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Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis
The life of the brilliant composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was punctuated by crisis. His parents both died in 1889, leaving him the reluctant head of a household of siblings. He himself endured a nearly fatal medical ordeal in 1901. A beloved daughter died in 1907 and that same year, under pressure, Mahler resigned from the directorship of the Vienna Opera. In each case Mahler more than mastered the trauma; he triumphed in the creation of new major musical works.
The final crisis of Mahler’s career occurred in 1910, when he learned that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The revelation precipitated a breakdown while Mahler was working on his Tenth Symphony. The anguished, suicidal notes Mahler scrawled across the manuscript of the unfinished symphony revealed his troubled state. A four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, restored the composer’s equilibrium. Although Mahler left little record of what transpired in Leiden, Stuart Feder has reconstructed the encounter on the basis of surviving evidence. The cumulative stresses of the crises in Mahler’s life, in particular Alma’s betrayal, left him physically and emotionally vulnerable. He became ill and died soon after in 1911.
At once a sophisticated consideration of Mahler’s work and a psychologically acute portrait of the life events that shaped it, this book extends our thinking about one of the great masters of modern music.
The final crisis of Mahler’s career occurred in 1910, when he learned that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The revelation precipitated a breakdown while Mahler was working on his Tenth Symphony. The anguished, suicidal notes Mahler scrawled across the manuscript of the unfinished symphony revealed his troubled state. A four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, restored the composer’s equilibrium. Although Mahler left little record of what transpired in Leiden, Stuart Feder has reconstructed the encounter on the basis of surviving evidence. The cumulative stresses of the crises in Mahler’s life, in particular Alma’s betrayal, left him physically and emotionally vulnerable. He became ill and died soon after in 1911.
At once a sophisticated consideration of Mahler’s work and a psychologically acute portrait of the life events that shaped it, this book extends our thinking about one of the great masters of modern music.
- GenresMusicNonfiction
368 pages, Hardcover
First published July 11, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
May 25, 2024
Gustav Mahler grew, rose, thrived despite his sickly, thin frame, a world stained by antisemitism, a rivalrous circle, a dissatisfied wife, and a family (and his own outlook) haunted by death. Perhaps it is no surprise that I could not put this book down. He kept finding a way to move forward until he couldn’t; kept thinking he wouldn’t live long until he was right; kept being the target of small-minded critics and rivals until the world agreed he was brilliant. Many championed him in his lifetime; Gustav Klimt was one of 200 who gathered at the train station to wish he and Alma a fond farewell from Vienna.
May 16, 2007
Chapters on Freud's meeting with Mahler and Alma's post-Gustav life particularly good reading.
June 18, 2022
I think I could have done without the constant psychoanalysis (and not just Freud's). I understand that this book was meant to focus on Mahler's crises and mental hardships, but at some point it became a bit repetitive, and by the end I wasn't so interested in what Freud himself actually had to say about Mahler. I liked the first few chapters. As I don't know much about Mahler generally, perhaps it was my fault for picking this book as one of my first biographies on him; it might be better appreciated by a true fan of his works.
January 17, 2020
Brilliantly researched, carefully written, and lovingly complete. A great tribute to a great composer/conductor.
July 20, 2012
Mahler's death wishes toward his brothers, especially Otto, had been gathering momentum prior to von Bulow's memorial service. In the course of the creative effort to find a suitable resolution to the symphony, these wishes briefly courted Beethoven's ideal of universal brotherhood as encoded in his ninth symphony. While emulation would have effected a psychological transformation from fratricide to its opposite in warding off unacceptable wishes, the risk of imitating Beethoven was artistically unacceptable. The fratricidal themes that had flared up in undisguised form a few months earlier during the revision of Das kalgende Lied found compromise in a new idea, that of "resurrection". P.57
In fact, Alma did alienate Mahler from this circle of trusted friends and they never forgave her for it. Mahler no longer saw them informally, although there was correspondence on celebratory occasions or in the case of illness. p.110
When death occurs so suddenly [speaking of the death of Mahler's daughter], grief is often accompanied by an unnamed terror, a sense of vulnerability to the unknown that leads one to see the comfortingly familiar among people and places. [seems like this was a theme that ran pretty continuously through Mahler's life.] p. 140
This following passage is the key to the book and to understanding Mahler:
Mahler, who had sustained so many losses earlier in his life, was no stranger to the human impulse to repeat experiences. As Alma pointedly observed, Mahler was "the perpetual grief seeker". Unconsciously, he had courted loss in the very choice of Alma Schindler, whom he knew to be flirtatious and pursued by many men. In this sense, from the beginning of their relationship he had taken a high risk. For Mahler himself, mourning through music had long been the agency of mastery. In one compartment of a complex creative and emotional life, Mahler was in a state of endless mourning. The theme found its way into even his earliest unfinished opera project, Ernst von Schwaben, a projected heroic memorial for beloved Ernst, one year younger than himself, who had died at thirteen. ... The trend can be traced to the composer's childhood, when two siblings, born in 1864 and 1865, each died a year later. The five or six year old Mahler was said to have written his first composition at that time: whether real in the sense of scribbled or performed, or merely imagined, its title was "Polka with Introductory Funeral March." Young Gustav was already the ironist and mourner. pp 142-143.
The manner in which Mahler realized the final moments of ewigkeit [Das Lied von der Erde] musically is nothing short of miraculous. In these last measures not only is there no resolution on the singer's part (as the sixth on A is famously added to the C major tonic chord) but the D is firmly in the ear as well, owing to the repetitions of "ewig." Thus all of the notes of hte pentatonic scale are sounded, as if encompassing the entire universe forever in an aesthetic statement of endlessness. p 151
Thus Alma led a double life that summer, for as she continued to write melancholy letters to Gustav, she pursued an ecstatic affair with Gropius. Three interlocking triangles eventually emerged among the summer drama's personae. The first was that of the lovers and Gustav Mahler. The second included the lovers and Anna Moll, who would shortly become Alma's confidante and accomplice. Anna would be privy to all, while Mahler was kept in the dark, trusting Alma and grateful to Anna for what he perceived to be her unstinting familial help. Thus the third triangle, of Mahler, Alma, and Anna Moll, was marked by deception and betrayal. The ever shifting interplay among these four individuals would continue for the remainder of Mahler's life and formed a hidden layer to his final illness and death scarcely a year later. p 181
The somatic autopsy does not answer all the questions. Autopsies do not always disclose the cause of death, nor do they invariably demonstrate why people die when they do. What people die with is not the same as what people die from. Furthermore, what prompts a person to become ill, enter the preterminal phase, and die at a particular time in a particular way cannot always be ascribed entirely to a [somatic] disease process. The final illness is a psychosocial as well as a medical event. p. 273
In fact, Alma did alienate Mahler from this circle of trusted friends and they never forgave her for it. Mahler no longer saw them informally, although there was correspondence on celebratory occasions or in the case of illness. p.110
When death occurs so suddenly [speaking of the death of Mahler's daughter], grief is often accompanied by an unnamed terror, a sense of vulnerability to the unknown that leads one to see the comfortingly familiar among people and places. [seems like this was a theme that ran pretty continuously through Mahler's life.] p. 140
This following passage is the key to the book and to understanding Mahler:
Mahler, who had sustained so many losses earlier in his life, was no stranger to the human impulse to repeat experiences. As Alma pointedly observed, Mahler was "the perpetual grief seeker". Unconsciously, he had courted loss in the very choice of Alma Schindler, whom he knew to be flirtatious and pursued by many men. In this sense, from the beginning of their relationship he had taken a high risk. For Mahler himself, mourning through music had long been the agency of mastery. In one compartment of a complex creative and emotional life, Mahler was in a state of endless mourning. The theme found its way into even his earliest unfinished opera project, Ernst von Schwaben, a projected heroic memorial for beloved Ernst, one year younger than himself, who had died at thirteen. ... The trend can be traced to the composer's childhood, when two siblings, born in 1864 and 1865, each died a year later. The five or six year old Mahler was said to have written his first composition at that time: whether real in the sense of scribbled or performed, or merely imagined, its title was "Polka with Introductory Funeral March." Young Gustav was already the ironist and mourner. pp 142-143.
The manner in which Mahler realized the final moments of ewigkeit [Das Lied von der Erde] musically is nothing short of miraculous. In these last measures not only is there no resolution on the singer's part (as the sixth on A is famously added to the C major tonic chord) but the D is firmly in the ear as well, owing to the repetitions of "ewig." Thus all of the notes of hte pentatonic scale are sounded, as if encompassing the entire universe forever in an aesthetic statement of endlessness. p 151
Thus Alma led a double life that summer, for as she continued to write melancholy letters to Gustav, she pursued an ecstatic affair with Gropius. Three interlocking triangles eventually emerged among the summer drama's personae. The first was that of the lovers and Gustav Mahler. The second included the lovers and Anna Moll, who would shortly become Alma's confidante and accomplice. Anna would be privy to all, while Mahler was kept in the dark, trusting Alma and grateful to Anna for what he perceived to be her unstinting familial help. Thus the third triangle, of Mahler, Alma, and Anna Moll, was marked by deception and betrayal. The ever shifting interplay among these four individuals would continue for the remainder of Mahler's life and formed a hidden layer to his final illness and death scarcely a year later. p 181
The somatic autopsy does not answer all the questions. Autopsies do not always disclose the cause of death, nor do they invariably demonstrate why people die when they do. What people die with is not the same as what people die from. Furthermore, what prompts a person to become ill, enter the preterminal phase, and die at a particular time in a particular way cannot always be ascribed entirely to a [somatic] disease process. The final illness is a psychosocial as well as a medical event. p. 273
February 19, 2008
I found this book disappointing: while well-researched and full of fascinating anecdotes, there is little in the way of insight (spoiler alert: Mahler was obsessed with death). The book sets itself up as if it is going to explore the three big crises in Mahler's life and how he sublimated them all into artistic creation; instead, it seems structured so that the meeting of Freud and Mahler in Mahler's last year is the High Noon showdown, which takes up a disproportionate fraction of the book in relation to its percentage of illuminating content. The writing style is also leaden to an extent that the occasional surprising exclamation point reminds you that Feder might have actually processed some of the information he is presenting here. Even worse, discussion of the music is almost entirely absent, other than references to the fact that certain works actually exist or the perfunctory platitude lauding Mahler's genius ("Never before has there been music like this"--thanks).
Still, die-hard fans like me will probably enjoy learning more about Mahler in whatever form that takes. The book is not a waste of time, but all that enriching it's not, either.
Still, die-hard fans like me will probably enjoy learning more about Mahler in whatever form that takes. The book is not a waste of time, but all that enriching it's not, either.
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews