Mahler Blog

‘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

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

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.

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

Due to illness of the usual conductor of the Concertgebouw Orchestra, Mariss Jansons, Bernard Haitink has been found ready to replace him for the closing concert on 17 September.
The 81 year old ‘Maestro’ has been linked to the Concertgebouw Orchestra for more than 50 years. Even though he left the Concertgebouw Orchestra as the first conductor in 1988, he has since been back to Amsterdam regularly.
He brought international fame to the orchestra with performances of Bruckner and especially Mahler. His presence gives the KlaraFestival, which has the theme of ‘The Mahler Connection’, even more prestige.
Bernard Haitink was born and bred in Amsterdam. There are links to Belgium on his mother’s side. His mother was called Anna Verschaffelt and was raised with a French culture. She was Jewish on her mother’s side, Rozetta Hijmans. This meant that strictly speaking, according to Jewish tradition, Anna Verschaffelt and also her children, including Bernard Haitink, were Jewish because of the female lineage. But that didn’t make any difference in her free-thinking family. The father of Anna Verschaffelt, who was born in Ghent, was catholic and left Belgium for Amsterdam to accept a professorship in botany at the Gemeentelijke Universiteit.

The closing concert will undoubtedly be the apotheosis of the KlaraFestival!

Chaim den Heijer