Gustav Mahler, The Double Man

Conductor Leonard Bernstein once said of Gustav Mahler that he was a double man in every single part of his life: “In the work of every composer, we see shifts between one idiom and its opposite, but nowhere are these shifts as extreme and violent as with Mahler.”

 As a Jewish musician at the height of his fame and powers, torn between his dual role as composer and conductor, Bernstein was uniquely placed to offer insights on the great Austrian symphonist’s psychology. But for many of the rest of us, Mahler remains an enigma. When examining Mahler’s work, it can be tough to see through the dizzying complexities of his personal and professional life and give a clear appraisal of his legacy. Firsthand accounts of his temperament and demeanour are often confusingly contradictory. For some, he was a God, for others, a tyrant. He was loved and loathed in equal measure, and often for the same reasons. So who was Gustav Mahler? And can we get to the bottom of this double man?

By the 1890s, Mahler had become the most celebrated conductor in the world, yet for all his efforts at self-promotion he had failed to win equal recognition as a composer. With rare exceptions, critical appraisals of his major works ranged from lukewarm to glacial. Few of his peers took his music seriously and its grotesquely ironic gestures and folk-infused hyper-emotionality often left audiences baffled. After a performance of his Forth Symphony in Munich in 1901, anti-Semitic aesthete William Ritter chided, “Jewish wit has invaded the Symphony, corroding it”, and in 1910 Claude Debussy walked out of the Paris premiere of the Second Symphony, dismissing it as “too Schubertian”. For Mahler who, like Bernstein, “conducted to live and lived to compose”, being known as a conductor first and composer second was an especially hurtful dilemma.

Disillusioned by contemporary opinion, Mahler sought refuge in the judgement of posterity. “I shall first have to shake off the dust of the earth before justice is done to me,” he grimly prophesied to critic Bernard Scharlitt in 1906. With messianic conviction, he took his failures and turned them into strengths. He became, in Friedrich Nietzsche’s words, a man “not of his own time”; a visionary with a prophetic mission. His symphonies spoke of sffering, death and redemption. They were intended, not as entertainment, but as enlightenment. Richard Strauss, the more pragmatically-minded composer, would hear him speak of redemption through music and, genuinely bewildered, huff, “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be redeemed from.” In turn, Mahler, who was more touchy than he cared to admit, would write Strauss off as a “vain materialist” who had sold his soul for commercial gain.

 For all his swagger, it’s hard not to read the neurosis of a deeply insecure man into Mahler’s general attitude. Strauss was, at the time, the more accomplished composer, and Mahler felt threatened by a fame and success he had never achieved and desperately desired. His ostensible indifference to public critique of his music was likely to be, as Alex Ross puts it, “a café-table affectation” or, more precisely, a disingenuously aloof persona Mahler adopted to deal with his inadequacies.

Truth be told, Mahler fought valiantly to have his music performed and appreciated. He hobnobbed with the Viennese musical élite, sending letters and gifts to critics to keep their favours. When a work was well received – as was the case with the Eighth Symphony he was not immune to the joys of triumph. He reacted, not as a stoic musical god getting his due, but as a human gleefully reaping the rewards of his gruelling labours. In word, he disavowed the meaninglessness of success and public recognition yet, in deed, he pursued them relentlessly. In short, Mahler was neither divine nor delusional, but a bit of both. He was an extremely gifted but flawed man, riddled with doubt and overwhelmed by ambition, struggling to reconcile the demands of his ego with his humanitarian mission – “part Genius, part demon”, in the words of Bruno Walter. In short, he was a double man.

 Mahler’s childhood was not an easy one. Born in 1860 into a German-speaking Jewish family in a small village in Bohemia, an outlying province of the Austrian empire, Mahler quickly formed an awareness of himself as the ethnic other. “I am thrice homeless,” he would famously say, “a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a Jew everywhere.”

 His father, who struggled to make a living as an innkeeper, noted his son’s musical gifts early on, and encouraged him to nurture them. As an adult composer, Mahler would develop a highly dichotomised style that bore the mark of his early childhood experiences. While still a boy, Mahler lost five siblings in early childhood, and observed their burial “from the family tavern where the singing never stopped”. The result, as Norman Lebrecht noted, was a child’s funeral march in the First Symphony, composed in the style of a drunken jig.

 Gustav Mahler’s music abounds with many perverse paradoxes of this kind. Heavenly images of an idyllic afterlife follow on from bleak depictions of earthly torment. Jewish klezmer sounds form an unlikely partnership with hymnal textures evoking the Catholic liturgy. Over-worked sentimentalism rubs shoulders with classical Germanic restraint. Basic, folk-like homophony gives way to counterpoint of Bachian complexity. East and West, the highbrow and the lowbrow are treated with equal respect as fonts of creative raw material.

To his befuddled detractors, his symphonies appeared like an absurdist mish-mash of disparate elements, thrown together without rhyme or reason – it’s little wonder the critics reacted so coldly. Mahler himself often struggled with the excesses in his music: “I cannot do without trivialities,” he wrote to Bruno Walter in reference to the newly completed Third Symphony. “But this time, all permissible bounds have been passed.”

 In 1910, Mahler visited Sigmund Freud for the first – and only – time. Though originally skeptical of Freud’s method, he had just come to know of his wife Alma’s dalliance with the architect Walter Gropius and, desperate, turned to psychoanalysis as a last resort. Freud reassured Mahler he “need not be anxious”, and that his marriage was allegedly “a happy one till the end”. But a breakthrough of an entirely different kind would, by chance, emerge from this analytic session. Mahler brought up a childhood episode in which his father, a hostile man by nature, was having an unusually intense row with his mother. Frightened, young Mahler rushed from the house onto the street, where he immediately heard a barrel organ grinding out the Viennese folk song, Ach, du Lieber Augustin.

 “The conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement,” Freud noted, “was from then on inextricably linked in his mind, and the one mood inevitably brought the other.” The observation provides a neat formula for many of the marked dualities in Mahler’s life and work. Too neat? Possibly.

 According to Freud scholar, Ernest Jones, Mahler finally “understood why his music had been prevented from achieving the highest rank as a result of the noblest passages, those inspired by the most profound emotions, being spoiled by the intrusion of some commonplace melody.” Mahler had, for years, managed to mythologise himself as “the untimely man”. Had this man of reason finally found an empirical justification for his shortcomings as a composer?

 In both his private and professional life, Mahler’s fierce idealism made him a polarising figure. During his time at the Vienna Court Opera he was regarded by many as a “tyrant” and a “vampire”. Yet for Arnold Schönberg and his followers he was “this martyr, this saint”: nothing less than the saviour of modern music. His petulant rehearsal demeanour – which involved irate screaming, foot-stomping, baton-jabbing, and regular accusations of incompetence – prompted comparisons to Johannes Kreisler, the sociopathic conductor from ETA Hoffmann’s tales. Off the podium, however, the raging lion became a gentle lamb. “He was the most lovable, kindest creature you could imagine,” assures Czech soprano Ernestine Schumann-Heink, “except when he was conducting.”

Numerous firsthand testimonials attest to the confusing nature of Mahler’s double personality. “[He was] fundamentally kind and helpful as a child,” wrote composer Wilhelm Kienzl, “but often suddenly, terroristically contentious.” Walter similarly observed, “Brusque and harsh with weakness or inadequacy, he was kind and sympathetic wherever he recognised talent and enthusiasm.” Quite often, those who knew Mahler the lion didn’t know Mahler the lamb, and vice-versa. “When I told [people] that this… man could be as cheerful as a child,” soprano Anna von Mildenburg recalled, “they would smile incredulously and serve up examples of his terribleness.”

 Mahler’s conflicted relationship with colleagues was further strained by the anti-Semitism then prevalent in Viennese artistic circles. In 1898, Hans Richter resigned as head of the Vienna Philharmonic’s subscription series and Mahler was unanimously approved as his successor. Yet, early into his new appointment, racist murmurs began to be heard among some of the orchestral members. During a rehearsal, one violinist reportedly said to another, “I don’t understand why you find Mahler so infuriating – Hans Richter pitches into us far worse.” The reply: “Yes, but he’s one of us, we can take it from him.”

 Mahler, whose arrival at the Philharmonic promised to bring winds of innovation, quickly made enemies out of nationalist conservatives. Claiming to act in the service of the composer’s original vision, he took frequent liberties with the scores of established masterworks, tweaking instrumentation here and there for added effect. Members of the Philharmonic who were horrified that an E flat clarinet had been added to Beethoven’s Coriolan overture contacted the nationalist publication, Die Deutsche Zeitung, which in an article entitled “Jewish Power at the Court Opera” snarled: “If Mahler wants to make corrections, let him tackle Mendelssohn or Rubinstein – the Jews will never allow that – but let him leave our Beethoven in peace.” The increasingly antiJewish atmosphere would eventually compel him to leave Vienna for New York nine years later.

 In his personal life, Mahler swivelled between two character extremes: the exuberant romantic, and the insecurely attached possessive. “I know the blissful happiness love gives to one who, loving with all his soul, knows he is loved in return. I lost the world, but found my harbour,” he gushed in a letter to his wife Alma in 1910. Similarly from Amsterdam in 1904: “Your beauty is renowned through Holland and everyone wants to meet you.” And from Berlin a year later: “I am sitting once more at the table from which you were bombarded, day in day out, four years ago: and I observe that my feelings have not changed since those days. My thoughts go to you with the same joy and love.”

 Yet the same man could be capable of gestures of unjustified meanness. From early on in his relationship with Alma, Mahler’s self-centered and narcissistic behaviour bordered on the pathological. Threatened by her youth and talent, he expressly forbade the promising songwriter to compose, insisting that as her husband he remain her only priority. Throughout much of his marriage, Mahler was absorbed by his own dreams and needs, and dangerously neglectful of his partner’s. He made monopolistic claims on Alma’s attention and energies and yet rarely replied in kind: “I had longed for his love,” Alma writes in her memoirs, “… and he, in his fanatical concentration on his own life, had simply overlooked me.”

 So which was he, Mahler the romantic or Mahler the narcissist? Child or tyrant? Angel or demon? The answer, not surprisingly, is that he was all of these things and much more. Rather than dualistic in the basic sense, Mahler’s character was more precisely a complex web of seemingly contradictory personas. Mood and situation would determine which of these starkly different personas would be brought to the fore. Each was drawn upon to serve a different purpose, and each was equally representative of Mahler the man. In this sense he was no different to you or me.

 To some degree, we are all character-composites. We all have aspects of the larrikin, the poet, the stoic, the madman and others, and they coexist because they help us deal with different social and mental scenarios. But in the case of Mahler, genius and, arguably, a pinch of madness magnified this natural, internal plurality, greatly exaggerating its dichotomous nature, and giving us reason to define him by it.