Cummins also takes a skeptical look at the legend of Mahler as an impotent, humorless neurotic and recreates the friendship between Strauss and Mahler—two of the greatest musicians of the early twentieth century.
Cummins also takes a skeptical look at the legend of Mahler as an impotent, humorless neurotic and recreates the friendship between Strauss and Mahler—two of the greatest musicians of the early twentieth century.
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Overview
Cummins also takes a skeptical look at the legend of Mahler as an impotent, humorless neurotic and recreates the friendship between Strauss and Mahler—two of the greatest musicians of the early twentieth century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781450289795 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | iUniverse, Incorporated |
| Publication date: | 02/28/2011 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
Read an Excerpt
Mahler Re-Composed
By George M. Cummins III
iUniverse, Inc.
Copyright © 2011 George M. Cummins IIIAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4502-8981-8
Chapter One
Mahler Sick and LovesickIf music be the food of love, play on.
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken and so die.
That strain again! It had a dying fall.
— Twelfth Night
"He was like a superb, sick child."
— Alma Mahler.
Death
This is a story about the sicknesses and loves of a man generally well and vital throughout his life, a man of just one mature love, and that only in his last years. He had sicknesses and infatuations as everyone does, and I want to write about them and about his death as well, since its image pursued Gustav Mahler as relentlessly as did hemorrhoids and migraines. Death was a lifelong companion, indeed a visitation from before the cradle for Mahler, who discovered as a small child that he wasn't Bernhard and Marie Mahlers' firstborn after all, but that an older infant, brother Isidor, had died in an accident. Half of Marie Mahler's fourteen children did not survive infancy, and all of those who died very young were her sons. Ernst, a year younger than Gustav, died in adolescence, his adoring older brother's phantasmal fairy tales echoing in his ears during the last lingering weeks of his illness. Many years later the mature composer Gustav Mahler came upon a rambling volume of poems by Friedrich Rückert dedicated to the memory of his dead son, Ernst; the name worked magic on the superstitious genius, who could not put down the volume until he had conceived the idea of Kindertotenlieder, or "Dead Children Songs"; it was to become a seminal work. Out of death, new life. Of eleven sons of Marie and Bernhard Mahler, all died early save Gustav and Otto, who shot himself at twenty-one at a time when Gustav was beginning his drive to the Directorship of the Vienna Court Opera; there was a third who survived to live longer than Gustav, Alois, a dreamer and a Baron Münchhausen-style pathological liar, who died a baker in Chicago, representing Heller Candies of Vienna. Three sisters survived to adulthood, one of them his beloved Justine. This was Gustav's life-long companion and confidante until his unexpected marriage in 1902, when she was banished by Alma Schindler Mahler, the long-awaited love of his life, who immediately seized the Kommando in his house.
Mahler's Kindertotenlieder, "Songs for Dead Children", mentioned immediately above, were written before the last and most painful child death, that of his daughter Maria Anna in 1907 at not quite five years of age, his daughter, Alma used to say, with the same flashing dark eyes and flowing hair, with her father's capricious moods and passions and an unspoken closeness to her father. She used to visit him in his study on early winter mornings in Vienna as he wrote out and corrected the full scores of the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies before going to work at the Opera, and she visited him in his Komponierhäusl ('little composing house') in the summers. This was a freestanding structure high above the house and deep in the woods, somewhat resembling a crypt. Mahler built three of them at three summer residences in Austria, with entrance strictly forbidden to all but Putzi, as they called her, relatives, salesmen, housekeepers, all forbidden but the little girl, who in her brief life came to know only Häusl number two, the one near his villa on the Wörthersee in Carinthia. After long whispered sessions with her father she would emerge smeared with marmalade and sticky with crumbs — her father loved good marmalade and good butter — and what had been said between the two was their secret.
The loss of this child to diphtheria and scarlet fever, or probably simply to scarlet fever and croup, drove him to distraction with grief if not to emotional collapse or to madness, even when this, the second hammer-blow of fate that he had predicted for himself in the Sixth Symphony, was followed by a third. Madness, or dementia, did claim friends and fellow musicians Rott, Wolf, Krisper and Heinrich Krzyzanowski, as well as Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a female companion with whom Mahler had no romantic attachment, and who died in grief, poverty and loneliness ten years after her beloved musical genius. That an alarmingly high percentage of very close companions fell victim to insanity did not escape Mahler's notice; as a young man he vowed to maintain clarity of mind while not forsaking his dreams, and by and large, despite terrible overwork and a late marriage to a difficult, younger woman, he was successful in this. We read in the sketches and scores for the incomplete Tenth Symphony interpolations addressed to Alma betraying such pain and anguish that we should judge him on the verge of breakdown or of madness, if the musical score containing them were not of such uncompromising creative logic and fecundity. Death and funeral marches, as though they were the celebrities of his private stage, made obligatory appearances in all of his works. In Mahler's life people tended to die in family groups, as in 1889, when both parents and a sister died and Mahler managed to miss all three funerals, ceremonies he feared, loathed and contrived to avoid at any cost. Death was the unwitting organizing principle of his life. In 1894 the passing of a brilliant conductor who disliked Mahler's compositions gave Gustav the afflatus for the long-stalled Second Symphony — to be called the Resurrection — at the late age of thirty-four (only sixteen years to go, I need to rush, he told himself).
The Ninth Symphony, written less than two years before his death, and which in the days of his symphonic programs might have been entitled What Death Tells Me, struck his admirer Arnold Schönberg as a dreamlike work with a concealed author using Mahler, the ostensible composer, merely as a mouthpiece. Was this concealed author 'death'? He hated funerals, as I have said, and specified that no music or speech be heard at his own, and that his monument bear no text other than "Gustav Mahler"; he did direct that his remains be laid with those of the daughter whose loss he bore so grievously. The Freudians were not slow to point out that that this request is ('represents,' 'symbolizes') a return to rest in the female, the Mater Gloriosa in his little daughter's form. He had so often spoken of the female as a 'haven', and in the Dead Children Songs there is a revealing Freudian slip. The last song of the cycle ends with this statement:
Von keinem Sturm erschrecket
Von Gottes Hand bedecket,
Sie ruh'n wie in der Mutter Haus!
Frightened by no storm,
Sheltered by God's hand,
They rest as though in their
Mother's house!
In an earlier version Mahler had written wie in der Mutter Schoss 'as though in their mother's lap [or womb, bosom]'; he cheerfully corrected the mistake when it was discovered, however, and would have been annoyed to find commentators seeking neurotic meaning in it.
Mahler died of staphylococcal bacterial endocarditis (SBE), a disease which today may be treated effectively with antibiotics or surgery, or both, but which in 1911 constituted a death sentence for the patient. The initial diagnosis was made in New York by a close family friend of the Mahlers, Joseph Fraenkel, who kept its dire seriousness from them both ('strep' and 'staph' meant nothing to them; some time later in a Paris sanatorium Mahler called them "my little beasties," those creatures his physicians in their scientific raptures displayed to him on slides; he compared them to the glassed formicary Alma had brought to his sickroom to entertain him — he watched with fascination the death of the queen ant and the spontaneous genesis of a new one) and had his diagnosis confirmed by the leading American bacteriologist at Mt. Sinai. This case was one of the first for which staphylococcus viridans samples were systematically documented. "Look at these, they're like algae!" cried ecstatic Dr. Chantemesse to Alma in aesthetic rapture, while Mahler moaned nearby in his light-suffused sickroom. He did not have a weak heart and did not die of a heart attack. What had happened was that the patient in his youth had suffered repeated feverish anginas or bouts of tonsillitis which constituted a first attack of the viridans. There was a significant mitral shrinking after departure of the beasties, as well as systolic and pre-systolic murmurs, well compensated. These morbid heart sounds were clear enough to the ear of a country doctor in 1907 who listened to his heart and told Mahler, "Mr. Director, you have no reason to boast of this heart." The remark was accepted as a death sentence by the devastated composer, freshly in mourning for his daughter; but he had no idea of how death might come, and in fact with the passage of time he had restored some of the vigor of his lifestyle with mountain climbing in western Austria. But the beasties, when at last they returned in February of 1911, ate into a heart lining weakened by a previous condition and spread their toxin throughout the body, killing him in three months' time at fifty years, ten months of age.
The disease was unlike anything he had suffered before and in its course it was insidious. Fever from microbe discharge into the blood was chronic and low-grade, not more than 100 degrees F, and was usually absent in the morning, so that the normally hard-working and vigorous patient was forever tricked into believing that he had his illness beaten, only to succumb to racking exhaustion and immobility by evening. The illness mimicked the patient's wild mood swings of his youth, tenderness followed by anger and then laughter, and play by retreat and introspection. It mimicked his mobile facial expressions and colors, which changed so suddenly and drastically that he seemed in the same day and hour to be now a young man, then an old man, and now a young man again. It mimicked his changes of mind — now he was one's sworn enemy, now a moment later, one's blood brother to the death. The morning after his arrival in Paris, only weeks before his death, there took place an especially cruel deceit, a fata morgana of life as though proceeding into a future as broad as a bright window onto Tyrolian vistas or the domes of Salzkammergut Dolomites that he adored. Soon after his arrival by ship from America, Mahler awoke alone in his room at the Élysée, fully cured, as it seemed to him, and without a trace of fever. He shaved — he had not shaved himself since the first days of sea voyage from New York, and he had been so weak for so long that he had had to be supported by two people on the brief walk from his suite to the elevator — he shaved, and took up a little notebook that he kept for musical ideas. "I knew as soon as I returned to Europe that I would feel better," he told himself, with the absolute certainty of a very superstitious man.
He remembered his humiliating departure from the Savoy in New York. With touching concern for his privacy they had emptied the foyer of guests to keep curious eyes away. He was carried out on a stretcher. The people at the Savoy had always been sensitive to the Mahlers' needs, even to assuming all expenses after Mutterl (Gustav's affectionate name for his mother-in-law) set the drapes on fire in a cooking accident. So that bright and happy morning in Paris Alma found him on the balcony, clean-shaven and musing about the setting of an opera called The Barber of Baghdad and planning a trip to Egypt; the two notions were linked in his mind in an irrational, dreamlike coherence. There he stood, the little man with the flashing rimless glasses, before his astonished wife and mother-in-law as if resurrected from the dead, or at least restored from a swoon; pale, but smiling, waving his arms, speaking as though into Alma's bodice (she was a good three inches taller). She couldn't believe her eyes or ears; she was certain he was dying of a bad heart. "The endless driving of the heart that such a monster-motor as Mahler's spirit demanded had totally worn it down to nothing."
Yet now here he was as if alive again. At this moment he recalled a 1909 visit to Paris, when he had been good-naturedly tricked by relatives into sitting for the famous sculptor Rodin, then seventy; he had liked him and gotten to know him, though his French was bad and Rodin knew no German. Mahler stubbornly maintained that they had had long philosophical discussions together, as he liked to do with artists who had gained his respect. So now, again in Paris, he demanded a ride in the Bois de Boulogne. He had ridden a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne during the Exposition in 1900, when he took the Philharmonic on its first foreign tour. Breakfast, and then the Bois de Boulogne. "You know, Alma," he used to tell her from his sickbed — those times now seemed a lifetime ago — "I have decided I ought not to die after all. Who will take care of you after me? What sort of man will you marry?" Playful talk of dying or living and the future after Gustav had become their little domestic playlet of the months of his illness, Alma's part being to assure him that there was no one better than he, he then to answer that, after all, he had decided not to die, that he would save her the trouble of deciding whom to marry next. He was fifty years and ten months, she, thirty-one. At each sad day's end it really seemed to him that he would recover, that he would keep Alma and not lose her to an unknown future husband, or to a present-day lover; she had had, to his knowledge, one liaison, one that produced a tremendous marital crisis in July of the previous year, shortly after his fiftieth birthday. Such was the ebb of the fever that it lay dormant for those many long hours while the spirit chafed to return in full vigor.
Into the cab with Alma and Mutterl and into the Bois they rode; he had always loved parks, the Prater in Vienna, of course, and Central Park in New York, where last winter he had frolicked in the snow with his younger daughter Gucki. Riding in the cab, his eyes adjusting to Paris browns and early spring greens, he felt the sudden microbic flush of the poison as surely and irrevocably as had all the flumes of his veins and arteries been injected at once by countless needles. In the interval of a hammer blow, as in the Sixth Symphony, he was so weak he could not focus his senses. He collapsed very soon, resting his head, Alma recalls, on Mutterl's shoulder, closing his eyes as if in resignation. The cab turned abruptly back, reversing direction in the middle of the road as though something precious and indispensable been forgotten at the hotel by one or another of the passengers and had to be retrieved. Or were they going in the wrong direction? This was the last park, the last hallucination, and there would be no more resurrection.
Bohemia and Moravia
Under Maria Theresa, Jews were granted the right to settle in the Czecho-Moravian highlands (Vysocina), then a lovely mineral-rich land of woods and valleys about halfway between the Bohemian capital of Prague and the Moravian seat, Brünn (Brno). Freuds, Kafkas and Mahlers hail from this region (Mahler, Maler, Máler, Malher; Moll, Müller, Mohel are all related variants of the name), where Gustav's grandfather Šimon had numerous children, all illegitimate, according to the Familiengesetz, since their sire was not the first-born. In 1860 Gustav's parents together with their second-born and only living child moved from Kalist in Bohemia to Jihlava in Moravia (Iglau, in German, under the sign of the hedgehog), where they lived at 265/4 Pirnitzergasse. The town was a German-speaking oasis in the Czech countryside; today the house still stands, but only Czech is spoken everywhere, a language Gustav heard as a child but never mastered.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Mahler Re-Composed by George M. Cummins III Copyright © 2011 by George M. Cummins III. Excerpted by permission of iUniverse, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Detailed Chapter Outline and Synopsis....................ixIntroduction. The Case for Mahler the Czech....................xxvii
Chapter One Mahler Sick and Lovesick....................1
Chapter Two Tell Me the Story....................66
Chapter Three Too Jewish....................137
Chapter Four Strauss....................209
Chapter Five Tell Me the Story....................283
Chapter Six Curriculum Vitae....................364
Conclusion....................447
Bibliography....................459