Mahler's chaotically brilliant, Freudian compositions were overshadowed by his conducting, writes Eileen Battersby
If any composer may be said to have captured the essence of the angst and chaos that is - and was - the 20th century, it is Gustav Mahler (1869-1911), whose symphonic legacy is also his heartfelt spiritual autobiography. Caught between sophistication and naivety, it beguiles and irritates, provokes and bewilders; looks beyond its time yet also acknowledges the masters who went before. Here is introspective music at its most Freudian. Mahler justifiably considered himself stalked by fate and his approach to composition is framed by his metaphysical quest. By exploring his own haunted psyche, he also cohesively challenged that of his listener, and of the symphonic form as perfected by Beethoven and Brahms.
To engage with a Mahler symphony is to experience all the joys and sorrows - not ignoring the thematic shifts and mood changes that define the business of being alive - and suffering. Mahler believed in narrative; his symphonies are like epic novels, at times soap operas and are, above all, densely organic living stories straddling late Romanticism and early Modernism; his sound looks to central Europe as well as the German tradition. The first three of his symphonies were composed while Brahms was still alive.
Leonard Bernstein described Mahler as singing "the last tuneful songs of 19th-century Romanticism", which is true - there are passages of staggering lyric beauty - but he also embraced the strident and the new. The young Mahler was influenced by Richard Strauss, four years his junior but an instant success who became a lifelong friend, and by Bruckner, whom he followed (but never studied under, although he did attend lectures given by him) in expanding the symphonic form, albeit by vastly contrasting methods.
Bruckner concentrated on one theme; his dedicated disciple, Mahler, believed in scale writ large and added voices - solo female and choral voices in Symphonies 2 to 4, and later a great mass of soloist and choirs in Symphony No 8, the symphonic oratorio often referred to as "the symphony of a thousand", which initially draws on a Pentecostal Latin hymn and then looks to the closing scene from Goethe's Faust.
"The symphony is a world," Mahler would write to Sibelius, and he used the form as such, drawing on a range of themes from nature in all its moods to funeral marches, patriotic interludes, folk tunes and dances, juxtaposed with exquisitely intimate passages celebrating and lamenting love, while elsewhere it sounds as if he was composing Hollywood scores, a genre in which one of his pupils, early prodigy Erich Korngold, would win two Academy Awards. The Adagio from Mahler's unfinished Symphony No 10 possesses the required sombre lushness of a major film score, and was showcased in Visconti's Death in Venice.
Mahler can be defiant, and he can be despairing. At times he is exuberant, almost jaunty, and frequently overblown. His intensity of expression often risks its extended forms collapsing into the episodic. He pushed the symphonic to its limits, and in that diversity of mood swings lies his originality, soaring lyricism, jarring harshness and, ultimately, his difficulties. As a composer he works the mind and the emotions, but his overwhelming density encourages an oppressively academic response in the listener.
From prayers to epic fanfares to cow bells, horns - the rustic and the spiritual - it's all there in work that chronicles the central European dilemma, that of a multi-dimensional culture crushed by the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Mahler's music has much in common with the writings of the great Joseph Roth - both shared an overview that is essentially tragic. Mahler was an intellectual with an interest in philosophy and the new psychology. His marital difficulties with Alma led him to consult Freud, in whose pioneering work he also had a general interest.
The 10 Mahler symphonies are journeys through one man's life. The RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra begins that odyssey tomorrow when it performs Symphony No 1, "The Titan", under Gerhard Markson, at the National Concert Hall to open a Mahler symphony series that continues until May 2007.
Gustav Mahler was an outsider, and knew it, describing himself as three times an outsider, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, an Austrian among Germans and a Jew throughout the world. Even as a composer he was something of an outsider, because for most of his career he was far better known as a conductor, and as a controversial (at times) interpreter of other men's music. He was born into an ordinary Jewish family on July 7th 1860 in Kalischt, now Kaliste, in Bohemia, just as the oppressive attitudes to Jews throughout the empire were beginning to relax.
This new freedom made it possible for Mahler's father, who had started out modestly as little more than a peddler, to move to Iglau where he established taverns and a distillery. The family's growing comfort meant that the young Mahler was able to pursue his musical interests. Alert to all kinds of music, from military bands to folk songs - hence his lifelong love of song - he began studying the piano and was sufficiently promising to be sent to the Vienna Conservatory in 1875, where he remained for three years.
He was also beginning to compose, and soon decided composition would be his future - as would Vienna. While working as a music teacher, he began writing songs, an opera which he abandoned, and also attended lectures at the university. More attention focuses on his symphonies, but, interestingly, many observers - myself included - prefer his songs. Mahler's contribution to German song, such as the Kindertotenlieder (1901-1904), is comparable to that of Schubert, with whom he shares a melodic gift.
Mahler's dramatic cantata, Das klagende Lied (The Song of Sorrow), reflecting in its Romantic medievalism and love of nature the influence of 19th-century German opera, was completed in 1880. It drew attention to the young man who had by then begun to get noticed as a conductor of the operas of Mozart, Beethoven and Wagner. In 1888 he was appointed chief conductor at the Budapest Opera after stints in Prague and Leipzig, and then moved on to Hamburg, where he impressed as a dedicated and meticulously well-prepared conductor. Mahler the conductor overshadowed the composer. During these years he developed a routine: he conducted during the opera season from autumn to spring and then, retreating to the countryside of southern Austria, devoted his summers to composition (eventually he became restless and wanted to return to Vienna).
After completing three symphonies, including Symphony No 2 ("The Resurrection"), and while working on a fourth, Mahler converted to Catholicism, possibly due less to religious fervour than to his interest in the Vienna Opera House. The anti-Semitic Viennese court would have been unlikely to appoint a Jew. In 1897, now officially a Catholic, Mahler became director of Vienna's legendary Court Opera.
This marked the beginning of 10 difficult years; although musically Mahler had many triumphs, there was also resistance and he often had to battle.
On November 25th 1901, within months of the poor reception given to his Fourth Symphony, he married Alma Schindler (in spring 1902), the daughter of a painter and later, after Mahler's death, the wife in turn of architect Walter Gropius and writer Franz Werfel. She was then 21, 19 years younger than Mahler. The unlikely union was the talk of Vienna; Alma became restless, had affairs and would eventually survive him by 53 years. Initially, though, there was some happiness as Mahler became a father in his early 40s with the births in 1902 and 1904 of his two daughters. He had also completed three further symphonies - Nos 5, 6 ("The Tragic") and 7, with its daring music of nightmares, including the ghostly scherzo (unfortunately, the bizarre Offenbach-like finale has tended to overshadow the gorgeous Nachtmusik of the two middle movements and that scherzo).
The Seventh Symphony, with its melancholic shading, proved prophetic. By 1907 Mahler was facing disaster. Forced to resign from the Court Opera because of his ongoing refusal to compromise artistically, stressful confrontations with musicians, singers and critics, as well as lingering traces of anti-Semitism, he then endured the death of his elder daughter, Maria, who had contracted scarlet fever. A further blow came when he was diagnosed with heart disease. And there was the ongoing trauma of Alma's infidelity.
Mortality now threatened his art. "With one blow I have simply lost everything I have ever achieved in clarity and comfort," he wrote to Bruno Walter. "I stood face to face with nothingness, and now at life's end I must learn again to stand and walk, like a beginner."
Nonetheless, he accepted an invitation to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, which he did for two seasons, beginning in 1908. The post had its problems as the Metropolitan's outlook was strongly rooted in the Italian operatic tradition, whereas Mahler had concentrated on the German repertoire.
When he was offered the conductorship of the New York Philharmonic in 1909, he accepted, and resigned from the Metropolitan. His health was worsening and he only conducted one season, not that New York audiences were too upset, as the response to the new works he had introduced was lukewarm.
During these sad final years the superstitious Mahler found some consolation in composing a symphony in the guise of an orchestral song cycle, Das Lied Von Der Erde (The Song of the Earth). He began it after completing his monumental Symphony No 8 and when he was fearful of beginning a ninth symphony, the number which had proved the last for Beethoven, Bruckner and Dvorak.
Das Lied Von Der Erde was inspired by a collection of ancient Chinese poems which greatly moved Mahler when he read them as The Chinese Flute in a German translation published in 1907. He identified the themes of the joys of youth and the sadness of mortality which he shared with their long-dead author.
Mahler decided to shape the poems into a symphony of six songs following the human life cycle. Although he used some Chinese musical devices, it is a European work. It also sets the emotional tone for the Ninth Symphony, posthumously premiered and the most desperately sad piece he ever wrote. Its opening movement includes tolling bells, a funeral march and what could be a failing heartbeat. The third movement introduces a note of desperate hysteria, while the dignified, at times magnificent, closing movement faces death with stoic acceptance.
The five movements of his unfinished 10th Symphony, which he had sketched out in the summer of 1910, all share a continuous line of music, and three are even partially scored for orchestra. A lighter mood is present but the work is difficult to assess because of its incompleteness - it is most remembered for its Adagio.
On returning from New York, Mahler consulted a specialist in Paris. There was no hope. He died in Vienna on May 18th 1911. More than half a century would pass before Mahler was acknowledged as a modern master capable of equal measures of excess and haunting beauty.
