1. of a deeply insecure man into Mahler’s general attitude.
Strauss was, at the time, the more accomplished
composer, and Mahler felt threatened by a fame and
success he had never achieved and desperately desired.
His ostensible indifference to public critique of his
music was likely to be, as Alex Ross puts it, “a café-table
affection” or, more precisely, a disingenuously aloof
persona Mahler adopted to deal with his inadequacies.
Truth be told, Mahler fought valiantly to have his
music performed and appreciated. He hobnobbed with
the Viennese musical élite, sending letters and gifts
to critics to keep their favours. When a work was well
received – as was the case with the Eighth Symphony –
he was not immune to the joys of triumph. He reacted,
not as a stoic musical god getting his due, but as a
human gleefully reaping the rewards of his grueling
labours. In word, he disavowed the meaninglessness of
success and public recognition yet, in deed, he pursued
them relentlessly. In short, Mahler was neither
divine nor delusional, but a bit of both. He was
an extremely gifted but flawed man, riddled
with doubt and overwhelmed by ambition,
struggling to reconcile the demands of his
ego with his humanitarian mission – “part
Genius, part demon”, in the words of Bruno
Walter. In short, he was a double man.
Mahler’s childhood was not an easy one.
Born in 1860 into a German-speaking Jewish
family in a small village in Bohemia, an
outlying province of the Austrian empire,
Mahler quickly formed an awareness of himself
as the ethnic other. “I am thrice homeless,” he
would famously say, “a Bohemian in Austria, an
Austrian in Germany, and a Jew everywhere.”
His father, who struggled to make a living as
an innkeeper, noted his son’s musical gifts
early on, and encouraged him to nurture
them. As an adult composer, Mahler would
develop a highly dichotomised style that bore the
mark of his early childhood experiences. While still a
boy, Mahler lost five siblings in early childhood, and
observed their burial “from the family tavern where
the singing never stopped”. The result, as Norman
Lebrecht noted, was a child’s funeral march in the First
Symphony, composed in the style of a drunken jig.
Gustav Mahler’s music abounds with many
perverse paradoxes of this kind. Heavenly images of
an idyllic afterlife follow on from bleak depictions
of earthly torment. Jewish klezmer sounds form an
unlikely partnership with hymnal textures evoking
the Catholic liturgy. Over-worked sentimentalism
rubs shoulders with classical Germanic restraint.
Basic, folk-like homophony gives way to counterpoint
of Bachian complexity. East and West, the highbrow
and the lowbrow are treated with equal respect
as fonts of creative raw material. To his befuddled
detractors, his symphonies appeared like an absurdist
mish-mash of disparate elements, thrown together
without rhyme or reason – it’s little wonder the critics
reacted so coldly. Mahler himself often struggled
with the excesses in his music: “I cannot do without
trivialities,” he wrote to Bruno Walter in reference to
the newly completed Third Symphony. “But this time,
all permissible bounds have been passed.”
In 1910, Mahler visited Sigmund Freud for the
first – and only – time. Though originally skeptical of
Freud’s method, he had just come to know of his wife
Alma’s dalliance with the architect Walter Gropius and,
desperate, turned to psychoanalysis as a last resort.
Freud reassured Mahler he “need not be anxious”,
and that his marriage was allegedly “a happy one till
the end”. But a breakthrough of an entirely different
kind would, by chance, emerge from this analytic
session. Mahler brought up a childhood episode in
which his father, a hostile man by nature, was having
an unusually intense row with his mother. Frightened,
young Mahler rushed from the house onto the street,
where he immediately heard a barrel organ grinding
out the Viennese folk song Ach, du Lieber Augustin.
“The conjunction of high tragedy and light
amusement,” Freud noted, “was from then on
inextricably linked in his mind, and the one
mood inevitably brought the other.”
The observation provides a neat formula for
many of the marked dualities in Mahler’s life
and work. Too neat? Possibly. According to
Freud scholar, Ernest Jones, Mahler finally
“understood why his music had been
prevented from achieving the highest rank as
a result of the noblest passages, those inspired
by the most profound emotions, being spoiled
by the intrusion of some commonplace
melody.” Mahler had, for years, managed
to mythologise himself as “the untimely
man”. Had this man of reason finally
found an empirical justification for
his shortcomings as a composer?
www.limelightmagazine.com.au42 LIMELIGHT APRIL 2015
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