Gustav Mahler

"Do you have to be there in person when you become immortal?" - Mahler on why he didn't do more to make his works better known.If you are inclined towards a 700 page book on the composer Gustav Mahler this might be the one to read. Author Jens Malte Fischer, an Austrian theater historian, has combed through decades of correspondence between Mahler, wife Alma, friends and colleagues to frame the portrait. A synthesis of biographical and topical studies span his lifetime and spotlight his world. In addition to the chronological account there are chapters on his songs symphonies, conducting, reading, spirituality, philosophy, marriage, illness and legacy. Fischer is a musicologist and perhaps a musician, but his analysis of Mahler's music is from a cultural angle rather than a technical one. This could be a blessing or curse based on your interests.Born in a Bohemian village in 1860, Mahler grew up in a small provincial city. He was an early arrival in a large Jewish family of modest means. At a young age he revealed his gift of musical genius. He left home for at fifteen to study piano at the Vienna conservatory, but his true love was composing, and he had a great talent for conducting. After five years he began to lead local orchestras, quickly gaining positions in Prague, Leipzig, Budapest and Hamburg. He returned to Vienna in 1897 to direct the Court Opera and Philharmonic. After 11 years and many triumphs, systemic racism and professional envy drove him to the Met and NY Philharmonic. There he had to compete with Toscanini, which was no easy task. He died in Vienna in 1911.Fischer weaves in a contemporary history of the Austro-Hungarian empire. After Austria's war with Prussia in 1866, a dual monarchy was formed from a multi-ethnic alliance. Cultural tensions led to German nationalism in the west and Hungarian in the east. Johann Strauss II's 1874 opera 'Die Fledermaus' reflected a cultural dissolution, where drunk revelers cheat on unaware spouses. The eclectic Ringstrasse architecture was begun in 1875, and populated by a shallow minded bourgeoisie. Liberals who aided Jewish assimilation fell from power in 1879, with Christian Socialists and Pan-Germans replacing them. An uneasy balance persisted until WWI. In 1897 Mahler was a peripheral part of the fin-de-siecle Vienna Secession art movement.Fischer explores the 'War of the Romantics', between the 'New German School' led by Liszt and Wagner, influenced by Gluck and Berlioz. They were rivals to a conservative faction of Schumann, Brahms and Mendelssohn, adherents of the 'Viennese School' of Hayden, Mozart and Beethoven. Mahler was an admirer of Wagner, despite anti-semitic diatribes, and a champion of his operas. In 1903 Mahler began important opera reforms, collaborating with the Secession artist Alfred Roller to produce a level of integrated stage design not seen before. It was inspired by an unachieved Wagnerian concept for a 'total art' integration of music and drama. Mahler in turn influenced the development of Shostakovich and Schoenberg's '2nd Viennese School'.Mahler loved reading, and books infused his music with poetry and philosophy. Goethe and the Aristotelian concept of entelechy, where life is an everlasting force for perfection, and aspects of Leibniz's monadism, a theory of indivisible metaphysical units, were Romantic responses to the distinct atoms of Enlightenment materialism. Mahler was Jewish by birth and Christian by conversion, but he was more drawn to esoteric spiritual beliefs. His early songs were based on folk poetry and fairy tales, his middle period on settings for poems by Friedrich Ruckert, and his 'Das Lied von der Erde' adapted the ancient Chinese poetry of Li Bai and Wang Wei. His numbered symphonies have themes of nature, love and death, although their meanings are disputed.Mahler had a troubling habit of falling in love with his soprano soloists, and awkward ways of extricating himself from the affairs. One early love was Anna von Mildenberg, a virtuoso singer of the time. He married Alma Schindler, a beautiful and young socialite daughter of a famous painter. She went on to betray him in his darkest hour with the architect Walter Gropius. A key to the discord was Mahler's suppression of her musical aspirations. He had rigorous and uncompromising professional standards, often rushing the stage, rearranging players and relieving performers during rehearsals. Mahler had congenital physical frailties, and unconfirmed psychosomatic illnesses. These were concerns, but it was heart disease that led to his death at 51.I often have a dream, related to Mahler's anxiety about his compositions being performed and received well. In the dream I am standing with modern recordings of his works, asking what he thinks of each of them once he has listened. Would he prefer his disciple Bruno Walter to his friend Willem Mengelberg, or later recordings by Klemperer, Horenstein, Barbirolli and Bernstein? Would he be happy to know that his work had not been in vain? As he said: "My sixth will pose riddles that only a generation who know my first five may hope to solve." But later he warned "How long do works survive? Fifty years? Then come other composers, another time, another taste, other works." Perhaps he made music that will last far beyond his greatest hopes.This book was written in German and translated to English. In spite of somewhat labored prose it speaks well to the level of learning in Central Europe. Fischer isn't afraid to delve into amateur psychology, speculating on Mahler's sex life and sessions with Sigmund Freud. I was looking for a more succinct account like those of Shostakovich by Volkov or Wagner by Callow, but found this book not too far afield. It is a challenging and rewarding work, though labyrinthine in structure. The book was a 2003 best seller in Germany, a matter of no small wonder. If still not enough, there is La Grange's 3600 page tetralogy lurking in the shadows, yet I would not dare to go there.

Massive, magisterial, deliberate, discerning — a splendid book, spectacularly so! It’s not a page-turner — slow and steady as she goes, like an engine chugging up a mountainside, the steepness of the ascent proving the power of the intellectual locomotion. But it’s not a page-skipper either. Skip a few pages and you’ll have the gnawing suspicion that you might have missed something important. Leaf back and you’ll discover you did. Though Fischer makes no show of his interpretative genius, the skill with which he conjures musical, philosophical and physical context of Mahler’s life and times, and, preeminently, his titanic creativity, the dynamics and depths that characterize his friendships, loves, great love, and passing acquaintances, the influences both sublime and trivial, the grandeur and the nitty-gritty grit that shaped him, exhibits it on every page. One single example: in recounting the famous consultation of Mahler with Freud, their four hour walk, the author describes the meeting as the “extraordinary encounter between the Napoleon of the musical scene of Vienna and New York and the Goethe of psychoanalysis”. To this long time student of Freud and Mahler enthusiast — That’s it! That’s it! Exactly! Genau! At one place Fischer refers to one of Mahler’s early letters to a friend as “a symphony in epistolary form”. This is Biography as Symphony. A resounding success in every way.

A 900+ page biography may seem scary, but Fischer's book on Mahler contains such interesting information that he discusses in a thoughtful manner that you will want to keep reading. Fischer and his translator combine to create a book that is highly readable by those who have at least some basic knowledge of Mahler and his symphonies. In addition to giving a chronological account of Mahler's life, Fischer has thematic chapters, such as one on Mahler's relationship to Judaism and another on his religious/spiritual beliefs; social history chapters, on such topics as mid-century Vienna, turn-of-the-century Vienna and its artistic movements, and anti-Semitism; portraits of composers and conductors who interacted with and supported Mahler's symphonies, including Bruno Walter, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Willem Mengelberg, Richard Strauss (as well as intellectuals such as Theodore Adorno); Mahler's intellectual interests in Goethe, Wagner, Dostoevsky; etc. Since Mahler was known for his conducting (perhaps the second-best conductor of his era) much more than for his composing (his symphonies were usually not well received), much of the middle of the book talks about his rapid progression from smaller opera houses to his coveted positions as Musical Director of the Vienna State Opera and then as Principal Conductor for the Metropolitan Opera in New York. But about equal weight is given to the summers, which was when he did his composing, and to discussions and interpretations of each of his symphonies. Finally, while I can't judge the accuracy of the translation from German, I can say that the text reads very well; you wouldn't know it was a translation. So, if you have a strong interest in Mahler's music and want to know more about the man who created it, you'll want to read this book. And keep your Mahler recordings with you, as you'll want to listen to them in order as you progress through the book. Some of the historical recordings that Fischer mentions can be found in excellent remasterings on the Pristine Classical site.

Worth the purchase.

Fischer's book has already been hailed by some as the best single-volume biography of Mahler. That should really be qualified by the adjective `exhaustive', since it's otherwise rather unfair to Jonathan Carr's The Real Mahler (Constable, London 1997), which is no mean achievement and is even quoted by Fischer.The new biography's immediate value is in providing a reasonable, considerably shorter alternative to Henry-Louis de La Grange's mammoth four-volume Gustav Mahler (some 4,700 pages, with its first volume's revised edition still to come). All the same, you can't beat La Grange's meticulous attention to detail, even though in the later stages of the revised, English-language revision it's peppered with repetitions and copy-editing errors. But Fischer's book is less gushing than La Grange, who occasionally shows traces of hagiography.There's the rub. Nothing wrong with a considered, critical approach, but Fischer is resolutely dry, at least in English translation, and you often feel he could have fought a little less shy of enthusiasm or even passion for his subject. He's very good, though, at using a whole range of German-language sources not generally available to English readers and actually rarely brought to the fore by La Grange. He also wins out over others in the structure of the book, which is very helpful both to the general reader and the researcher. He interleaves the chapters of chronological biography with essays on particular topics: Mahler and Literature, The Conductor, Jewishness and Identity, Mahler's Illnesses, Faith and Philosophy, and so on. The last three are especially useful and well thought through. Alongside these, Fischer devotes a separate chapter to each of the symphonies, but unfortunately in doing so reveals his Achilles heel.Perhaps because he's not a musicologist (Fischer is Professor of the History of Theatre at Munich University), the musical analyses fall with a thud between two stools. They're comparatively niggardly, not engaging enough to entice people new to Mahler, and too generalized to be of any use to Mahler lovers familiar with the works - in fact hardly more than the equivalent of recording liner notes. And the author has a terrible weakness for dogmatic judgements that are not only unwarranted but downright wrong-headed. To give a couple of glaring examples, on the long-standing controversy over the order of the middle movements of the Sixth Symphony Fischer is categorical: the `definitive order' is Scherzo-Andante. This at a time when most conductors now adopt the reverse sequence (and some always have done) and many authorities argue that perpetuation of the Scherzo-Andante order derives from a characteristic mistake of Alma Mahler's. Worse, later on Fischer states, in discussing the third hammer-blow, which Mahler excised from the Finale, that `The question of whether or not it should be reinstated continues to divide opinion.' It's difficult to see where he gets that notion from. True, one of the most recent live recordings of the Sixth, by Jukka-Pekka Saraste, does put the third blow back in, but to arguably little musical benefit, and this version is so rare as to be an exception that proves the rule. Certainly, I've lost count of the number of performances I've heard in the concert hall, and can't recollect one that had the final hammer-blow.Fischer starts on a curious note, too. The idea of beginning with a physical description of his subject (`What Did Mahler Look Like?') is not a bad one and he does a good job of it. But to condemn Alma for never attempting to describe Mahler's physical appearance in her reminiscences is a bit over the top. Poor Alma was indeed a notorious narcissist, and comes in for a lot of deserved criticism later on in the book, but I would have thought this, of all things, was a pardonable offence, if an offence at all. He ends a little oddly, too, in implying that conductors who fight shy of Mahler's music might be closet anti-Semites. That seems to me uncalled-for. Let's face it, there are a fair number of conductors with impeccable philo-Semitic credentials who'd honestly do better to leave Mahler's music alone!Ultimately, though, if you're interested in the subject this is a book worth having - just take the musical pronouncements with a pinch of salt.

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Fantastic biography, well written with even the non- music theory trained reader in mind. Why is this not translated into German? But, I'm complaint at a very high level. Thanks for putting all these details together, into what I would call a 'page-turner'.

De la grange a deja tout ecrit sur mahler