritarian father, a suffering, constantly pregnant mother (14 children) brothers and sisters borne off regularly in coffins; that, alas, was still an all too familiar picture in the 19th. Century. It did not necessarily mean that children grew up psychologically maimed, still less that the pressures turned them into great creative artists. All the same, Mahler's family background makes it sorely (for many irresistibly) tempting to try fathom him and his music via the psychiatrist's couch. None other than Sigmund Freud did just that; at least, he made a stab at analyzing Mahler during a few hours stroll round the Dutch town of Leiden in 1910. The outcome was predictable. Freud concluded that Mahler had a Holy Mary complex (mother fixation) and unearthed an early incident which seemed to explain much about the character of Mahler's work. Mahler is said to have remembered that after a `specially painful scene'' between his parents, he ran out of the house and heard a passing barrel organ grinding out popular tune Ách du lieber Augustin. Hence, we are told, the stark contrast between the tragic and the banal became fixed in his mind for life. According to Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, Mahler even `suddenly said that now he understood why his music had always been prevented from achieving the highest rank through the noblest passages... being spoilt by the intrusion of some commonplace melody".""
Freud's comment about a `Holy Mary complex'' has helped sustain a distorted view of Mahler's relation with his parents. Despite the `dreaming'', which Alma reports, Mahler was under no illusion about how things really were between Bernard and Marie. (His father and Mother) `'They were as ill-suited as fire and water", he told a lady-friend when he was in his mid thirties. ""He was all obstinacy, she was gentleness itself". Blunt words but not enough to justify the frequent claim Mahler hated his father and so identified with his mother that throughout his life he unconsciously imitated her limp. Demonstrably there were much of both his parents in Mahler, of Bernard certainly no less than Marie. He needed no barrel organ incident to fix the pain of stark contrast in his mind. It was already there. The battle between fire and water, as it were, was implanted in Mahler at birth and it never ceased to rage.""
This reminds me of the relationship between Mozart and his father- Leopold. Mahler's father encouraged his son to pursue piano lessons, hoping his son ""would become money-spinning virtuoso, and who later let him study at Vienna conservatory, though certainly not helping him much to pay the fees.""
Bernard was protective. ""when young, Gustav was mistreated by a family with whom he had been sent to stay in Prague, a wrathful Bernard descended, packed his son's things and took him straight home"" from his father, Gustav inherited, among other things, voracious ambition and unshakable will. ""At six or seven he was already giving piano lessons for about 5 crowns an hour and boxing his pupils sharply on the ears whenever they played a wrong note.""
The Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis - who theorized that the symptoms of hysterical patients represent forgotten and unresolved infantile psychosexual conflicts-, befitted Mahler's eccentricities. But, who was complexed of whom? Perhaps history would have been fairer had Alma went to see Freud as well.
Alma was a beautiful young lady. Like many people, I saw her picture in other publications, indeed she was very beautiful. Alma claims that Mahler 'feared women' and that their relationship was never really without danger, arguing that he had almost no sexual intercourse right up to his forties (he was 41 when they met). In fact, Mahler's long record of prior love affairs-- including a lengthy one with Anna von Mildenburg -- suggests that this was not the case. Whereas Alma's flirtation and first kiss was in her teens - as she boastfully said so. ".In her memoirs she must have been looking for an edge over Mahler. For instance, Alma Mahler (then Schindler) played piano from childhood and in her memoirs reports that she first attempted composing at age 9. Was that false or true??(She knew that Mahler's parents had arranged piano lessons for him when he was six)
During the emotional instability in their marriage after Mahler's discovery of the affair (Alma's infatuation with Walter Gropius 1883-1969 - a German architect and founder of Bauhaus and is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of "modern" architecture) Mahler took a sincere interest in Alma's musical compositions; completely regretting his earlier attitude when he dropped her talents out.
Upon Mahler's endeavoring, and under his coaching and assistance, Alma prepared five of her songs for publication (they were issued in 1910, by Mahler's own publisher, Universal Edition). His meeting with Freud couldn't have been to discuss Mahler's dynamite style of conducting because by 1910 his style changed and he eschewed all expansive gestures on the podium. But was `'Alma'' the ONLY crises they discussed? What else could they have had as sincere discussion and why? Backlog of hard feelings I believe; they had watched with apprehension the gradual encirclement of the Jews !! At the Opera, Mahler stubbornness in artistic perfection had created enemies, and he was subject to perpetual attacks from anti-Semitic circles in the press. His resignation from the Opera, 1907, was hardly unexpected. (Incidentally: Dreyfus affair divided France from the 1890s to the early 1900s and its repercussion continued until well after WWI)
The hard feelings of anti-Semitism must have adversely impacted his marital relationship with Alma? It could also have been ""the curse of the ninth"" - Mahler knew he would not live long after his composition of the Ninth symphony that he completed in 1908 (perhaps!).
By the way, Pages 227, 228, 229, 230 refer to RECORDINGS, but there is no mention of Herbert Von Karajan. This is strange indeed!! Symphonie No.9, and Das Lied von der Erde, are remarkable interpretations, performed in 1982 and 1975. The only reference is made on page 94 "" For comparison's sake,in his first five and a half years (1956-62) as Vienna Opera director, Herbert Von Karayan led just 168 performances - and he was no slouch"" whereas Mahler, in four years between his arrival in Vienna and his break with the Philharmionic, he conducted some 370 opera performances including nearly thirty premieres......
Summary of Mahler: A Biography
Evaluating with exemplary judiciousness the masses of material about Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), British journalist Jonathan Carr pens a highly readable biography. Whether describing the composer's youth in Central Europe, triumphs as a conductor in Vienna and New York, or stormy marriage to Alma Schindler, Carr elucidates Mahler's complex nature without presuming to "explain" it. Devilish or saintly? Cunning or naive? Extrovert or withdrawn? "He was all these things," writes Carr, "brandishing his contradictions in music of stinging intensity." Mahler's compositions and personality gain new dimensions from this fresh, nuanced approach.Classical Books
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