http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/the_tls/article4429303.ece From The Times Literary Supplement July 30, 2008 Mahler triumphant A great composer nears the end of a great biographical voyage Hugh Wood The long voyage is nearly over, and the great ship is at last approaching land. But we are not quite yet in harbour; for Henry-Louis de La Grange's revision of Gustav Mahler: Volume One still awaits translation into English. Then the labours of a dedicated lifetime may be at an end. Meanwhile, we have here, at over 1,750 pages, the longest of the four volumes, and in every way the climactic one. So much in it is new, or newly re-explored, or freshly and radically re-interpreted. The portrait that emerges is surprising because it is so straightforward: that of a great conductor at the height of his powers and a great composer striking out boldly into new territory. What has previously been obscured and diminished by mythmaking, melodrama and malice is now at last given its full stature. That this new depiction is the underlying intention of the author is made quite clear from the first page: to realize how well he has succeeded, it is necessary to read the whole book. But this is not just a biography: it is more of a Mahler-Lexicon, almost a history of the age. De La Grange has found himself irresistibly drawn down every avenue that offers itself, and his interests are wide. By the time one has read through all thirty-three of the Appendices, and has discovered in the last one the recipe for Mahler's favourite dessert (Marillonknodel - and it sounds delicious), one feels not only triumphant but replete. This is first and foremost a chronicle of the American years, giving them their proper importance. The departure from Vienna with which Volume Three ended was not perhaps the calamitous watershed it has been made out to be (and seemed to be at the time). To a large extent the divided, seasonal nature of Mahler's life simply continued. He became a commuter not between Maiernigg and Vienna, but across the Atlantic, between Toblach, in the Tyrol, and New York. Just as he had latterly never composed during the winter in Vienna, so there is little sign of any substantial composition being conceived or undertaken in the United States. But in severely limited summer spells at Toblach, two and a half masterpieces were written: Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth Symphony and the incomplete Tenth. Europe remained a hive of activity for Mahler: he had never been busier. There were earlier symphonies still to be given their premieres: the Seventh in Prague, the Eighth in Munich, the latter providing the greatest public occasion in his composing career. There were three expeditions to countries to which the Mahler writ did not extend - two to Paris, where his Second Symphony had the sort of reception you would expect, and one to Rome, which was a disaster. But when he visited the Netherlands at the end of September 1909 for a performance of the Seventh, Mahler found that he had built up a group of faithful friends there. These three years were full not only of public events but also private encounters with the most lively and active of his contemporaries. The only country scarcely represented, and lacking too in performances, was England. Delius may have met Mahler at Leipzig in the 1880s, and certainly did at the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein in Essen in 1906 (performances of Sea-Drift and Mahler Six). He tried in 1908 to organize a Festival of New Music in Liverpool, and asked Mahler to come and conduct his Second Symphony. There was a friendly exchange of letters but the event never came off. A more long-lasting friend was Ferruccio Busoni, whom Mahler had already known for some years. They met again in New York at New Year, 1910. Mahler immediately offered to conduct Busoni's Turandot Suite, which he did that same March. Busoni also appeared as soloist under Mahler's baton. The warmth of their friendship is reflected in Busoni's letters to his wife. And he was there at the end: the Italian composer travelled on the boat which took Mahler on his last journey back to Europe. Mahler's links with Charles Ives are altogether more tenuous. Round a minimum of fact about Ives's Third Symphony, which Mahler may or may not have seen in a copyist's office, has been woven a cloud of myth. Dispelling this 'might have been' demonstrates de La Grange's forensic skill at its briskest and most rigorous. A startling avatar was the appearance at Mahler's door of the twenty-five-year-old Edgard Varese, bearing the score of his orchestral work Bourgogne. If Mahler had felt more certain of his position with the New York Philharmonic, it is (I suppose) just possible that he might have dared a performance. But he sent Varese on his way with kind words and a letter of recommendation. Much closer to his heart - and extremely thoroughly narrated by de La Grange - was Mahler's championship of Schoenberg, to which we shall return. Mahler's time was not altogether spent with musicians. The account of his twelve sittings for Rodin in April 1909 is fascinating. Both men were previously unaware of the other's existence, never mind fame: they were informed of both by friends - a task made easier, not more difficult, by Rodin's ignorance of German and Mahler's of French. Stranger was the descent on Toblach of the biologist Paul Kammerer. Music - and Mahler's in particular - was one of Kammerer's passions; another was, unfortunately, Alma Mahler, who left a highly coloured character sketch of him. But perhaps Mahler's most celebrated non-musical encounter was with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, where Freud was on holiday. Freud's account of the meeting, made long after in conversation with Princess Marie Bonaparte (his patient, colleague and confidante) has never been more fully or sympathetically treated, although the subsequent psychiatric discussion is somewhat overextended. De La Grange's narrative is greatly enhanced by substantial setpieces, of which the visit to Freud is one. The book begins with another. It is not until page 43 that the Kaiserin Auguste Victoria, carrying Mahler and his wife to America, sails past the Statue of Liberty of the morning of December 22, 1907. Over the previous forty pages we have been plunged into all the vitality, competitiveness and enthusiasm of New York's musical and social life in the years before Mahler's arrival. It is an Edith Wharton world (she is quoted twice) of old money competing with new, both intent on raising up monuments to their newly achieved privilege and social grandeur. Of course, there is a passion above all for opera. The Metropolitan Opera building had been completed in 1883 and Anton Seidl had initiated Wagner seasons throughout the 1880s. International artists soon found their way to the Met: in 1903, Caruso made his debut there and starred in the two succeeding seasons. But by this time the Met had a formidable rival in the shape of Oscar Hammerstein and his newly built Manhattan Opera House - to which he enticed Nellie Melba at New Year 1907. Heinrich Conried (in charge at the Met) could only riposte with Feodor Chaliapine, whom the critics panned. Conried had to deal, too, with a panic of the puritans over a proposed Salome: and in the autumn there was (coincidentally) a financial panic on Wall Street. It was into this frenetic and overheated atmosphere that Mahler was introduced. He must have felt himself quite at home - especially with trouble over Salome. Mahler made his Met debut with a Tristan which was received enthusiastically by the leading critics, though less so by the general public. That the box-office takings (given in detail by de La Grange) did not dramatically fall off may be put down to the section of the New York public who were not confined in their interest to Italian opera, among them a large German-speaking community (15,000 in the 1880s) who already knew and loved their Tristan. Mozart's operas were a different matter. A certain amount of advocacy was needed for Don Giovanni, prepared with a cast unused to singing Mozart before an audience unused to hearing it. Walkure and Siegfried followed, but the final triumph of this first season was Fidelio on March 20, 1908, universally praised by the critics - even those who had previously declared themselves in the opposite camp - but sparsely attended by the public. Mahler had deliberately chosen for his debut season five of his greatest achievements in Vienna, and so it was not surprising that his thoughts occasionally returned there, and particularly to his old colleague and collaborator, Alfred Roller. The two men were in correspondence. Roller's letters reflected the fact that he was a survivor under Felix Weingartner, and only hanging on by the skin of his teeth - the customary situation for those left behind under a new and alien regime. Mahler - for both artistic and personal reasons - would have liked to have him at his side in New York. A long letter to Roller advises him as to how to bring this about, in very down-to-earth terms. It also suggests that he, Mahler, is to be in charge of German opera at the Met, and Arturo Toscanini in charge of Italian opera. It wasn't to work out like that, and Roller never came to work in America. De La Grange writes: 'Mahler, who had been so relieved to leave a city of intrigues for a New World that he hoped would be free of them, had clearly been mistaken'. But at least these intrigues seemed to lack the petty and vicious infighting of their Viennese predecessors, and one of them at least worked in his favour. Mrs George Sheldon, a 'resolute, forceful woman' - and, as the wife of a banker, a rich one - was intent on creating for New York a permanent symphony orchestra of the calibre of the Boston Symphony, and she had her eye on Mahler to conduct it. And there was another conductor in town who wished to conduct Tristan at the Met: Toscanini. The quadrille that was then danced was too intricate to be described here, but by the autumn of 1908 Mahler had been engaged to conduct three orchestral concerts with the New York Symphony Orchestra during spring 1909. Toscanini conducted Aida at the Met on November 16, 1908 and (admittedly some months after the triumphal performance of the work by Mahler) at last had his will with Tristan on November 2, 1909. These New York years are very thoroughly documented by de La Grange - one imagines as never before. His wholesale reprinting of the main bulk of newspaper comment by the city's critical fraternity may be felt by some to be itself open to criticism. But I believe it to be justified, and indeed one of the book's special qualities. The leading critics are each equipped with pocket biographies, which reveal them to be impressively well-educated individuals. Richard Aldrich of the New York Times; William Henderson, originally of the Times, but who had moved to the Sun; Henry Krehbiel of the New York Tribune; Henry T. Finck of the Evening Post - these four were the Old Guard, but many others are also cited. Not all were friends to Mahler: Krehbiel was conspicuously an enemy, and his enmity outlived its victim, spilling over into the obituary columns. But these were all cultured men who wrote well and intelligently. Their writings are invaluable in building up a record of how the music of the day was regarded, what values it was judged by, into what categories of judgment it fell. Indeed, since it was long before the days of universal high-quality recording, these written accounts are the nearest to any permanent record of the performance itself that we have. The two seasons (the second curtailed by cruel fate) that Mahler spent with the New York Philharmonic were certainly the busiest, maybe the summit, of his career. Enterprising programmes abounded, not all of them to our taste today. A series of planned 'historical' concerts began with a medley of Bach movements from the orchestral suites - Mahler's big-band Bach arrangements would scarcely pass muster now. There was, of course, a Beethoven cycle. The Pastoral seems to have been given most frequently, and the Fifth was greatly praised. (The near absence of Symphonies Two, Four and Eight shows how the times have altered in a post-Stravinskian world.) But he gave all the Schumann symphonies, and they were perhaps better for a little Mahlerian retouching. A programme consisting of Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique, the Liszt-Schubert Wanderer Fantasie and the Prelude to Meistersinger was daring and original as a piece of programme planning. Mahler gave in to New York taste when he programmed Tchaikovsky's Pathetique: he much preferred Tchaikovsky's operas. So it was fortunate that, with his residual contract with the Met, he had the chance to conduct the American premiere of Pique Dame. Even more modern music was represented: Strauss (Also Sprach Zarathustra, Don Juan, Ein Heldenleben, Till Eulenspiegel, Tod und Verklarung); Busoni (not only Turandot but also the world premiere of his Berceuse elegiaque - given under tragic circumstances, for this was Mahler's very last concert, on February 21, 1911); Elgar (Sea Pictures, Enigma Variations). There was even some Debussy. At the rehearsal of the Nocturnes, Mahler said to the orchestra, 'This should be played like a mist . . . don't misunderstand me! - I don't mean Mist in German' (in German, it is a quite different four-letter word). Much earlier, but only according to Alma, he had briefly said of Pelleas, 'Sie stort nicht' (It doesn't disturb). In the same season as Nocturnes, Mahler gave L'Apres-midi and in the following one Iberia and Rondes de Printemps - the latter only published in that same year of 1910. But the honeymoon was over. By the beginning of the 1910-11 season, difficulties with the management - and, later, over aspects of Mahler's relations with the orchestra - began to make themselves felt. The Guarantors, it seemed, expected him to conduct twenty extra concerts in the forthcoming season for nothing. Also they were dismayed by some of his programmes. In point of fact, they were making a profit, and Mahler was already working to his limit. His tenor friend from Vienna, Leo Slezak, had been involved in the Pique Dame production and reported meeting the composer in a depressed state: 'a tired, sick man . . . mild-mannered and sad'. But this was written long afterward with the benefit of hindsight and possibly under the influence of rumours already spread about. And when quite suddenly Mahler was removed from the scene altogether and the New York critics prepared to write their memorial notices, the stain began to spread retrospectively. Mahler's medical history was soon confused with his career problems and two and two began to make five. There was a particularly distasteful episode in midwinter 1910-11 when Mahler began to be so ill that he had reluctantly to cancel concerts. This was portrayed as some diplomatic illness behind the screen of which Mahler was thought to be negotiating his departure - a piece of viciousness as well as deadly irony. His stand-in was praised up; his successor stood ready waiting in the wings. Why then, de La Grange asks, this 'romantic myth' about the American years and the picture of Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony as 'the swansongs of a man who was worn out, at the end of his tether and full of forebodings about impending death'? How did it arise? De La Grange lays the blame on Alma. He devotes practically the whole of his eighth chapter, some 117 pages, to a thorough, perceptive and quite ruthless analysis of her extraordinary personality. Maybe there is no need to throw even a twig further on to the bonfire of moral disapproval in which she is already consumed. But she continues to exert an unholy fascination with her monstrous egocentricity, her fantasist's self-deceptions, her lust for power and status, her apparent sexual voracity masking an icy emotional frigidity. This nightmare lady was surely in her time the Pamela Widmerpool of Central Europe. But Alma was no fool. She was shrewd and intelligent, and had a genuine gift, not so much for composing songs, but for writing - and she had the instincts of a romantic novelist. During Mahler's life she lived in a solipsistic world that she had created, and drew others into believing in it, too. After his death she managed, simplifying and softening the truth here, sharpening up a good story or an anecdote there, to transform her memories into the fiction (or faction) of a cheap but intensely readable novelette. And then she published: this was the 'romantic myth', and we have all read and enjoyed it. She offers a peculiar difficulty to the biographer. Simply: she was a bad witness. Sometimes she was careless or approximate (a time, a date, a year) with the truth through sheer fecklessness. More often, she was cavalier with it, tampering with the evidence by omission or distortion, striking out passages in Mahler's letters which did not please her, rewriting episodes in their life together in order to place herself more firmly centre stage. Often she is the only witness, and the biographer has to depend on her while doubting with every sentence her capacity for telling the truth. Everything that passed through her hands must be regarded as tainted. It is an insoluble problem, even for a master biographer like de La Grange. Luckily, not everything did pass through her hands. A recent discovery was immune from Alma's revisionism. De La Grange was given access to a collection of some 3,000 letters that she wrote to her lover Walter Gropius, together with the drafts of some of Gropius's replies. They communicated largely through the poste restante and the treachery of Mahler's mother-in-law. The affair went on until Mahler's death, and ended (after a tempestuous interlude with Oskar Kokoschka) after she married and then left Gropius. The last phase was a grotesque emotional menage a trois with the Atlantic in between, Gropius lost in admiration for Mahler, Alma merely irritated by Mahler's genuinely reawoken affection for her. Gropius himself was a curious character who (in his own biographer's words) 'had a tendency to take up with women who were married or who already had a male partner, and then to get in touch with the husband or partner'. Which is exactly what he did. The whole business caused Mahler a great deal of pain: the anguish which is scrawled across the manuscript of the Tenth Symphony was real enough. That imperfect masterwork remains as a permanent memorial of those days. Mahler behaved well and he never stopped loving= Alma. De La Grange emphasizes several times that Mahler's gaze was always turned towards the future. His friendship with Schoenberg, who was only thirty-six when Mahler died, is an instance of this. When Mahler left for the States, Schoenberg was shattered; on his return to Vienna, Schoenberg was the first person that Mahler would enquire after. This was a time for Schoenberg of concert scandals and poverty. Mahler did his best to alleviate the latter, appealing successfully to a couple of rich friends for bursaries and to Emil Hertzka, who had newly founded Universal-Edition, that he should add Schoenberg's name to his publisher's list. In a letter (which de La Grange says is 'unpublished and little known') from June 1909, Schoenberg thanks Mahler for these services and goes on to say that he is working on 'some short scenes for orchestra' - probably the first mention of the Five Orchestral Pieces. Later that same summer, Mahler and the Schoenbergians got together on a rumbustious social occasion - well narrated by Alma, but with the wrong date attached. That Christmas in New York, Mahler received a letter about his Seventh Symphony, of which Schoenberg had just heard the first Viennese performance. Whatever reservations Schoenberg had once had were now swept away: 'I am now one of your disciples lock, stock and barrel'. Mahler wrote back warmly, in the only surviving letter from him to Schoenberg, 'I have taken your quartet along, and sometimes study it. But I am finding it difficult'. But as Schoenberg's creative pace quickens, so his poverty increases, 1910 being the nadir - the year of the Harmonielehre and Die Gluckliche Hand. The libretto of the latter, together with a copy of the Klavierstucke Op 11, Schoenberg sent to the Mahlers. Schoenberg had, in these frantic circumstances, taken up painting. But it was not until after Mahler's death that Schoenberg discovered (through a letter from Anton Webern) that three of the paintings that had been sold had been bought anonymously by Mahler. The wreath laid in Grinzing cemetery by Schoenberg and his pupils recorded 'the undying example of [Mahler's] work and influence'. That day of the funeral, Schoenberg is said to have conceived, if not written, a piano piece - two chords, an appoggiatura, a sigh, the wispy hint of a ninth chord - in order to recapture the essence of those immense symphonies: it became the last of his Six Little Piano Pieces Op 19. Now, almost a century later, we can set against that tiny tribute a great one, which will be seen as one of the oustanding musical biographies of the past century: the four volumes of Henry-Louis de La Grange's Gustav= Mahler. HUGH WOOD Henry-Louis de La Grange GUSTAV MAHLER Volume Four: A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911) 1,777pp. Oxford University Press. $70 (US $140). 978 0 19 816387 9 Hugh Wood's setting of Geoffrey Hill's sequence of poems Tenebrae, for chorus and ensemble, premiered last year, along with four other new works. Copyright 2008 Times Newspapers Ltd. 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