When Gustav Mahler died in 1911, at the age of fifty-one, his years cut short by heart disease, by most measures he had enjoyed an enviable life and career. He was respected as one of the most effective and innovative of opera conductors; his leadership of some of the world’s most admired symphony orchestras had set new artistic standards; his songs and his symphonies were beginning to enjoy a modicum of success in respected artistic circles; and he was married to one of the most attractive, talented, and vivacious women in Europe. But, that is a sadly incomplete picture. In point of fact, after ten years of leading the musical life of the world’s most important musical city, he was hounded out of his tenure as conductor of the court opera and the Vienna Philharmonic by an unrelenting anti-Semiticism of unprecedented virulence. The Viennese press attacked him without mercy, lampooning his conducting gestures and attributing every putative weakness to his Jewish background. His subsequent, brief career at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic had soon grown stale as he succumbed to his fatal illness. Those who did not appreciate and understand his music held the majority, and he was roundly ridiculed for its general incomprehensibility, eccentricity, and wildly personal nature. His beloved little daughter, Maria, had died at the age of four from diphtheria. And, the passion of his life Alma Schindler Mahler, had repeatedly betrayed him in more than one deeply wounding fashion. Taken altogether, his life was a series of contradictions: profound successes, abysmal disappointments, and little in between. Music lovers have long taken an inordinate interest in the personal lives of composers to seek meaning in the abstract art of music—usually without success. Art lives a robust life of its own in the psyches of its creators, but in the case of Mahler, his music clearly reflects the realities of his inner being more than in almost all major composers. It’s all laid out in the score. Even in death, the hatred, incomprehension, and derision that had dogged him were still visited upon him. In the commentaries on his passing, Viennese newspapers variously characterized him as “. . . [a] Nibelung dwarf who came to power from the darkness of the pariahs . . . ,” and his music as “. . . one gigantic weed in the symphonic garden, a weed from which a new cross beam for the temple of disgusting indecency may be carved.” There was much worse.
To be sure, after his death, especially in the immediate years after World War I, his music was championed by a few determined admirers, largely from German-speaking countries, chief among them the legendary Bruno Walter, a long-time protégé. And, for a while, there were a few festivals in Europe dedicated to his music, but they were soon infrequent. The advent of the Third Reich sealed the fate of his compositions, and they disappeared from the repertoire. After the Second World War, the situation was not much better, owing to, obviously, the survival of most of the artistic establishment who had long opposed him and his music in Austria and Germany. And to be sure, the radical, avant-garde musical æsthetics of post-war Europe had little time for personal, gigantic and embarrassing artifacts of late Romanticism. Times had changed. And then, beginning around 1960—the centenary of his birth--there began a total transformation of the stature of Mahler and his music. Leonard Bernstein was, perhaps, his most ardent champion, along with Georg Solti and Bernard Haitink, all of whom recorded cycles of Mahler’s works—aided by the advent of 33rpm records (Mahler’s works are long, you know.) New, up to date, editions of his works were published, a variety of books came out, and a new spate of Mahler festivals began. Few major composers have ever languished so long in obscurity or disrepute, only to rise up and take what appears to be a permanent place in the pantheon of the great. A younger generation of musicians finds it hard to imagine a musical world in which Gustav Mahler does not stand near their center.
But, what is the real nature of his music, its style, and its creator that had elicited so much incomprehension and condemnation on the one hand, and such approbation and popularity, now? There are many legitimate answers. It’s clear that we know the man through his music, and, indeed, his was a complex personality, but so are most top-echelon artists—Bruckner and his ilk excepted. Mahler was a man driven and dominated by his overt passions, there were few middle positions that he held. Possessed of deep fears and euphoric joys, he was acutely sensitive to the virtually kaleidoscopic fashion in which the world unexpectedly imposes itself upon us. The banal and the sublime juxtaposed—pathos to bathos--are familiar images. A well-known story recounted by Mahler from his childhood tells of his fleeing the house in despair from a typical battle between his brutish father and his mother, only to encounter the pedestrian scene of a barrel organist grinding out the utterly banal “Du lieber Augustin“ (The More We Get Together). His musical style, while not quite literally quoting familiar popular tunes, is characterized by musical motifs and themes that seem to be just that. He drew upon the commonplace, or its imitation, and used them as a musico-pyschological foil to place the listener in the purgatory of the disparity between the inner and the outer self. The sublimity and beauty of many of his slow movements is the other side—and he enjoyed interrupting one mood unexpectedly for the crashing in of the other—like his life. That accounts for some of the frequent moods of parody and burlesque.
He loved passionately—life and people—but was driven by thoughts of death and its meaning, or lack thereof. And the latter was not a trivial endeavor. His library was full of difficult philosophical works on existence and its forms, and he conversed and corresponded with learned friends on the subject constantly. And while he could be the prisoner of his own irrational love, he was often blind to those who loved him deeply. He exalted humanity, but could be the cruelest of friend or musician. He once had to have a police escort home to escape a flute player whom he had treated viciously from the podium, whose friends planned to assault him in an alley. There are places in his music in which he clearly is possessed of an irrational fear of dæmonic forces that drive him into wild reaction. These elemental forces, complexities and contradictions filtered his perceptions of the world, shaped, and informed his art. It’s all there.
He composed only symphonies, songs, and orchestral song cycles—there are no works for keyboard, chamber music, or operas. His nine completed symphonies are large works, whose length is made possible by an innate mastery of musical architecture, an extension of tonality to its limits, and a constant delay of musical and psychological resolution. His melodies, as observed above, can seem trivial—or long, spun out affairs that seemingly take forever to reach conclusion. It is not without much exaggeration when pundits observe that almost all of his music appears to be based upon marches or waltzes—powerful musical imagery from his impressionable childhood. That, and a deep love/fear of nature constitute some of the surface imagery that is found throughout his art.
His first four symphonies are often grouped together, united by the important part that vocal solos and choral sections play in them. These four symphonies are closely associated with his many song settings of the poetry of Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and are rife with folk-like melodies. Des Knaben Wunderhorn (the Boy’s Magic Horn), an important document of early German romanticism, is a collection of hundreds of German folk poems and songs published very early in the nineteenth century by the poets, von Arnim and Brentano. The collection’s appeal is fostered by the variety of basic emotions and subject matter in it (children’s songs, soldiers, animals, love, death, nature--tragic to humorous) and their association with a burgeoning interest in simple reflections of the “folk.” Mahler, like almost all other German-speaking people, fell completely for them—it would be difficult, indeed, to over-emphasize their importance in his musical psyche. They fitted perfectly his predilection for simple reference to “nature and life” without the aid of high literary art. And by extension—regardless of the source of his extra-musical inspiration—Mahler is fundamentally a composer of songs. Song is his natural voice; it speaks directly from the core of his being, and a very useful way of considering his other focus—the symphony—is simply as the redoubled effort in resources writ large to sing his essential song. Thus, there should be no surprise at all in the symphonies—especially the first group of them—for him to marshal songs to join the unprecedented orchestral colors and forces of his large orchestras. Almost no resources were too unusual to help conjure his images in sound, and it must have seemed to audiences of the time that almost every resource was there!
Typically Mahler’s lifelong penchant was grandly to begin infatuations/commitments, and then to become disillusioned, then after a while dump the affair/job in frustration, and move on, apparently without regret. It nevertheless must have contributed to his inner turmoil. This flux of thought and behavior is reflected in his music, to be sure. This element is present in his compositions from the outset.
His first symphony—incidentally, not well received--was finished in 1888, when he was twenty-seven years old, and a busy young conductor for the Leipzig Opera. Then, as for the rest of his life, he had to squeeze his composing largely into the summer, between opera seasons. However dedicated he was to his compositions, he was always primarily known and hailed as one of the great conductors of his time. The first symphony incorporates two of his songs as essential elements; the work also initially and significantly he dubbed not a symphony, but variously as a “tone poem” and “symphonic poem.” Soon, of course, simply “Symphony No. 1” sufficed, but the ambiguity speaks clearly to all of Mahler’s music as bearing a deep inspiration in extra-musical imagery—not as just the musical architecture espoused by a significant body of composers of the genre. So, early on, the importance of imagery and song was fundamental in his approach to the otherwise august reputation of the symphony as an essay for orchestra couched in the musical abstraction of, say, the string quartet. The third movement of this first symphonic effort is a funeral march—not a typical preoccupation for a young composer in his twenties. And this one is right out of Des Knaben Wunderhorn—ostensibly an image familiar to most German and Austrians: a hunter’s funeral, with a procession of cute animals (ironically honoring their pursuer). A small Jewish klezmer band adds to the eccentricity of the whole. So, our young hero begins his career with death as a focus.
--Wm. E. Runyan
2023 William E. Runyan