Tony Duggan <[log in to unmask]>:

>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.

I found also some parts corny, some parts a lie, other parts boring and
many parts very ridiculous.

Tony quotes directly from Ken Russell's own hand:

>...  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.

Does Russell really "knows his Mahler?".  What about the first movement
of the 3rd (the "pantheist hymn" in Russell's own words)?.  What about the
I Nachtmusik at the 7th? I think that he never had a clue about Mahler's
music.  That's probably why he bought every commonplace available at the
supermarket about this subject.

>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.

Another beautiful example of supermarket analysis of music.  Reading this
lines of Russell's own hand, I can explain myself many features of his
"film".

>Mahler also betrayed himself when he changed his religion ostensibly for
>social and financial reasons.

This is still a matter of discussion.  There are many ingenuous people
(among I count myself) who thinks that Mahler didn't change his religion
only -- or"ostensibly" at least-- due to social and financial reasons.
Besides, the way in which Russell depicts this in the movie is "ostensibly"
disgusting.

>Mahler simply had to renounce his Judaism and embrace a religion
>acceptable to her (Cosima Liszt).  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.

So, Mahler was converted from Judaism into "Wagner's Arian Pseudo-Religion"
for thirty golden pieces.  Well.  The error of Russell (though he is not
the only) lies precisely on the absolute underestimation of the weight of
Catholic culture and heritage in Mahler's own simbolic mind-frame.

>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.

This remark means more or less: "there were other ways to treat it, but
the most scandalous always appears as the most worth of confidence ".

>(...) put an Austrian officer of 1900 into a uniform of mourning and you
>have an SS man.

This speaks for itself.  Was Russsell aware about the kind of stuff the SS
were made of?.

>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.

I don't know exactly what does this means.  I have a suspect, but I don't
even want to think about it.

Pablo Massa
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