Pablo Massa wrote:

>Some weeks ago, I asked about what were --in the opinion of the list--
>the worst films about composers ever made.  A listmember (I don't remember
>who) mentioned Ken Russell's "Mahler" and I didn't pay it much attention,
>since I was one of the lucky few who hadn't seen it yet.  Well, I lost that
>condition yesterday at TV...and I repent much of not taking advice of such
>gentle warning.  In general terms, I would like to ask: what the hell was
>that movie, a failed project by the Monty Pythons???.

I really think that you (and the other lister) are being far too harsh on
this movie.  I have been a serious student and lover of Mahler's music for
over 30 years and I saw Ken Russell's "Mahler" in the cinema when it first
came out.  There is no doubt that Russell knows his Mahler, both the man
and the music, and that in his film penetrates to many truths about the man
and the music.  There are parts of it that I find deeply moving and there
are parts of it I find deeply irritating.  But this is what you get with
Ken Russell's work.  His composer "biographies" for the BBC (Elgar, Delius,
Debussy, Prokofiev) were masterpieces.  He is one of those film makers
where you have to take the bad with the good.  When Russell is good he is
magnificent, when he is bad he is truly appalling.  I can live with that
and I can certainly live with his film about Mahler.  It is NOT a
biography, though.  It is meant as a personal view, as you will see below.

I must be one of the very few people who possesses the soundtrack LP.
On the LP sleeve Russell sets out what he was doing in the movie and I
reproduce it now in answer you your question as to what it is all about.
I think Russell explains himself very well:

Ken Russell writes:

   Well, what does Gustav Mahler, and his music tell me?
   According to the composer his first symphony is about the life
   of a man.
   The second - an affirmation of the Catholic faith - deals with
   man's death and Resurrection.
   The third, which has movements entitled 'What the Rocks Tell Me',
   'What the animals in the forest tell me', 'What night tells me',
   'What the bells tell me', and 'What love tells me', is a hymn to
   pantheism.
   The fourth is a childhood vision ending with a child's dream of
   heaven.
   The fifth, which gets a funeral march mixed up with a wedding
   march, has been nicknamed 'The Schizophrenic'.
   The sixth is autobiographical.
   The seventh is called 'Song of The Night'.
   The eighth is about the spirit of creation.
   The ninth, like its composer, is preoccupied with death.
   The tenth was unfinished.

Death creeps into at least five of these symphonies as well as 'The Song
of The Earth', and the 'Kindertotenlieder': five songs on the death of
children.  So Mahler himself really dictated the content of my film and
in a sense the musical shape as well - that of a Rondo.  Rondo form is A B
A C A D A E etc.  In this case A, the recurring theme, is Love - the Love
of Mahler for his wife - B C D E etc.  are all variations on the theme of
Death including the death of Innocence, Responsibility, Aspiration, Trust,
Understanding, etc.  Some of the Death themes are also connected with the
main theme and one of these is developed at some length.  It is probably
the most important of all - The Death of Love.

There is a theory that Mahler associated the death of love - or the threat
to love - with military band music.  As a child - he was one of eleven -
he saw his crippled mother beaten by his father Bernhard, and her life
made a misery by his constant infidelity, one example of which young Gustav
reputedly witnessed in his own home.  During this period the family lived
next door to a barracks and it doesn't take a Sigmund Freud (who once
psychoanalysed Mahler) to put two and two together and associate the
Military March the boy heard daily over the adjoining brick wall, with
the unhappiness, sickness and death he saw around him.

During the last few years of his life Mahler was haunted by the fear
that his wife would leave him.  It seems only natural then that the most
romantic music Mahler ever wrote - the second subject of the first movement
of his sixth symphony - and which he said was his wife Alma - is disrupted
by brutal military march rhythms.  Mahler saw his love for his wife
threatened and he metamorphosed this into childhood memory - the military
march.

When Mahler died Alma went through three more husbands and God knows how
many more lovers before joining him, so time proved Mahler's fears to be
justified.  I have therefore distilled all the men interested in Alma into
one symbolic figure - a soldier - who embodied Walter Gropius, the famous
architect, and all the other army of admirers at her feet.  In a sense,
Alma seemed bent on paying Mahler out by associating herself with the cream
of Viennese culture after his death because of the spiritual death she
suffered herself.  At the time of their marriage she was a budding composer
in her own right but her talent was nipped in the bud by Mahler to whom she
had to sacrifice herself and her art, causing her to become, in her own
words, nothing but his shadow.  So the film is also about a conflict of
personalities and the reluctant sacrifice the weaker made for the stronger,
and consequently about betrayal as well.

Mahler also betrayed himself when he changed his religion ostensibly for
social and financial reasons.  Cosima Wagner ruled the musical world of
Austria and to 'get to the top' is his bread and butter job as a conductor,
Mahler simply had to renounce his Judaism and embrace a religion acceptable
to her.  In a sense this was almost like Siegfried's courtship of Brunhilde
- only Mahler was no Aryan like Wagner's hero, so he had to become one.  As
any convert knows, there is an awful lot of mystery to go through before
Baptism.  Wagner created a religion of his own based on the mythical
claptrap of old Norsk Legend, which his famous opera cycle The Ring is all
about, coupled with his manic anti-Semitism as propounded in his opera
Parsifal - one of the philosophical foundations on which Hitler's Nazi
Germany was built.

Bearing all this in mind there was no way to treat Mahler's 'Conversion'
in terms other than those I used in the film - if the true implications
as they appear to me were to be realised.

On yet another fantasy sequence Mahler appears to be cremated by SS men.
When I first planned this his pall bearers were not conceived as being
anything other than the usual mourners, albeit military ones.  But in
depicting the nightmare in which the dead Mahler sees his wife desecrating
his memory with her lovers in the future, (the most prominent being Max,
who has already been established in the film as the symbolic threat to love
- the military man) it became inevitable: put an Austrian officer of 1900
into a uniform of mourning and you have an SS man.  Take a Jew pretending
not to be a Jew, project him a few years into the future and you have
Mahler - or someone like him - being carried off to the crematorium -
alive.

Many of my films on composers evolve through a stream of consciousness
in which the man and the myth, the music and its meaning, time, place,
dream and fact all flow and blend into the into the mainstream of the film
itself.  The lifespan of a man is measured in years, the screen-time of a
of a film on him is measured in minutes.  Given this fact and the nature of
the medium and so far as I am concerned the impressionistic technique works
best.  When every second counts it is often necessary to say two things at
once which is why I frequently introduce symbolism into scenes of reality.
For instance, every dress Alma Mahler wears in the film has a symbolic
meaning.  This is just one example
 - there are many more, there for all to see or feel, even if
subconsciously.

Mahler's music has many interpreters: there are conductors like Bernard
Haitink, Bernstein, Solti, Barbirolli, Kubelik, Wyn Morris, Bruno Walter,
Mengelberg, Abravanel, Leinsdorf - God knows how many.  They all have their
own ideas of what Mahler's music is about.  They all see different things
in it.

My film is simply about some of the things I feel when I think of Mahler's
life and listen to his music.  It is by no means a definitive view, there
are as many facets to the mystery of Mahler's music as there are lovers of
it, and of which, I am happy to say, I am one.  Ken Russell

Tony Duggan, England.
Mahler CD recordings survey is at:
http://www.musicweb.uk.net/Mahler/index.html