Mahler Blog

Video: Rève d'amour

© 2010- Gil Plaquet

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Video: Big First Night + Mozart Mozart Mozart!

© 2010 - Gil Plaquet

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Photoset: day 1



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The other Alma

‘Only foreigners again’ sighs the Vienna city guide. I am one of just four people who have turned up for a guided Gustav Mahler and Karl Lueger tour of the city. The people of Vienna are not so in love with Mahler. There is also no statue of Mahler in Vienna, and no permanent exhibition, just the wonderful Rodin bust in the opera and some letters from Mahler and designs by Alfred Roller in the permanent collection at the theatre museum.

There is however a statue for Karl Lueger, and part of the Ringstrasse is also named after him. He was the mayor of Vienna from 1897 to 1910, so during Mahler’s years at the opera. But Lueger didn’t go to the opera, which was still court opera back then, and a matter for the emperor. And the emperor and mayor didn’t get on so well. Lueger was a populist who understood that you could win elections by linking difficult problems to simplistic slogans and scapegoats. The people of Vienna did not love the Jews migrating in from all corners of the Empire. The young painter Adolf H. who was roaming around the city at the time learned his lesson.

At a conference about Lueger, somebody asked the question why people in Vienna had not pulled down the Lueger statue by Nazi sculptor Müllner a long time ago. The answer was enlightening: if people outlawed the anti-Semites, an awful lot of the historic personalities, statues and placenames would have to disappear from Vienna...

So the paintings by Carl Moll, the stepfather of Alma Mahler, would have to be removed from the Vienna Museum and the Belvédère, because he was a confirmed Nazi.
He shot himself with a bullet through the head in 1945 when the Reich was over, together with his daughter and son-in-law, in his villa on the Hohe Warte.
The reality is complex. Because the same Moll appears to have been be a trusted figure for his Jewish son-in-law Gustav Mahler. He had Rodin make a bust for Mahler’s 50th birthday, he sat by his deathbed, he had a death mask made of Mahler, he was at the head of the funeral procession, head bent in sorrow...

And what about Alma Mahler? Her mother, stepfather and entourage, including Max Burckhard from the Burgtheater, brought her up with anti-Semitic ideals.
And the reality here is therefore also distressingly complex, the woman who twice married a Jew (Franz Werfel was also Jewish) was an anti-Semite at the same time. Just like her second husband, Walter Gropius (he wrote sentences like ‘The Jews, that poison that I hate more and more, are breaking us. They are the devil, the negative element’). Manon Gropius also meant a bit more for Alma Mahler because it was her only pure-blooded child...

And who wrote in 1903: ‘No way can you imagine a more vicious creature than the Polish Jew from these parts’...? It was Gustav Mahler.
So it was a complex world.

I visit Mahler’s grave in the Grinzing graveyard again. There are small stones laid high up on his gravestone, in Jewish tradition.
On Alma Mahler’s grave, one row in front, there is one big triangular stone: the gravestone of Manon Gropius.
Carl Moll is also buried here, but I can’t find his grave. His name is also not mentioned in the index of important people at the entrance to the graveyard.

All of a sudden I am standing at Justine Mahler’s grave, Mahler’s sister and support for his marriage. She died during the first months of the Anschluss. Her husband, the famous violinist Arnold Rosé – also Jewish – was able to flee. Their daughter Alma Rose is not in the grave. She died in Auschwitz. She was also a violinist. She played in the Mädchenorchester von Auschwitz. Eduard Rosé, cellist, brother of Arnold and widower of Mahler’s sister Emma, was also deported. He died in Theresienstadt in 1943.

And I think back to the shock I got in Sigmund Freud’s Viennese house when I looked at his family tree and saw that his elderly sisters did not flee like him, but died in the camps.
A morbid piece of luck in an accident: in '38, the majority of Jews had already long been harassed out of Austria...

Gerrit Valckenaers

The beat in the water

One of the most typical characteristics of Mahler’s music is its sarcasm and irony. Never before has a composer written so much music between quotation marks; music that doesn’t mean what it says, but which has staggering hidden meanings.
Earlier in history you can of course find the refined game of real and staged emotions in ‘Cosi fan tutte’ and poignant murderers by Monteverdi, but that is not submerged as it is in a Mahler symphony, where a funeral march can mask cheerfulness or a popular ditty can camouflage despair. Shostakovich and Schnittke later developed this facet of Mahler further, including playing with quotations.
The first composition by the six-year-old Mahler was after all a polka with funeral march. Mahler is the champion of sarcastic music, with underlying melancholy. Klezmer is not far off.

A classic example is Mahler’s song ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’, with a text from ‘Das Knaben Wunderhorn’ about Anthony of Padua. According to legend, in Rimini he preached in vain to the heretics, but successfully to the fish… In the text version of ‘Das Knaben Wunderhorn’, the preaching by Saint Anthony was not a miracle, but a pointless act: the fish stay as they were.

‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ was a selection of German popular poems, collected but also very much edited and embellished upon by the brothers-in-law Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano at the start of the 19th century. In the spirit of Romanticism, they dreamed of an idealised popular culture. With von Arnim and Brentano, even a country dweller expresses himself in alexandrines and sonnets…

For their version of the Saint Anthony song, they borrowed a Sancta Clara from the imagination-rich Abraham, court preacher in Vienna at the end of the 17th century, whose statue now stands in the Imperial Palace, around the corner from the Albertina. He captured the mood of the Viennese population when he suffered under the plague and the fierce Turkish siege of 1683. Humour and satire were his primary triumphs and he spoke ‘the language of the people’. Women and Jews were his main suspects for everything that went wrong in the world…

The text from ‘Des Antonius von Padua Fischpredigt’ can be found in Sancta Clara’s ‘Judas Der Ertz-Schelm’, a collection of sermons and poems which appeared in 1686.


Fragment from page 393 of ‘Judas Der Ertz-Schelm’

Mahler put the text brilliantly to music as early as 1893, a waltz that alternated between minor and major, which sounds cheerful, but is actually tragic. Mahler underestimated his public when he wrote that only a few would understand the satire of the people when preaching to the fish.
He then developed his music further into the scherzo ‘In ruhig fließender Bewegung’ from his second symphony. Luciano Berio then sampled this movement again integrally in his Symphony. Music about music about music.

In the copy of ‘Des Knaben Wunderhorn’ that Mahler had, you see Anthony standing on the banks. You understand Mahler’s self-recognition.
Here stands a conductor keeping time at the water...
Only the baton is missing. With his left hand he is controlling the violinists, while his right hand carefully indicates a pizzicato.
The conductor beats what he can, but it is pearls before the swine, a beat in the water.

Gerrit Valckenaers

The one note (the Adagietto part 3)

At the Mahler exhibition that is now showing in the Vienna theatre museum in the Lobkowicz Palace, there is also a facsimile of the copy of Mahler’s fifth symphony that Alma Mahler made in purple ink. Alma’s copy was the ‘Stichvorlage’, the version for the publisher.
Mahler changed a number of important details to the work from Alma’s copy before it went to press. Initially part 5 followed on uninterrupted from part 4. Mahler also scrapped the ‘attaca’ in Alma's handwriting.
As we stated earlier, the fifth symphony was written when Mahler was very much in love with Alma Schindler. It was an important work for him, and autobiographical again. In Mahler’s own handwriting on the fifth, he later also added a title page with a message to Alma: ‘To my dear little Alma, the faithful and brave companion of all my roaming’. The Adagietto is also the only real Viennese composition by Gustav, all his other works were created during his summer holidays, far from the city.

On Alma’s copy we also see that one is rubbed out and replaced at the start of the Adagietto: the seventh note of the main melody in Mahler’s first draft was not a b, but a g.
This final change by Mahler was a golden intervention; the melody would have been much more banal otherwise. An expressive quarter tone jump instead of a common note transition, some extra chromatics and a ligature are the result of this one decision. A ligature that must be read as much more languishing than tearful...
...

Gerrit Valckenaers

After the film: Willem (the Adagietto part 2)

Sometimes a new performance can change your fixed ideas about a work or even a style period. I had this feeling for example with Norrington’s Symphonie Fantastique, Marcel Pérès’ visions on the Gregorian or Harnoncourt’s version of Mozart’s 40th symphony with the Concertgebouw Orchestra…

It was an equally refreshing shock for me a few years ago when I heard an archive recording of Mahler’s Adagietto from 1926 with Willem Mengelberg as conductor. Mengelberg was Mahler’s great protagonist and trusted figure in the Netherlands and his performances with the Concertgebouw Orchestra laid the foundations for the great and lasting Mahler veneration in the Netherlands. Together with Bruno Walter, you can consider Mengelberg to be the conductor who was closest to Mahler.
For someone like me, who then still adored Bernstein’s extremely slow Adagietto, this was a big surprise: Mengelberg spent almost 5 minutes less on this part. And the strings play the main melody smoothly, with glissandi from melodramatic bel canto days. We will certainly hear Mengelberg’s version on Radio Klara’s late evening programmes during the Klarafestival. It’s incredible how a performance can make you listen to an icon in a completely different way.

Mengelberg noted his explanation for all this in the margin of his manuscript: ‘N.B. This adagietto was Gustav Mahler's declaration of love to Alma’. Both Gustav and Alma Mahler had confirmed to Mengelberg that this was a song without words, a love song whereby this text was at the basis of the strings melody: ‘The love I feel for you, my ray of sunshine, cannot be expressed in words’. Soppy verses by Mahler himself, which were luckily not sung, but which fit the melody perfectly. That’s why Mengelberg allows the violinists to play like singers from the start of the century...

The Adagietto is therefore not a symbol of downfall and melancholy, but Mahler’s greatest and most intimate love song in f major, written at the end of 1901, when Mahler became engaged with Alma...

A single but important counter argument: Alma Mahler never states this anywhere herself. Alma Mahler displayed works that Gustav Mahler dedicated to her throughout her whole life; she chased publishers, such as with the first edition of the eighth symphony, to be certain that the dedication to herself was stated in the title. So it’s surprising that the affectionate meaning of the Adagietto was not given any place of honour amongst her trophies...


Mengelberg’s annotated manuscript. Left, the ‘hidden’ song text; Above, his N.B.

Gerrit Valckenaers

See Mahler and die (the Adagietto part 1)

Foto: Stefan Vanfleteren

Leuven, 1980s, my student years. If you wanted to explore the history of film in those days, there were no video shops and no YouTube for getting acquainted with the classics. In the student canteen, posters written with thick marker pens announced which film you could go and watch for 40 francs in one of the local theatres. You could work out you were actually seeing a classic from the battered state of the film being shown.
This is how I first saw Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice’, with Dirk Bogarde as the languishing Gustav von Aschenbach. One man, one city and one land at night, listening to the strains of Mahler’s fifth symphony.

Dirk Bogarde & Gustav Mahler

Gustav von Aschenbach from Thomas Mann’s novella ‘Tod in Venedig’ was effectively partly inspired by Mahler. When Mann describes von Aschenbach, for example, “with his elegant figure, brushed-back hair, balding crown, with frameless glasses and noble bent nose”, it’s clear that he is sketching Mahler. Mann witnessed the impressive première of Mahler’s eighth symphony in Munich in September 1910. He said to his wife that evening: “It was the first time in my life that I had the impression I was meeting a truly great man.”
One month after the death of Mahler, Mann started his novella. Mann included all sorts of other, partially autobiographical, elements however, e.g. his meeting with the Polish character Wladyslaw Moes (‘The Real Tadzio’) in Venice. For Benjamin Britten, who himself knew the charm of young fellows, this was the reason for composing, as a man growing older, his opera ‘Death in Venice’, in 1973...

Back to ‘Death in Venice’: when the film premièred in 1971, people in Hollywood immediately wanted to sign up this Mahler; a promising film composer had left his calling card. Small problem: this Mahler already appeared to have been dead for 60 years... It says a lot about how late Mahler broke through to the greater public.
The film had an Amadeus effect: a whole generation became acquainted with a composer but immediately also a whole pile of false clichés... The image of Mahler as a languishing and sickly man could for many no longer be removed. The Adagietto from the fifth became the symbol of regret, of end-of-the-century feelings, of the death of the world. Bernstein had already made a first move by playing the work at Robert Kennedy’s funeral. Mahler’s Adagietto and Barber’s Adagio for Strings grew into being the ultimate laments of the 20th century.

For Alma Mahler, ‘Death in Venice’ would become the painful reality: her daughter Manon became infected with polio in April 1934. The Venetian authorities had not declared the epidemic… Manon Gropius fell lame and died after a year of suffering in Vienna.

Gerrit Valckenaers