Gustav Mahler

New Insights into His Life, Times and Work

Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351217880
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig (1897-1948) was a Viennese musicologist and critic who studied at the universities of Budapest and Vienna. From 1933 he embarked on producing a large-scale study of Mahler but at the time of his death the manuscript was left unfinished. Although it was presumed lost until 1997, the unfinished typescript, written in German, had been deposited in the library of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In 2003, the School's Research Centre commissioned Jeremy Barham to prepare the first published edition of this important work, and his annotations and commentary add invaluable material to his translation of this historic document. Biographical material is used as a loose framework and platform for Mathis-Rosenzweig's profound examination of the environment within which Mahler's earlier music was embedded. This is an environment in which Wagner, Bruckner and Wolf feature prominently, and in which Mahler's music is viewed from the wider perspective of nineteenth-century German cultural domination and the subsequent rise of political extremism in the form of Hitlerite fascism.

Chapter 1
The Bohemian Homeland Kalischt — Iglau

Mahler’s fellow countrymen, the Germans of Bohemia and Moravia, might have justifiably disputed with each other over which of these historic lands could lay claim to his birth and origin. For he was born in the unpretentious village of Kalischt on the Bohemian– Moravian border on 7 July 1860, the second child of Bernhard and Marie Mahler. However, in December of the same year the family moved from Kalischt, just inside Bohemia, to Iglau, the nearest larger town in Moravia, and it was here that he grew up and acquired his first, formative impressions. In an annotation to a letter of invitation from the young musician, Mahler’s childhood friend, Fritz Löhr, who visited him in his parents’ Iglau home in 1884, painted a lively picture of the Iglau landscape that found unmistakeable expression in Mahler's music:

The house in Kalischt, Bohemia, where Mahler was born.

So far as I can recall, he played less during this week that I spent with him in his parents’ house in Iglau. The main thing for me – something for which I cannot be too thankful – was getting to know the place where he grew up, the old parts of the town itself and the glorious countryside surrounding Iglau. There in the height of summer we would go for walks lasting half the day, wandering among flowery meadows, by abundant streams and pools, through the great woods, and to villages where the peasantry was in part Slav. And on Sunday there was an expedition to where authentic Bohemian musicians set lads and lasses dancing in the open air. Ah, there was dancing, there was rhythm, causing heart and senses to vibrate as though intoxicated. There was the zest of life, and sorrow too, just as there was a profound gravity, all of it veiled by reserve, on the faces of the girls, their heads bowed towards their partners’ breast, their plump, almost naked limbs exposed by the high whirling of their many-layered bright petticoats, in an almost solemn, ritual encircling.¹

But this Moravian landscape was filled not only with dance tunes and folk songs: Iglau was a garrison town. Trumpet signals could be heard blaring out from the barracks, and at nine in the evening the prolonged sounding of the retreat [Zapfenstreich] echoed from the walls. The troops would often move out with drums beating and trumpets sounding. The military marches of the old Austrian army had a very special sound. Their melodic richness and their rhythmic élan – one thinks of the famous Radetsky-March – had something irresistible about them. Alongside folksongs and dances, military signals and marches found their unmistakeable reflection in Mahler’s music, in the songs as well as the symphonies. They were the childhood memories of his sound-drenched Iglau home, transformed into art.

Two remarkable women can be found among Mahler’s forbears. First his paternal grandmother, who made her way through life as a pedlar, still carting her bundle of linen on her back from house to house into her eighties. From her he inherited an unwavering willpower in the pursuit of an aim, and her fearlessness and lack of concern in dealing with officials and authorities, which went so far that one time when the old woman had been unjustly punished for infringing pedlar legislation she travelled to Vienna, complained about the penalty in an audience with Emperor Franz Josef and had it waived. By contrast, he inherited a highly sensitive appreciation of all the suffering of creation from his mother, a delicate woman who all but collapsed under the burden of life in an unhappy marriage.

A native of Lučeneč, she came from a more affluent family than that of Bernhard Mahler, the pedlar’s son, who ran a distillery in his home town of Kalischt. In the eyes of her close relatives, the marriage was a fully deserved ‘demotion’ since she suffered from a limp as a result of infant paralysis and therefore could lay no claim to a ‘better match’. So she married, with the unhappy love in her heart for a man, Bernhard Mahler, who wanted nothing to do with her and who saw her simply as a domestic worker and a birthing machine. In almost uninterrupted succession she gave birth to twelve children. Before Gustav, the eldest son, Isidor, was born on 22 March 1858, but he died in an accident as a small child. A year after Gustav came Ernst in 1861, who wasted away with hydrocardia and died at the age of thirteen on 13 April 1874. Gustav had been very fond of his ill-fated brother Ernst, and the awful experience of the boy’s illness and death most likely inspired him many decades later to compose the Kindertotenlieder. Mahler was to experience the death of one of his own children, but not until after he had composed these songs. The second child after Gustav was the sister Leopoldine, born on 18 May 1863, who was forced against her will into marrying a man called Quittner and died of a brain tumour in 1889, the very same year as her parents. After her birth the yield of children in the Mahler household stopped for four years until 6 October 1867, when a son Alois was born.² He was mentally deficient and had attacks of megalomania that manifested themselves in almost pathological ways. According to Alma’s memoirs, he once dressed up as a mediaeval German mercenary and rode like this on an old hired nag through the streets of Iglau. When someone stopped him, he shouted: ‘You wait. I’ll ride past the castle in Vienna like this, and the Crown Prince will ask: “Who’s that fine young fellow on horseback?” He’ll summon me to his presence and I’ll get some wonderful post’.³ Alois, later changing his name to Louis because he thought it sounded ‘less Jewish’, subsequently developed into the black sheep of the family. He got into debt, forged bills and had to flee to America, where all trace of him was lost.⁴ It is a wonder that Nazi propaganda did not seize on the case of Alois, in order to expose Gustav Mahler as the brother of a criminal forger.

After Alois came a girl called Justine (15 December 1868). She later married the violinist Arnold Rosé, leader of the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna Opera orchestra, and over many years played an important part in Gustav Mahler’s life. She kept house for him while he was still unmarried, and after the death of their parents (Bernhard died on 18 February 1889 and Marie on 28 October of the same year⁵) she looked after the younger children. She had been brought up by her father with ruthless severity and was terribly suppressed by him. Once as a young girl she stuck candles all around the edge of her bed and lit them. Then she lay on her bed and convinced herself that she was dead. Justine Mahler-Rosé survived all other members of her family, dying in Nazi-occupied Vienna in 1938, shortly after which her husband emigrated to England.

After Justine, Marie Mahler gave birth to a boy on 19 December 1869, who was called Arnold. The child died soon after birth. The next child, a boy called Friedrich, born on 23 April 1871, died on 15 December from scarlet fever at the age of eight months. On 22 April another boy, called Alfred, came into the world only to die thirteen months later on 6 May 1873.

On 18 June of the same year Marie bore a son named Otto. He was a highly gifted musician like Gustav, who idolised him, but entirely undisciplined. After the death of their parents, when it fell to Gustav, still a young man, to support his unmarried siblings, he did all he could to give Otto a good education. He engaged tutors to coach him; he found quarters for him in the house of his childhood friend Löhr so that he could direct Otto’s studies. Everything was done to further his musical training. On several occasions he even procured posts for him as répétiteur at minor German theatres. All these efforts were nevertheless in vain. Otto was unable to stay the course anywhere, and in failing to do so rebelled against Gustav whose position he kept comparing with his own. Morose, arrogant and taciturn, he had something demonic about him. At the age of 23 he committed suicide. Before shooting himself he wrote on a scrap of paper that life no longer pleased him and that he was giving back his admission ticket.

Marie Mahler’s eleventh child was a daughter called Emma (born on 19 October 1875), who later married the solo cellist Eduard Rosé in Weimar. The twelfth and last child, a boy named Konrad, was born on 17 April 1879 and died on 8 January 1881 from diphtheria.

It was in this house where life and death followed one another like sunshine and rain that Gustav Mahler grew up. It is said that as a child he went through life in a dream, paying little attention to what was happening around him. So he neither heard the thundering cries of his father nor, of course, understood the sad fate of his mother as she suffered under the tyranny of her husband, an impulsive and strong-willed man who deceived her at every turn. Nevertheless, his mother’s pale face, filled with suffering, imprinted itself on his consciousness. Great suffering became for him synonymous with the noble and the good, so that in later years he still used to say about certain people he met: ‘that’s a beautiful, ruined face’.

Mahler’s musical talents were apparent from early childhood. During a visit to his grandparents’ house, the four-year-old Gustav climbed up to the attic where he found an old piano. After several hours of searching for him throughout the house without success, they found him there sitting amongst the junk in front of the piano, strumming on it and singing.

This dream-like absorption, accompanied by a complete lack of awareness of passing time, exhibited itself in the child in other, quite unusual ways. Alma reports the following incident in the preface to her collected volume of letters published in 1924:

His father had taken the child Gustav for a walk in the woods. All at once he recalled something he had forgotten. He told the child to sit down on a log and wait until he came back. Then he went home. There, as usual, there was all the distraction, noise and tumult of family life. Only hours later was the little boy missed. It was already twilight when the agitated father hurried back into the woods. There, just where he had left him, he found the child sitting quietly on the log, his eyes wide with dreamy contemplation, untouched by fear or doubt, even though he had been there for many hours before evening fell.

There is something of the movingly heroic and, at the same time, of fairy-tale appealingness in this image of the solitary child patiently waiting in the dark woods. This is the child that Gustav Mahler always remained at heart. The cloud of dreamy thoughtfulness that wrapped him in solitude never quite left him, whether he was the young conductor in Olmütz, the all-powerful operatic director in Vienna or the celebrated master in New York.⁶

Time and again the thoughts and recollections in Mahler’s letters revolve around images of the Bohemian-Moravian landscape of his home. The atmosphere of these images chimed in his imagination with the innermost moods of his soul from where musical inspiration rose like the dawning of a hovering dreamscape; or, in a moment of sudden illumination, burst forth like an igniting spark.

Thus as a nineteen-year-old who five years before lost his beloved brother Ernst and was now contemplating plans for Herzog Ernst von Schwaben, an opera that he never completed and that he destroyed along with all his early works,⁷ he wrote:

Then the pallid shapes that people my life pass by me like shadows of long-lost happiness, and in my ears again resounds the chant of yearning. – And once again we roam familiar pastures together, and yonder stands the hurdy-gurdy man, holding out his hat in his skinny hand. And in the tuneless melody I recognised Ernst of Swabia’s salutation, and he himself steps forth, opening his arms to me, and when I look closer, it is my poor brother; veils come floating down, the images, the notes grow dim:

Out of the grey sea two kindly names emerge: Morawan, Ronow!⁸

The young Mahler visited Morawan and Ronow, two farms near Časlau in Bohemia, in the holidays of 1875–76. Their gardens, flowers and many friendly people remained in his memory, and he imagined them suddenly setting the scene for a meeting with a blue-eyed girl who smiles at him – a fleeting image that immediately fades away to nothing.

These diary notes comprising the nineteen-year-old’s letter to his young companion Emil Freund [sic]⁹ end with the following outburst:

O earth, my beloved earth, when, ah, when will you give refuge to him who is forsaken, receiving him back into your womb! Behold! Mankind has cast him out, and he flees from its cold and heartless bosom, he flees to you, to you alone! O, take him in, eternal, all-embracing mother, give a resting place to him who is without friend and without rest!¹⁰

Exactly 30 years later, at the beginning of October 1909, Mahler returned to the tranquil landscape of his Moravian homeland in order to put the finishing touches to his most personal and perhaps most important work, the symphony for tenor, alto (or baritone) voice and large orchestra Das Lied von der Erde. It is highly significant that during the most important phase of his spiritual and intellectual development as a composer, Mahler turned to his homeland, that he chose to complete the score of Das Lied von der Erde amidst the landscape of his Moravian homeland. (The outward reason for this journey – the relinquishing of his permanent dwellings in Vienna prior to his second visit to America – by no means suggests that there were not deeper grounds arising from his particular spiritual state.)

Mahler had already begun Das Lied von der Erde in the summer of 1908 at Altshluderbach near Toblach. The death of his first child on 5 July 1907 had plunged Mahler into deepest despair. Furthermore, during this time of complete submersion in pain and grief, he learnt from a doctor that he was suffering from bilateral mitral disease and that he would therefore have to give up what were to him indispensable activities: mountain walks, swimming and long hikes. After months of deep depression he assumed a new mental attitude. He looked back on his life as if from a great height, relieved from all earthly concerns. And once again the world shone before him in all its beauty, in the gentle evening glow of farewell. In poems of the tenderest melancholy translated from the Chinese by Hans Bethge¹¹ and published in the anthology Die chinesische Flöte, Mahler recognised a fitting medium through which to give full musical expression to this new vision of the world. He immersed himself more and more in the world of the Chinese poems until, through textual extensions and adaptation of the lyrical sequence of moods into a symphonic structure, there emerged not only a unified content but also the basis for an organic musical construction combining symphonic and lyrical ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 'Made in Germany': Mahler, Identity and Musicological Imperialism
• 'Gustav Mahler. New Insights into his Life, Times and Work,' by Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig (translated by Jeremy Barham)
• Foreword
• Introduction and Attempt to Set Out the Problem
• Chapter 1. The Bohemian Homeland. Kalischt - Iglau
• Chapter 2. Apprentice Years in Vienna (1875-1879) and their Aftermath
• Chapter 3. In the Lowlands of Day-to-Day Operatic Life (1880-83)
• Chapter 4. Kassel (1883-85)
• Notes
• Appendices
• Index