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November 13, 1998/ 24 Cheshvan 5759, Vol. 51, No. 8
Mahler fan club
Many share Phoenix Symphony's admiration for Jewish-born composer
DIMITRI DROBATSCHEWSKY
Special to Jewish News
The music of Gustav Mahler, a much-maligned Austrian composer whose symphonies are very long and sometimes dissonant, and a Jew who amid severe artistic adversity 90 years ago proclaimed that "my time will come," suddenly is enjoying a boost in popularity after having been appreciated only by educated musicians and musicologists. The "Mahler fad" now has even reached Phoenix, a place not always looked upon as a hotbed of cultural sophistication.
The musicians of the Phoenix Symphony, even as they were struggling to get their administration to grant them living wages, in an unprecedented move, postponed an authorized strike in order to perform a highly anticipated concert featuring only one work, Mahler's Ninth Symphony. The concert took place Nov. 5-6 and was emotionally greeted with a richly deserved and fully appropriate ovation. (Early this week, it was the musicians who cheered when two donors stepped forward to fund their raises and the strike was averted.)
Back in 1962, in front of the then just-opened Los Angeles Music Center, a number of "hippies" picketed the concert hall with signs reading: MAHLER IS HEAVY. That slogan also was seen on bumper stickers on Los Angeles' freeways and streets, and on the masthead of the Bruckner-Mahler Society's newsletters. Mahler, like the German Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse in literature, or the American poet Allen Ginsberg in poetry, had been declared by the '60s "beat generation" one of their openly revered idols.
In May 1995, in Amsterdam, a "Mahlerfest" was held, featuring three of the world's greatest orchestras (the Berlin and Vienna Philharmonics, and the home-grown Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra) playing under some of the world's most renowned conductors and delivering a veritable orgy of Mahler's music. All of his symphonic and vocal works were presented on 12 consecutive nights, creating a once-in-a-lifetime artistic experience, one for which thousands of music lovers and critics from all over the world made the voyage to the Netherlands.
Who is this Gustav Mahler? The controversial composer was born in Bohemia in 1860 and died in Vienna in 1911 of a heart ailment and other diseases, resulting from and exacerbated by overwork. Mahler was an innovative composer whose music at first turned off many concertgoers, and his personal arrogance, conducting style and obsession with perfection earned him enemies by the thousands among fellow musicians and critics. He also was a man who in his personal life often revealed the attributes of a selfish despot and inveterate male chauvinist. He reneged on his religion and converted to Catholicism, not out of conviction but as a career move, so he could be appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera. His enemies, however, did not forget his Jewish origins, and he was forced to resign after only three years.
The last of the 19th-century great Romantics, Mahler had a difficult start in his musical life that haunted him even beyond the time when, at long last, he was acclaimed more than he was despised. But even his hard-core European enemies, whose hostilities were generated by jealousy and viciously press-promoted anti-Semitism, had to admit that his objectionable personal behavior could be excused (as it often was) because of the extremely high artistic standards he achieved wherever he was professionally active.
His private life often was as difficult as his career. He married one of the most eligible, talented and beautiful young women of Vienna, Alma Schindler, and had two daughters with her. He deeply loved his wife and children, but tragedy struck when his older daughter, at the age of four, died of scarlet fever and Mahler blamed himself for her death, thinking it might have occurred because a few years earlier he had composed the tragic "Kindertotenlieder" ("Songs of the Death of Children"). But there was, of course, no connection between the two events.
Mahler's marriage suffered from his insistence on channelling all of the family's creative energies toward his own achievements, demanding that Alma cease composing ("One composer per family is enough!") and otherwise be subservient to him. Around 1907, Alma met the promising young architect Walter Gropius; they fell in love and had an affair. Gropius, in a letter addressed to Mahler, asked him to release Alma to him. She did not leave her husband, but all this torment caused further damage to Mahler's mental health. He even once consulted the famous analyst Sigmund Freud in an unsuccessful effort to restore sanity in his life.
That Mahler's music would be highly emotional is not surprising. He expresses in ways far better than words could have done what one's soul can only sense but not articulate. During the Nazi era in Germany (and later in Austria), Mahler's music was banned from the concert hall, and when in the 1960s the American conductor Leonard Bernstein scheduled one of Mahler's symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic, the rehearsal was captured on tape.
At one point, Bernstein who, even though Jewish, always was an adulated favorite in Vienna's music world, stopped the rehearsal and severely chided the orchestra. In accented (and not always correct) German, he told the musicians that "I know that you can play the notes; for that we need no rehearsal. But where is the life? Where is the soul that Mahler has put into the notes?" Bernstein complained that the musicians played the music no better than halfheartedly and not only did not understand the score, but did not want to understand it. Almost 20 years after the Nazis had left, hostility toward the Jew Mahler had not subsided.
Of course, Bernstein won and opened orchestra and public to the music's beauty. The resulting performance (or performances, because Bernstein was to play all of Mahler's symphonies with the Vienna Philharmonic) was stunning. Bernstein, who after Bruno Walter was perceived as the world's greatest Mahler interpreter, coaxed so much intensity and emotionalism out of the score that almost everyone - the eminent conductor, the musicians and the audience - at the end of the concert had tears streaming down their faces.
Which only proves that once prejudice is overcome, even formerly hostile musicians could create beauty. It also illustrates a more general but equally important point: Life without music, as the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche has said, would be a mistake. Phoenix needs its symphony orchestra.
If we did not have Mahler, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms and Strauss, all our concerns might possibly just revolve around multi-millionaire rock stars and professional athletes, who often have demonstrated what materialism devoid of spiritual values and without real culture may lead to. Good music is essential even for those members of society who do not yet enjoy it.
Dimitri Drobatschewsky, retired music critic for the Arizona Republic, is now a freelance writer and translator living in Glendale.
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