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Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss, each of whom had functioning marriages and children;
both lived stable, elegant lives in comfortable homes.
The fascination with Mahler has been buffeted by a widespread popular impression that
his life was marked by inner turmoil and rejection, one of suffering and perpetual
outsider status. His childhood is said to have been tortured, and his adult life crippled by
a hostile public, vicious music critics, and above all a debilitating marriage to a notorious
femme fatale, Alma Mahler, a gifted Viennese beauty who slept with every artist, writer,
and composer of stature in Vienna, from Alexander Zemlinsky and Oskar Kokoschka, to
Hans Pfitzner and Franz Schreker. After Mahler, she married famed Bauhaus architect
Walter Gropius and then Austrian writer Franz Werfel.
This picture of Mahler’s life distorts the reality. Bernstein liked to quote Mahler’s
prediction that “my time will come.” It is true that Mahler may have felt
underappreciated and misunderstood in his own day. He may have believed that he was a
perfect example of the Wagnerian conceit that great composers in modernity cannot be
properly appreciated by their contemporaries, despite knowing very well that practically
all great composers were profoundly successful in their own day and age, including
Wagner himself. Yet myths are frequently based on fragments of truth. While we would
like to think of ourselves as having discovered Mahler’s greatness long after his death
and elevating him to his proper place in history, he died of heart disease in Vienna at the
age of 51 a world-famous man. His long and painful trip from New York to his home in
Vienna in the spring of 1911 elicited widespread sympathy and concern.
At the time of his death Mahler as a personality was controversial, yet as a composer and
conductor he was a celebrity. Mahler had become a major musical figure in Europe. He
was feted and his music performed in St. Petersburg in the east, Helsinki in the north, and
in Paris in the west. He was also famous in North America, where in the last years of his
life he worked as music director of the New York Philharmonic and a star conductor at
the Metropolitan Opera. Since 1897 he had been a defining public presence in the cultural
and political life of his adopted city, Vienna. His death was reported all over the world.
The most successful German-speaking composer of his generation, Richard Strauss,
wrote his last large-scale purely orchestral piece, Eine Alpensinfonie (An Alpine
Symphony), as an eloquent tribute to the memory of Gustav Mahler the composer, his
friend and rival.
Between Reality and Myth: Gustav Mahler’s Life
The eminent philosopher Hannah Arendt observed that each individual as a private
person and citizen must come to terms with his or her “natality”: the unchangeable, blunt
facts of his or her birth. It was Mahler’s lot to have been dealt a complex natality. He was
born to Jewish parents on May 7, 1860, in the small village of Kalischt in Bohemia, then
consisting of a little more than 500 people, including just a handful of Jewish families.
Shortly after Mahler’s birth, the family moved to nearby Iglau, which is in Moravia.
(Kalischt is now officially Kaliště, and the nearest large town, Iglau, is called Jihlava.
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These name changes from German to Czech reflect the shift after 1918 from the
Habsburg Empire to an independent Czech political entity).
Mahler was born when the possibility of moving one’s residence within the empire was
made legally possible, even for Jews. This was a novelty of the political liberalization of
the 1860s that followed more than a decade of political reaction after 1848. By birth
Mahler was technically Bohemian, but Iglau, where he grew up is just over the Moravian
border, making him perhaps more Moravian. But for Mahler, geographical identity is
entirely misleading. His primary identity was that of a Jew though his parents were not
particularly religious or steeped in the traditions of daily Jewish life and observance.
Mahler was born into a German-speaking Jewish home in a region where the majority of
its Catholic citizens primarily spoke Czech. Insofar as Yiddish, a structurally German
dialect with an extensive Hebrew and Slavic vocabulary, was heard in Mahler’s parental
home and surroundings, it is reasonable to assume that he grew up in a multi-lingual
environment in which he heard a minimum of three languages spoken.
Mahler’s family, like many lower middle class Jews in the region, was German-speaking
by choice. Jews who had left the urban and rural ghettos of the 18th century were eager to
experience social advancement, not only in economic terms, but in terms of culture,
which meant adopting the habits and styles of German-speaking urban elites. The elite
German culture to be emulated came from Vienna. Vienna in turn symbolized the
Habsburg dynasty to which Jews, all over the Empire were particularly loyal. Since the
era of Joseph II, the Habsburgs were seen as resistant to nationalism and protective of
Jews as loyal subjects. This mind-set became increasingly remarkable and important
because Mahler came of age in an era in which radical political anti-Semitism had
already made a successful appearance as a counterpart to modern German and Czech
nationalism. The year Mahler was born, Richard Wagner, whose music Mahler revered
and performed brilliantly, proudly reprinted with his own name his notorious but
cunningly persuasive anti-Semitic pamphlet “Das Judenthum in der Musik” (“The Jews
in Music”), originally published anonymously in 1850.
Iglau, the town where Mahler spent his first 11 years, was at the time of his birth made up
of 17,000 people. It possessed an important textile industry (including factories for cloth
making and dyeing), brewers, and paper and glass manufacture. It served as a trading
center both towards the east and towards the west. It was the center of a largely rural
district in Moravia that encompassed nine small cities and nearly 500 tiny villages. Of its
188,000 inhabitants, 4,480 were Jews. The majority was Czech-speaking and considered
themselves of Slavic origin. Given Iglau’s commercial and geographic centrality, the life
of the town was colorful and echoed with the sounds of everything from a garrison band
to traveling entertainers and street musicians. Mahler’s music, much like that of his near
contemporary, the American composer Charles Ives, persistently explores the experience
of memory and nostalgia, particularly regarding childhood. In nearly all of Mahler’s
works, traces of the everyday world in which he lived, including the urban Iglau and the
rural countryside of his childhood, can be located through fragmentary musical
evocations.