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Date: | Thu, 22 Jun 2000 23:39:44 +1000 |
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Tony Duggan writes:
>More importantly, when he was writing the Ninth Symphony, Mahler was NOT
>"faced with his own imminent death". He was not in that position until
>about February 1911 by which time all of his music had been composed.
As a physician I know perfectly well that from a medical point of view this
was not the case with Mahler at that point in time, it one means that he
was certainly not on his death bed. Those interested might want to know
that descriptions of Mahler changing his once very vigorous and athletic
conducting style to one of much greater reserve due to the occurrence of
chest pain on exertion sounds to me a lot like angina pectoris. There are
descriptions of him being doubled over with chest pain during rehearsals.
Today I would have been recommending a cardiac catheterisation study with
a view to percutaneous angioplasty or coronary by-pass surgery along with
a battery of cardiac medications. I am often surprised how much physicians
were able to diagnose in those days and I suspect that Mahler's physicians
would have told him that he had a grave heart condition and that nothing
could be done. In those days the physicians were less likely to forget
that their practice was an art above all and in their diagnostic acumen
in this case I suspect they were absolutely right. Bizarrely for us today
Mahler suddenly started eating meat as he became increasing obsessed with
the idea that this was essential for him, whereas he had been a strict
vegetarian beforehand. It probably didn't help his cause one bit.
Rheumatic valvular heart disease (as well as syphilitic aortic valve
disease) was rampant in those days so I wouldn't have been surprised if he
needed a valve replacement too. Valvular disease can certainly exacerbate
any coexisting angina which otherwise may not have been symptomatic. I
strongly suspect he may have had consequent cardiac failure as one of the
leading aetiological grounds of his untimely demise, although I have not
read an account detailed enough to really diagnose accurately what he
ultimately died from.
Death had always been imminent to Mahler. His younger brother died
as he was growing up for example. This is why the first song of das
Lied insists in reminding us of the miserable brevity of life and all
it's "rotting trifles". Anyway Mahler seemed to have always felt the
immediacy even his own mortality, a topic about which thanks to Wagner
and Schopenhauer, had been close to his heart anyway. As the 6th symphony
and Kindertotenlieder demonstrate, even at times of seeming happiness he
was still obsessed with the subject. I tend to sympathise with the view
that the last threeworks, das Lied, the 9th and 10th symphony represent
his response to his being forced to come face to face with death not
as a merely abstract philosophical concept but a death which, as Martin
Heidegger was to point out in his philosophical analysis of death, was
now his VERY OWN. The so called farewell trilogy therefore represents
not a response to Death as a physiologically 'imminent' event but as a the
deepest contemplation of the most 'imminent' of all emotional-philosophical
possibilities.
Satoshi Akima
Sydney, Australia
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