Joel Hill wrote:
>I forgot to mention that in addition to T L-Shaped Room, Bravo is also
>showing "Mahler" on October 6, 7, 22 and 23. This is Ken Russell's 1994
>film. Don't know anything about it, but I am sure that other Listers do.
Not a biography so much as Russell's fantasia on themes from the life of GM
and his music. In that it has its high points and its lows. Some of its
highs are very high with some striking images and some fascinating ideas.
However, the lows are very low indeed with lots of Russells apalling talent
to annoy on show. Watch it if you can. I guarantee you will find it an
experience and will gain something positive from it.
I must be one of the few people alive who can claim to own a copy of the
soundtrack LP (yes, there was one.) On the back Russell himself writes
about what he was trying to do in the film. It shows him playing fast
and loose with some of the known facts - the number of Alma's husbands,
to mention but one instance. The point about the film having the structure
of a Rondo is worth knowing.
Russell Article:
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.
My (developing) Mahler recordings survey is at:
http://www.musicweb.force9.co.uk/music/Mahler/index.html
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