Mahler Re-Composed

By George M. Cummins III

In 2010, the composer Gustav Mahler celebrates his one hundred fiftieth birthday. In Mahler Re-Composed, linguist George Cummins shares a collection of six interrelated essays that provide a fresh perspective on difficult questions familiar to Mahler lovers. Cummins, a teacher of Russian and Czech at Tulane University, brings a uniquely Czech perspective to the study of Mahlers personality and work. In his careful examination of the composers life and work, Cummins begins with an introduction that provides a glimpse into Mahler the Czech and continues with an account of Mahlers conversion from Judaism to Catholicism while making his way to the Vienna Hofoper directorship.

Cummins also takes a skeptical look at the legend of Mahler as an impotent, humorless neurotic and recreates the friendship between Strauss and Mahlertwo of the greatest musicians of the early twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Feb 28, 2011
• ISBN: 9781450289795

George M. Cummins III

George M. Cummins III studied literature and linguistics in New England. From 1972 to 2010 he taught Slavic languages at Tulane. Retired, he now writes, hikes, travels, and camps on the Tuxachanie Trail in Saucier, Mississippi. He lives in New Orleans, Louisiana.

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Mahler

Re-Composed

George M. Cummins III

iUniverse, Inc.

Bloomington

Mahler Re-Composed

Copyright © 2011 George M. Cummins III

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ISBN: 978-1-4502-8981-8 (pbk)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-8980-1 (cloth)

ISBN: 978-1-4502-8979-5 (ebk)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2011901443

Printed in the United States of America

iUniverse rev. date: 2/25/11

Contents

Detailed Chapter Outline and Synopsis

Introduction. The Case for Mahler the Czech

More About This Book

About Language and Voices

Keys to Mahler

Chapter One Mahler Sick and Lovesick

Death

Bohemia and Moravia

Youth in Jihlava; Freudian Symbols; The Toilet and Diet

Health; Physiognomy

Early Loves

Anna von Mildenburg Enters His Life

Migraines and Vertigo

1907 diagnosis; Arrhythmia

The Freudian Analysis

A Jungian Response. Mahler dreamed not so much to recover the past as to create it anew as though it were present.

Looking At Alma

Marital Crisis of 1910

Chapter Two Tell Me the Story

Need for Friendship; Siegfried Lipiner

Natalie

Summer Rhythms

1900-1901

Natalie Records

Text and Music in Where the Beautiful Trumpets Blow. Verträumt. Humoresque.

Interviews in Which He Contradicts Himself

More Interviews; Summer of 1899

Tell Me the Story

Programs for the Resurrection

St. Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes

Concave Mirrors

The Third Symphony

1900; Programs Forsworn

Child of Sorrows

Alma Schindler Appears

The Last Entry

Natalie’s Finale

Chapter Three Too Jewish

What is Too Jewish?

Czech Critic Baťka

Giorgioni’s Concerto

Bernhard Mahler; Early Life with Parents in Jihlava (Iglau)

Enter The Spiritual Father

Critics Attack the First Symphony

Hamburg Directorship, 1891-1897

Plans to Assault Vienna

Death and Resurrection

The Lightning-Bolt Revelation of von Bülow’s Death

The Genesis of Resurrection, Todtenfeier

Death and Transfiguration of the Pupil

The première of Resurrection

His Way of Doing Things; Too Jewish?

Super Jew; Rosa Papier

Polish Jews

Break with Mildenburg

Visit to Moscow

The End of the Story

Chapter Four Strauss

1909

1902

1907 Hurt feelings

1909-1911

Their Backgrounds Compared

1902 False Truisms; My Time Will Come

1905-1906-1907 Salome

Elektra

Salzburg, 1906; Are People Made of Different Stuff than I?

Programs and Program Music

Audition Colorée

Jewish. Nazi Era.

Mahler and Strauss in Correspondence

Berlin, 1895; The First Mahler Fan

May 1911: Gustav Dying, Receives Strauss’s Last Letter Strauss Will Conduct Your Lovely Work

First the music

Chapter Five Tell Me the Story

Introduction to Das Lied

Textual Sources

Instrumentation; Timbre

Not the Sixth, but the Kindertotenlieder’s Bells

The finale, Der Abschied

Third Stanza:

Texts and Music in der Abschied

Der Abschied: Tell the Story

The March of Der Abschied; Death is Inevitable

Farewell

Text and Music of Farewell

Lebensthema

Back in Bohemia

Spring and Summer of 1909

The Ninth Symphony

9.1 Andante comodo

9.2 Im tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppisch und sehr derb.

9.3 Rondo. Burleske. Allegro assai. Very defiant.

9.4 Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend.

Last Thoughts on 9.4

Some Late-Mahler Features

The Tenth

Deryck Cooke’s Performing Version of the Tenth

Chapter Six Curriculum Vitae

Conclusion

Bibliography

Detailed Chapter Outline and Synopsis

Chapter One: Mahler Sick and Lovesick

Death. Loss of siblings, of acquaintances and friends; of his brother to suicide, of his first-born child at the age of five to diphtheria. Relatives die in groups, as in 1889 his father, mother and sister. Death and funeral marches are present in all his works. The relationship of death and madness, death and Freud. The Freudian slip in Kindertotenlieder: safe in their mother’s womb/lap in place of in their mother’s house. What Death Tells Me as the motto of the Ninth (Schönberg). Mahler’s death in 1911, New York to Paris to Vienna.

Bohemia and Moravia. Gustav’s origins, Kaliště and Jihlava, known to him under their German names Kalischt and Iglau, sign of the hedgehog. Play of Language. Puns on the name Mahler; his linguistic sense of humor. Youth and Gastric Symptoms. Anginas, hemorrhoids, toilet training problems, encopresis [involuntary release of the bowels, an infantile trait in toddlers] as a major Freudian event. The personalities of mother and father, Marie Hermann and Bernhard Mahler. The theme of the toilet in composition. Father is deposing. A song is born in the toilet. Brother and sister Justine play death, but Tchaikovsky dies instead. Mahler almost dies of a bowel operation in 1901; it marks a turn in his life when he recovers. Bland diet, apples, graham bread, overcooked meat; Wagnerian vegetarianism. Health; Physiognomy. Carefree exercise in the summers: cycling, rowing, hiking, swimming. Taut strong body, inner and outer strength. Alfred Roller discourses on his face. Sometimes bearded, mostly beardless. Something masklike about it. Lines of will-power and of suffering. Glasses or pince-nez. Iris darkly sprinkled, brown.

Early Loves. An adolescent love blooms in a letter to a friend. Wertheresque romanticism, Mother Earth, Sehnsucht. The summer’s fruit is Das klagende Lied, Song of Complaint, a cantata with triple meanings: ‘lament’, ‘complaint’ or ‘accusation’, directly translatable into Czech as Píseň žalobná. Cycle of experience: fall in love, be disappointed in love, seal the experience with a musical masterpiece. 1883-84 in Kassel he loves Johanna Richter. Variation of cycle: fall in love with a singer, be disappointed; Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen. 1887-88 in Leipzig he falls in love with Marion Weber. Second variation: teach the lover, be disappointed. Die drei Pintos. Three loves lost, three masterpieces. First Symphony and the funeral march to the Second (love and death). 1895 brings a sustained romance with big-busted Anna von Mildenburg. Wunderhorn songs. Considers marriage in 1896; he is thirty-six and time is flying. New theme: he decides to break off from her. Third Symphony and the affair with Mildenburg ends, honorably, and they remain friends for life.

Migraines and Vertigo attack him during performances but do not keep him from his work. Writer’s block during his summer composing periods; he discovers to his delight that the Fourth has been written by his unconscious mind. Views his symphonies as his children. Traveling with an MS is like traveling with a child, only incognito.

1907 Diagnosis of Mitral Insufficiency. He becomes, but only for a time, a hypochondriac. His life-long peculiar, dancing, stuttering walk, St. Vitus’ dance. Is this a tic of sympathy for the sad mother? Mahler’s arrhythmia, in rowing, walking and in conducting. Tempi. Sensitivity to noise. Tücke des Objekts in his phrase, or Murphy’s law of noise.

The Freudian Analysis. The argument: early sexual trauma associated with barrel organ street music. Obsessional compulsion to compose derives from identification with the mother (the organ) and the father (the organ grinder). Alma Mahler as alma mater ‘loving mother’, Mater Gloriosa, etc. What Freud Tells Me. Psychoanalysis of Alma by contemporary Freudians. What Mahler really told Freud. The ironic song of mass death in the plague: O du lieber Augustin. Laughter as a counterbalance to trauma. Intimations of a liberating semiotic of irony. More on the marital crisis of 1910. The temper of love.

A Jungian Response. In this framework, the argument proceeds from the thesis that the personality strives toward wholeness. Mahler’s Jewishness and his many masks. Is ‘mask’ the key word? The trickster. Identification with the anima. Mahler as Houdini, finding escape hatches. Union of opposites, schattenhaft.

Looking at Alma. Alma as daughter of the deceased artist, as groupie lover of geniuses. Her neuroses. Her fantasy world. Their courtship; his letters; he frankly tells her she may no longer compose. Their separate dreams of the future. Tristan, Liebestod. Alma is wrongly convinced he is a virgin. They are engaged; they make love healthily and often in the early winter of 1902. Daughter conceived in January, wedding March 9.

Marital Crisis of 1910 Alma is wooed by young Walter Gropius in a sanatorium while Gustav composes in the mountains. Your bride, she secretly writes to him (Gropius!), your wife forever. One day G. gets a letter addressed to Herrn Direktor Mahler. A Freudian slip; it is a love letter to Alma. It all blows up; her reproaches to him as an unsatisfactory husband. Gropius visits the distraught couple. G. writes the Tenth (theme A: love and disappointment), margins littered with cries of pain. He writes her love poetry. Freud was right, you are the center of my life.

Chapter Two: Tell Me the Story (I)

This is the story of the music of the Wunderhorn years (1892-1901) as told by Mahler’s friend, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, in her memoir written with a truthfulness so unimpeachable that musicologists mine it for indirect evidence in dating the chronology of his compositions.

His Need for Intimate Friendship, to discuss art and music with a close companion. The books he read: Quixote, Faust, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky. Siegfried Lipiner, a learned writer-friend. Learning literary talk; learning how to communicate on the bridges of metaphor.

Natalie. A photograph from 1895 shows her as the ideal sporting companion. Later, group portraits with the Soldat-Roeger Ladies String Quartet. An eloquent portrait from the post-Gustav years betrays her tenderness and vulnerability. Natalie romantically inclined, Gustav not. In 1896 he is having an affair with Anna von Mildenburg, Natalie at his side in the summer as he completes the Third, which he dedicates not to his lover (who sees the Third as a rival) but to his friend Natalie. Sisters Justine and Emma run the house, Natalie the spirit. The temper of her memoir: Natalie as chaste amanuensis, loving from afar. Summer Rhythms. 1892 sees the appearance of the Schnützelputzhäusl composition hut. That’s the way it is in the teeny weeny house, where the little mice sing and dance. In 1894 he disinvites her; too nosy and she’s spying! She returns the next season, her role more delicately defined. Love flairs here and there in her heart, though passion did not illuminate their friendship. 1897; they flee an epidemic of scarlet fever and bicycle in the mountains. Thoughts on life and death. 1897-98 season; they are together in Vienna.

1900-01. Natalie and Justi find a site for a new summer home on the Wörthersee in Carinthia, where he builds a villa for his future family (Natalie, it turns out, will be excluded). 1901; they cuddle in a carriage (her words); he begins the Fifth and Kindertotenlieder. The relationship with Natalie brims over and dies in late 1901 with the arrival of Alma Schindler.

Natalie Writes. She documents the 1900 lieder concert by Selma Kurz; critics attack his songs for combining sophisticated orchestral music with Volkslieder. Gustav praises Kurz’s pianissimo in the song discussed below. Interviews. "One does not compose, Natalie, one is composed." The Wunderhorn ‘humoresques’: lighthearted but deadly serious, with a disturbing ambivalence. His theory of composing Des Knabens Wunderhorn. Submerge the ich of the romantic, sing the epic voice. He sees the songs as kernel archetypes (vs. lyrics). Analysis of the Interplay of Text and Music in Where the Beautiful Trumpets Blow. Verträumt, dream-cast. A maiden is visited by her soldier-beloved at early dawn; he promises a reunion within the year there, where the beautiful trumpets blow. Horns and winds play the role of the trumpets. There is a brief joy, then anguish (hence: humoresque). Mahler talks about irony as a set of polarities.

Interviews in Which he Contradicts Himself. Which comes first, the text or the music? — Neither, each discovers the other. His metaphors: a certain song is "feeling (emotion) all the way up to the lips, but not past the lips. What composing is like, whether one has to be in the mood (no, that is irrelevant). Composing is a game of building with stones that have been lying about since my youth. Conducting ought to be a steady elimination of the beat, which should retreat behind melodic and rhythmic content. Tempi. His stratagems in performance instructions. How to put birdsong into the score. Noise harassment. Polyphony: noises at a country fair, carousels, shooting galleries, puppet theaters; themes approach the ear from different angles." Nature. His hierarchy of art: music, poetry, — a gap —, painting, sculpture.

More Interviews, Summer of ’99. He composes while walking. "You have to know something by heart before you can learn it by heart. Of course, this rule doesn’t always apply. The anguish of his symphonic programs, which so often confounded listeners instead of setting them on the right track. Adorno: his music was like Eurydice stolen back [hijacked] from hell." Mahler struggles to explain his first two symphonies. Varying programs for performances of the First for Budapest in 1889 and Hamburg in 1993. For the ’96 performance the program was removed. He forgets or suppresses elements of programs, e.g. the Titan appellation. Natalie makes the last summary from his own words, in 1900 in a letter to Karpath.

The Program of the Resurrection Symphony. Auferstehen was his simple answer to the riddle of the universe. Compositional history: after-the-fact arrangement of parts. Reminiscence is the keyword. St. Anthony’s Sermon to the Fishes. Its perpetuum mobile rhythm, its semiotic, the mindless hubbub of human daily existence, as also in The Earthly Life. How the song became a scherzo in the Resurrection. Mahler as though standing before us in the person of the saint, leaning over the bank and telling his story to the fishes in clarinet language refracted by the mirrory surface of the water, as one sees a dance without hearing the music, the world appears as though in a concave mirror, chaotic and confused. Elemental panic.

The Third. This time the program is put together well before the composition. It is to be a grand review of the order of nature, from inanimate minerals to God. A symphony is the building of a world with all available means, the content ever new and developing. Elaborate discussion, recorded by Natalie. Yet even here, she notes, he had a way of tracking the spoor of his compositions after they are written. Program for the Third, in Outline. The form is epic narrative, as all the elements of being tell their stories to the composer, who wants to make music just as otherwise someone would tell a story. Shakespeare, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche. Ixion’s wheel. Scherzo: "Scurrilous and tragic. Pan-ic humor."

1900; Programs Rejected Forever. We do have, still, his rhapsodic metaphors for the Fourth, from Natalie, and a famous program outline, from Paul Bekker. The Heavenly Life (What the Child Tells Me) holds its key. Child of Sorrow. He premières it in Vienna, January, 1902, to uncomprehending laughter and mockery — another child of sorrow in the growing family. In time the symphony will become one of the most popular ever written.

Alma Schindler Appears. He gives a dinner to introduce her to his friends; Natalie is not invited. Alma excises Lipiner and Natalie from his life. The Last Entry in the Diary. Announcement of Mahler’s engagement to Alma. Finale. Natalie, alone, dies in poverty and dementia, June 8, 1921, ten years after Mahler.

Chapter Three: Too Jewish

What is Too Jewish? Otto Klemperer said of Bruno Walter’s conducting of Mahler: Too Jewish. Anti-Semitism of Mahler’s day in the Austrian press. Gesturing and speaking like a Jew. Mahler teaches Klemperer how to prepare a work. A Jew has to work harder, Mahler counsels, like a man born with one arm shorter than the other. The intentional absence of apparent Jewish elements in Mahler’s music. Leonard Bernstein is determined to find Jewish elements, the Phrygian mode, the lamenting mode (klagende), as in The Earthly Life. Klemperer’s riddle unsolved. Mahler’s very anti-Wagner style (disintegration, fragmentation); is that Jewish? His soloists are mostly women, not Heldentenöre. The Vienna Hofoper, Mahler’s goal in 1895-97. He writes to Löhr: even if I were not Jewish, with my way of doing things, the path would be barred. The position of Director of the opera may, yet, open a path for my own compositions (the real goal)." Self-flagellating Jews in the press: Karl Krauss of Die Fackel. Reverse discrimination against Felix Weingartner, Mahler’s replacement at the Opera in 1907. Exotic instrumentation. Is the shofar of Exodus 19 the great trombone solo of the Third? The anti-Semitic narrative. Hitler sees Mahler conduct Tristan. Mahler’s niece, a talented conductor, dies in Auschwitz. Jewish ‘traits’: opulence of expression, self-dramatization, exterior effects, organizational aptitude and his mercantilism — but this is a perfect description of Strauss! (Arthur Schnitzler). 15 Baťka: Mahler’s real Jewishness emerges as a nostalgic yearning for German culture, unattainable and so all the more poignant of expression. 16 Giorgioni’s, or Titian’s, Concerto as a portrait of Mahler, discovered by Walter. Carl Moll on Mahler, who, he claims was not really a Jew.

Bernhard Mahler. Kaliště, Jihlava, and the Moravian Vysočina where Mahler grew up. Austrian and Czech Culture. 21 Early life with Mother and Father in Iglau. To his parents, especially his father, he owes resources of body and spirit to work unstintingly. His Spiritual Father. Hans von Bülow, Gustav’s model of conducting. Languishing in Kassel in 1882, he begs von Bülow to take him as his pupil. In 1887 the Master condemns G.’s completion of Die drei Pintos to Strauss. Rejection after rejection follows him in the ‘80’s. In 1888 in Prague he completes Todtenfeier. Begins work in Budapest.

1889 brings the deaths of a sister and both parents. World première of the First in Budapest is a humiliating failure. It is a symphonic poem with a program evolving at every succeeding performance. Critics Attack the First. Schönaich: "You force-feed yourself [with enthusiasm] until you get a liver disease producing the succulent foie gras. To his friend Fritz Löhr he writes: It is all [the fault of] my way of going about things." Hamburg (1891-1897). Dreams of escape to an independent position — Dresden, Munich, Vienna; rejects the notion of converting to Catholicism. Plots to assault Vienna.

Death and Resurrection. G.’s dream of the Eternal Jew, carrying a golden cross on his staff, which he forces upon Gustav. His dream of Death, dressed as a playboy. Dostoevsky and the teachings of Father Zosima: all are responsible for all; release from dogma. His pantheism now seems remote from Nietzsche. In Gustav’s work the figure of Christ is replaced by Creator Spiritus, the animating light of inspiration, and Mater Gloriosa, in the Eighth. Gustav’s practical, compassionate Christianity. A Christ-believing Jew, or: a Jew who thirsts for eternal life for every soul (Alma). The Lightning-bolt Revelation of von Bülow’s Death. The spiritual father shall die and is to be resurrected in The Resurrection (the Second). Von Bülow approves of G.’s Wagner. He loves Gustav like a father. Approval from the father! Genesis of Resurrection. In 1891 he conceives the idea, but can compose nothing; in the summer he unhappily tours Scandinavia. He Plays Todtenfeier for von Bülow. "If that is music, one of us is insane. Tristan is a Haydn symphony compared to that." Is there a flicker of compliment in that last remark? He tries to get v. B. to conduct some songs; Master agrees but cancels at the last minute. Death of the Master and Transfiguration of the Pupil. At last he dies, February, 1894. Mahler, who detests funerals and misses his own mother’s, goes to the funeral, where they play Klopstock’s forgettable Auferstehen. Like a lightning bolt, it hits him: this is the finale for which Todtenfeier is the first movement. Death is the great release, the sluices open. An Immaculate Conception of a work that was inside him all along.

Première of Resurrection. December 13, 1895. A success with the audience, not with the critics. A voice of admiration crying in the wilderness: the critic Max Marschalk. 52 Anti-Semitism in criticism of the Eighth, in 1906. Brief description of the Eighth, a reincarnation and restatement of some values of the Resurrection. Tinkering with Beethoven Condemned by Critics. 55 Critical Attacks of his Symphonies. Too Jewish? Nietzsche and Wagner in the Third. Jewish self-hatred? Wagner’s Heldentenor becomes G.’s contralto. Fragmentation.

Super Jew. Rosa Papier advises him in Vienna on how to besiege the fortress of the Hofoper. The first step is to formally convert to Catholicism, but Gustav hesitates. Polish Jews. Are these our brothers? A Catholic? He confides to Roller he could never write a mass because he could not bring himself to write a credo. The Break with Lover Mildenburg. She is a problem, but Rosa will take care of her. Visit to Moscow. Ruminations on the manifestation of God in the world; surely not in race or nation, he thinks. End of the Story. Getting a resignation from Jahn is the last station of the cross before the Directorship. February 23, 1897, he is baptized in Hamburg; October 8, 1897, Emperor Franz Josef declares the young genius Director of his Court Opera in Vienna. Discussions of base motive among his acquaintances; turning against the religion of his childhood for fame and fortune.

Chapter Four: Strauss

This is the story of the friendship of Mahler and Strauss, drawn from Herta Blaukopf’s edition of their correspondence, Alma’s memoir, Gustav’s letters to Alma, and letters from acquaintances.

1909. Pauline and Richard Strauss visit the Mahlers in Toblach. An irritating interruption, writes Alma. Pauline was in rare nervous form. Strauss, that flippant, insensitive Bavarian with his uncontrollable wife. Alma the perfect hostess sets everyone at ease. The couples had known each other since 1902. In 1905 Strauss enchanted them with excerpts from Salome, which Gustav vainly sought to première in Vienna. Alma records Richard’s Bavarian accent in depreciative phonetic symbols.

Strauss’s Wit, Self-deprecating Humor, Callousness. Many years after Mahler’s death, Richard reads Alma’s book. Mean and untrue, he remarks. R. had accepted Pauline as Gustav had Alma, each with all of their terrific pronouncements, with equanimity. She is good for me, said R. of Pauline. My centerpoint, said Gustav of Alma. For each man these ladies were the loves of their lives, once and for ever. Strauss at Forty-Five. Graying and absentminded, Richard is composing Der Rosenkavalier while Gustav is in the throes of the Ninth. Alma is jealous of Strauss, the jealousy of a woman who is not in love with her husband and so desires that all men be in love with her in some sort of preposterous retribution. The incident: Pauline leaves Richard over a letter from a woman. It is discovered to have been all a mistake; she returns to him. R., a man of incomparable humor, writes an opera about it, Intermezzo.

Skat. Discussions About Food. Mahler defends late Beethoven before Strauss’s attacks. For G. it is a matter of philosophy, for R., a matter of taste. Strauss loves G.’s Fifth. The adagietto of that symphony as "kitsch" (Strauss). In Strauss’s mind, beautiful music, at the very bottom, when all the layers are unzipped, contains nothing more than laughter. Strauss’s Relaxed Composing Habits vs. G.’s claustrophobic cabins. G. in Toblach 1909, Alma in Love with Another and in Decline Physically. His beautiful love letters to his wife in 1909 as he prepares for the Ninth, something I’ve had on the tip of my tongue for a long time. He interprets Faust to her; Faust and his Eighth. Profound Importance of Strauss to Mahler, 1909. With Rosenkavalier Strauss is marching backward to Mozart, while G. marches forward to Schönberg, Berg, and the mid-twentieth century.

1902. Strauss arranges the première of G.’s Third in Krefeld and loves it (especially 3.1); by coincidence, Strauss is composing Also Sprach Zarathustra even as G. is setting a Nietzsche poem to music in the Third. Strauss plays no small part in the unexpectedly warm reception of this work. 1907. Hurt Feelings. G. presents the Third in Berlin; Strauss is also in Berlin for his Salome, which G. attends, rapturously, while R. unaccountably misses his symphony. In Dresden G. had earlier missed the world première of Salome. R. to G.: "Where were you?" 1909-1911. Strauss plans to conduct the Third in Berlin, in December, "as a special gift to you [in your illness]. It will be a pleasure to hear your lovely work [meant sincerely]." He kept his word and performed the work seven months after Mahler’s death. Their Backgrounds Compared. Both knew how to grovel; both were good at musical conspiracy. Strauss is irreverent. Of the Wunderhorn anthology he sets off-color texts to music, while G. sets doomed soldiers and lost lovers. 1902. False truisms: G. always chose the ethical over the beautiful (wrong), R. ever the trickster (wrong). Bahr: Strauss was like a gardener with a soft, secretive, feminine mouth. Strauss and the burlesque of his opera Feuersnot, social satire and a relentless parody of Wagner. Mahler stages it for him gloriously. Alma maligns R. to G. and, sadly, he listens. Squelch: G. could be just as passionate a money-grubber as Strauss. Though she could banish Natalie and Lipiner from her husband’s life, she could not banish Strauss. In 1902 in a famous letter G. frets that Strauss is in tune with the times while he, G., is out of touch (unzeitgemäß). "The time will come when men will see the wheat separated from the chaff — and my time will come, when his is out." Tonality of grand jealousy.

Salome. Mahler so loves Salome that the refusal of the Hofoper to permit him to stage its première is one of the last straws leading to his break with Vienna. Or is it merely G.’s hurt pride? Strauss jokes: "Salome is a scherzo ending in a fatality. Description of this autoerotic musical orgy; the real goal of the music is sexual climax with the severed head of John the Baptist. Chaste Mahler writes: it is only through your music that Wilde’s work has become comprehensible to me." G. feels respect and jealousy, indignation and irritation, self-pity and envy, feelings of rejected friendship. Elektra, the first opera with a libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal. G. disgusted by the club of elitists surrounding R. He is ambivalent to this progressive and brilliant work, a symphonic poem remade as opera. Salzburg, 1906, Berlin 1907. Dinner with Strauss brings another anguished letter to Alma. G.: Are people made of different stuff than I? Old Strauss with a benevolent smile writes, in the margin of his copy of Alma’s book two great wars later: Yes. Eloquent photograph of the two men together in Salzburg in 1906. In Berlin G. again falls in love with the work (Salome) and identifies it with its creator. I have a huge respect for the entire work. The great Czech soprano Ema Destinnová sings.

Programs and Program Music. The variety of musical expression in Mahler’s 1.3 (scherzo of the First Symphony). The Bruder Martin parodic funeral of the scherzo is a favorite of Strauss. Other R. favorites: the sleigh bells in the Fourth, the sleeping saint in its third movement, the Dolomites in the Third. He is fascinated by the celesta writing in 6.1 and writes the instrument into Der Rosenkavalier with unforgettable effect. Strauss is present for the première of the Sixth in Essen. How and in what ways is Strauss’s program music like Mahler’s? The program for Strauss is the impulse for a complex interweaving of themes undergoing endless metamorphosis and modulation. (Sounds like Mahler!) One needs a program to understand Don Quixote, but it is the poetry of the cello that makes it immortal. Strauss the Nietzschean and Also Sprach Zarathustra. Audition colorée, tonalities and colors. Mahler’s problems with symphonic programs.

Jewish. Nazi Era. Strauss’s so-called anti-Semitic remarks; Strauss goes to Bayreuth in 1934. Bruno Walter is ordered not to conduct the Berlin Philharmonic in 1934. Strauss is appointed president of the Reichsmusikkammer. 57 Hitler warns Strauss that his current librettist, Stefan Zweig, is Jewish. Strauss is seemingly unaware of the danger facing him. By the good luck of fate, the bureaucrat holding his arrest warrant likes his music. He is never arrested. The war ends with R. still at his Garmisch estate, greeting American soldiers: "I am the composer of Don Juan and Salome."

Mahler and Strauss in Correspondence. Twenty-four years of letters and postcards, most not preserved or edited and recast by Alma. G.’s letter to Marschalk: Remember the basic difference between me and Strauss. Temper of the letters exchanged between the two. Playing each other’s compositions. Musical Politics and rivalry, 1894. Weimar performance of the First produced by Strauss. Details of its failure, with the same program — Titan, A Tone Poem — G. had prepared for Hamburg in 1893. Mahler does not yet understand how to market his work. Berlin 1895. With Strauss in attendance he tests the first three movements of Resurrection, but Strauss fails to attend the December première of the entire work. 1897 letter to the critic Seidl reveals Mahler now fully understands the difference between the two. G. sends R. the complete score of Resurrection; Strauss, pleased, thinks: Berlioz. To G.: I was so glad to get a sign of life from you after so long. I had been thinking that you had forgotten about the first Mahler fan! 71 Strauss’s ADVM vigorously promotes Mahler. January, 1902, Mahler produces Feuersnot, Alma now in attendance, see 1909 above. 1911 May. G. dies; a painful loss for Strauss. His graceful last letter to his dying friend. It was his last pleasure, Alma writes to Strauss. In 1919 Strauss, the Empire fallen, becomes director of the Vienna State Opera and moves into his friend’s old offices.

Chapter Five: Tell Me the Story (II)

Introduction to Das Lied von der Erde. Textual sources: Bethge’s Die chinesische Flöte. Bethge’s sources: Hans Heilmann, Judith Gautier, Marquis d’Hervey-Saint-Denys. At the bottom lie the original Chinese poets Li T’ai Po and Mong-Kao Jen. Why would he choose this poetry for his lieder symphony? A new surface layer of musicality: the pentatonic scale and the gruppetto or ‘turn figure’. An apparent new auditory universe is but a mask, a carapace (Adorno). Instrumentation; timbre. Instrumentation similar to past works, but timbre has a new semiotic; there is no exogenous meaning, all derives from context. Lightness and weight; suggestiveness, caricature, bleached emotion. Not the Sixth, but the Kindertotenlieder as forerunner. Donald Mitchell and his ideas about bells.

Notes on the Songs. Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde. How he got the overall title Song of the Earth, and its meaning. Polar contraries; earth below, Der Abschied abuts on heaven above. Analysis of Das Trinklied not as a lied, but as a symphonic movement with voice and text working as one of a mass of linear progressions. Anticipation of transfiguration in the music of the firmament shines blue forever. In the moonlight, a jabbering ape dances over the coffins of men. "Dark is life, is death." The polarity will be resolved only later.

Der Einsame im Herbst. Autumnal andante, with alternate moods of chilled retreat and effusive feeling. Von der Jugend. Ironic China-porcelain minuet, built on an inverted arch viewed through the mirror of a pool. "Distanciation voulue," in de la Grange’s term. Like the Chinese painter who disappeared into his own canvas, this disappearance is the appearance of death, in which the music preserves at the same time that which is vanishing (Adorno). Von der Schönheit. A second stylized minuet. Maidens pick lotus blossoms on the banks of a river. Young horsemen gallop past; one maiden sends long glances of yearning (Sehnsucht) back to him. Mahler surgically rewrites and recasts Bethge to his own purposes. Time is suspended in the final chord, der lange Blick, ‘the long glance’. Der Trunkene im Frühling. An ironic drinking song to the apparent meaninglessness of life.

Der Abschied. The farewell. Detailed analysis of this movement, the core of the work, as long as all the previous movements taken together. Mahler’s method of working back to front; he wrote the opening sounds only after the ending was finished. What appear to be chords in the sketches are abbreviated linear cells; the writing is down and across, front-to-back and back-to-front. The textual source and Mahler’s restitching and rewording. The blurring of pronominal reference; grammar as a mask. Blurred unison; the Lebensthema. Chamber-style writing for solo players. The funeral march with its unrelieved sadness. All that has gone before is but preparation for the last moments of the work. What Mahler declares in Das Lied is an ecstatic love for life that endures through death and finds its full realization only in death. The improvisatory, free-form style of the movement, built from aria and recitative.

Back in Bohemia. 1908 summer; background for Das Lied. Première of the Seventh in Prague. Spring and summer of 1909; the Ninth emerges as he is alone in Toblach, writing a stirring series of long letters to his wife.

The Ninth Symphony. Contemporary reactions and interpretations; the critic William Ritter, colleagues Berg, Walter, Specht, and Schönberg, who said: It almost seems as though this work must have a concealed author, who used Mahler merely as a spokesman, as a mouthpiece. Mid-century views of the Ninth as anti-symphony (Adorno). 9.1 Allegro comodo. Mahler wrote: Scattered love, lost youth. The indeterminate, fragmentary haze of the opening and its links with the world of Der Abschied. Chamber-style intimacy. Farewell. The curvature or stoppage of time, its Proustian non-linearity. Intimations of death in measure 308 With utmost force, and a cry for the affirmation of life, despite all that has gone before, still it might be so. The unbidden apparition of relief in the coda, a solo violin, schmeichelnd, he writes, punningly as always, ‘flattering’, but also ‘coaxing, cajoling, reassuring’.

9.2 Im tempo eines gemächlichen Ländlers. Etwas täppich und sehr derb. A dance macabre, a merciless parody of his own favorite Austrian topoi, the ländler and the waltz. Analysis. The famous montage episodes, with pieces of matter carrying varying semiotic charges built upon one another. Ländler stands for ‘country past’ and waltz for ‘sophisticated city life’ (Zander). A fake development at measure 437. Twentieth-century, anti-romantic trivialization of old icons.

Rondo. Burleske. Episodic double fugue, a bravura virtuoso piece. Central episode is a cantus firmus, development of the gruppetto figure from Das Lied. Three planes of expression: a trivialized environment, a present ‘reality’, and a dreamt-of ‘beautiful world’ (Floros).

Adagio. Sehr langsam und noch zurückhaltend. D flat, a tone lower than the allegro. Opening hymn-like (first theme) and Phrygian-colored melismas in B minor and C sharp minor (second theme). Conventional structure; four sections rework each theme, alternating intimacy and isolation. Coda: Auflösungsfeld, the music is stripped away to total silence. So slow as to be motionless, so pianissimo as to be inaudible. Ersterbend, ‘dying out’.

Last Thoughts on the Ninth. Quotations and self-quotations in the music. Exogenous references to the Kindertotenlieder as their actant. The method of polarity: expressionless ~ espressivo. The courageous letting go to death, without pathos.

Some Late Mahler Features. They trace a displacement of his style away from the early work. Collages, discarding of the notion of ‘theme’, tonality as a mask. Opposition of extremes, democratization of instruments. Rejection of the pathetic in favor of veiled reminiscence. Semiotic charges in dissonances, parodies, epigrammatic motives.

The Tenth. Mahler’s desperate love poetry to Alma in 1910. In late 1911, after his death, Alma finds his terrific love-letters from the other side — the unfinished torso of the Tenth, sketches and short-scores. The history of the emergence of this unfinished symphony begins with Alma in debt, in 1923, entrusting Franz Schalk with the performance of 10.1 and 10.3, scattering pages to admirers for cash or favors. Zsolnay publishes an excellent facsimile edition. Analysis of the Adagio. Deryck Cooke’s Performance Version (Not a Completion). Beginning in 1950, the British musicologist reconstructs what Mahler left. His defenders and opponents squabble. In 1976 the second, corrected version of Cooke’s work is published, Alma now dead. What Cooke did: working from inside out, the vivification of a fetus; his interpretation of late Mahler. The shadowy scherzi; the problem of the muffled drum from the fireman’s funeral. What Cooke and others have given us. What could have been the story of the Tenth.

Chapter Six: Curriculum Vitae

This chapter is a compact narrative of the composer’s life in about eighty short pages. The CV is arranged in columnar fashion, with the narrow left column giving dates corresponding to what is going on in the narrative; merely a year or a month if that suffices, and for important births, deaths and premières, the precise date. Mahler himself, a great letter-writer, was very imprecise about dates, to the frustration of Henry-Louis de la Grange, his biographer.

I try to tell a story in brief when a story is needed. For example, a short paragraph indexed 1860 Jul 7 tells that Gustav was born in Kaliště, Czech for something like Muddy Puddles. Once a tavern with no windowpanes, Mahler told Natalie, (it burned in 1937), it is now a museum and a concert hall (some performers are mentioned). In October of 1860 the Mahler family moved to Jihlava (Iglau); in a long paragraph I describe the many name-changes the street he lived on went through; linguistically, the German-speaking oasis of Iglau is now Czech only.

What I include is what I want to highlight in Mahler’s life, for example, 1864 Richard Strauss born in Munich (Strauss is important, and the year and place of his birth). I quote from original sources, especially Mahler’s letters. He says, for example, of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, introduced to him in 1876, a fine kid — the casualness of the phrase makes it all the more bitter for Natalie, who loved him dearly and unrequitedly. Mahler’s pronouncements upon the completion of his works are very telling. Of Das klagende Lied he said: "my Schmerzenkind," child of sorrow, part and parcel of his (discarded) Jewishness; but all of his early works, through the Fifth, will suffer as well. Of Mahler as conductor I give a telling remark from a singer: "Thanks to God in heaven. And, yes, to Mahler. He drove me batty but he forced me to surpass myself. I forgive him everything." They all say that.

Colleagues and acquaintances who play a role in Mahler’s life are identified and introduced, such as the conductor Hans von Bülow, the Czech composer Josef Foerster, the impresario Bernard Pollini, the critic Otto Nodnagel (who suffered a road-to-Damascus conversion to Mahlerism), the helpful critic Ritter, and of course, the composer Richard Strauss. The development of his attitude toward program music is traced year by year. His tendency to tinker with scores (Beethoven’s Ninth) is traced. His superstition is noted: 7.7.00, a magic number, marked his fortieth birthday and the emergence of the Fourth. Where appropriate, I quote his puns and favorite creative metaphors. usually organic or architectural — this will be a tough nut to crack, "the finale is the verjüngende Spitze ‘tapering spire’. His nagging illnesses, phantom bouts with gastric problems; his travels, mainly to concert venues, and, as time progresses, mainly to concert venues to introduce his own works, leading to a break with the Hofoper directorship in Vienna. Critics, friendly and unfriendly, are introduced and briefly discussed.

1901 is a pivotal year, marking a bowel operation which nearly kills him, his introduction to his future wife Alma, and a shift in his composing style to the middle period, with the Fifth and three Kindertotenlieder. With Alma comes a new circle of friends, Secessionist artists and architects, including the designer Alfred Roller, an important colleague. In 1903 he visits Amsterdam, meets his colleague Willem Mengelberg (the Dutch will always love Mahler). Every summer brings a new symphony until the crisis year 1907, when he leaves Vienna, suffers his daughter’s death and a diagnosis of mitral deficiency.

Here the chronology slips imperceptibly into a more fluid narrative; time slows. Mahler moves into the last three years, the great years of Das Lied, the Ninth, the Tenth. Winters in New York, summers in Toblach, with increasing estrangement from his wife. 1910; in Hodonín, Moravia, and in Munich for the première of the Eighth. Last illness begins February, 1911. Death in Vienna.

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Jihlava’s lower square, NE view, with the towers of St. Jakub

Introduction. The Case for Mahler the Czech

To know an artist’s homeland is to begin to understand his work. Of no one is this more true than Gustav Mahler. He came from the Czech lands in mid-nineteenth-century Austro-Hungary, from a forested, hilly region called Vysočina, ‘Uplands’. The trees are typically conifers, evergreen; the steep hills are not mountains — no more than 1500 to 2500 feet — but high enough to give a good climb. Snow covers the ground much of the winter, and the air has a familiar bracing clarity that dizzies the heads of visitors from Prague or Vienna and makes them wish they lived in such a climate. In a very short time you can get intoxicated with the woods and lose yourself in dreaming. The Vysočina is richly watered by crystal streams and ponds having their source here, swollen in the spring by the melts. Mahler was born in a small town called Kaliště, meaning ‘muddied pools’, ‘dark ponds’. The top of the world, or the roof of the world, Czechs call it. The little stream called Bělá flows into the Elbe and the Moldau and with them into the North Sea. Not far from the Bělá the little Jihlava river, too, finds its source, whence it flows into grand waterways, the Dyje, the Morava, and the Danube and into the Black Sea. Here in the heart of Central Europe, where primeval springs run north and south as though from a focal point, here in the middle of European history, this very place becomes for Mahler the seam, the axis of Central Europe. Mahler stands at the axis as though straddling two worlds. Jihlava, where Mahler lived the first fifteen years of his life, lies on the seam of Bohemia, a land-locked country shaped like a diamond to the northwest, and Moravia, shaped like the spread wings of a butterfly, to the southeast. The Jihlava river is the border. It divides the old ancestral Bohemian lands to the northwest and Moravia to the southeast. He wandered these throbbing forests listening to their sounds, taking the measure of their inner pulse and emotions. To him they were majestic, sublime, glorious and frightening, tender and inscrutable, seductive and fearful. The forests sang a melody that told a story of joy and grief.

Mystery makes legends. At the founding of Jihlava, on the banks of the little river flowing to the Black Sea, a potter and a merchant meet. I can’t understand why the pots I’m firing from this soil break and crack, complains the man of clay. The soil is rich enough. What do you think is the matter? The man of barter studies some shards. Very soon he sees what the potter did not. Veins of silver, he pronounces. There is silver in every one of your failed pots. Silver mining would form the basis of Jihlava’s fame and wealth in the early decades of the millennium, and when mining was finally eradicated by seventeenth-century plagues, the city would find a rebirth in textiles and trade, located here as it was on the main artery linking Prague, Brno, and Vienna.

The caves and the hills tell their legends. In the Gothic chambers of Blaník, horses and knights are sunk into an eternal sleep. The manure of the horses turns to gold in the outside world. A gift of manure is a gift of gold. In the darkest hours of the Czech lands, it is said, the knights will emerge to save the nation. The boy resonates to this messianic story about art and alchemy — no matter that he is German-speaking in Czech Bohemia, the story is potent drink. There are many more stories about magical transformations in Jihlava, and in the Krkonoš or Riesengebirge Mountains that form the northwest spine of Bohemia and the border with Germany, stories about the Great Monster Devil of the Mountain, the hideous Rýbrcoul (in Czech), Rübezahl (in German) are shared by the people on both sides of the mountains, Czech and German alike. This archetypal monster yearns to be human even while despising man’s greed, dishonesty and corruption — oh, to be human, and to be loved by the beautiful nymph, Ema! Rübezahl — it sounds like ‘turnip-counter’ in German, giving the yearning devil a comic face — is moody and remote, at times a wise friend and counselor, at other times an evil nemesis. His domain reaches beneath the rocks and the meadows to the very center of the earth, where he may retreat in sulky silence for nine hundred ninety-nine years at a time. When emerging to mingle with foolish men and seductive women, he acts as a trickster, taking the shape of men or birds to teach lessons that as often are pointless or cruel as they are meaningful. At other times he acts as an arbiter, rewarding good acts and punishing ill. In one legend Ema, imprisoned by Rübezahl, gets the better of him by telling him how much she loves turnips; flattery never fails with him, as he is usually mocked and reviled for his name, so he eagerly plants a great field of turnips for Ema. She praises his work and asks him to count the plants. As he is counting, she escapes. The trickster is himself tricked, when he exhibits traits all-too-human.

These stories have no end of variations that are eternally developing in new and unexpected directions. Gustav gives them a Wagnerian flair by having his immature characters sing Tristan-and-Isolde love-and-death duets and naming them Brinnhild, Edelgard, Irmentraut, Adelheit, Kunigund. There is no end of making up your own versions of stories. Love and death, the itinerant knight going from adventure to adventure, losing his lady and then finding her again, with an infectious, self-deprecating laugh. Myth infects the legends of his own life too, so that one is never sure, Mahler himself is never sure, what is wholly real, what is partly imagined, and what is dream-cast, dreamt, verträumt. He likes to say the house in Kaliště where he was born had no window panes. He loves to tell the story of his grandmother or great-grandmother Maria, who was a peddler. She broke a law regulating peddlers and went to Vienna to petition the emperor, who heard her out and, lo and behold, cancelled the fine. The story is told of the strong-willed old woman’s grandson Gustav that he once lectured a later emperor on what operas had the merit to be performed in his Hofoper. Well, I suppose you know more about this than I do, old Franz Josef is said to have replied.

A great musician; there must then be fabulous stories of the prodigy Mahler as a young boy. So there are. One day in the luxurious Czap Hotel, the finest building of that time in Jihlava, Gustav at sixteen is playing a concert in a city that knows and appreciates its music. There is a review to be found in the Jihlava paper mentioning works played by Gustav and his schoolmate Rudolf Krzyzanowski. Gustav plays a Chopin ballade and the Schubert fantasy in C major. Accidentally beginning the fantasy in the wrong key, Gustav transposes it on the spot so as not to begin again. Mahler actually later confirmed this, but it is said to be impossible. Under the First Republic, after Mahler’s death, this building was a municipal center; under the Nazis it was renamed the Deutsches Haus, under the communists, the Workers’ House, finally the House of Enlightenment. Here through the irony of history the infamous Babice show trials were held to suppress the enemies of the Communist state. Eleven Jihlava citizens were condemned to death in the house of Mahler’s music. The evils of twentieth-century history persecuted his ghost and all of those he left behind. In twenty-first century Jihlava the Workers’ House is a new structure, painted yellow and bearing no resemblance to the grand Czap hotel.

In Prague at eleven he remembers entertaining his hosts the Grünfelds by playing difficult works by ear without a score. Later in life, he said, he no longer could do this. Looking through the lens of these early stories and dreams, Gustav even as a youth is shrewdly realistic about his goals. At seventeen he hears Anton Rubenstein perform the Beethoven sonatas and promptly abandons his dreams of becoming a concert pianist. As a composer he is startlingly slow to develop, ever dreaming and never finishing anything. He is ashamed of all of his juvenilia and he destroys them, and correctly so. He swears to keep only what he knows to be first-rate, genuinely his, genuinely Mahler. In the end, the mature Mahler will keep only songs — far fewer in number than those of Schubert, whom as a boy he imitates — and ten symphonies, the magic number, Beethoven and Schubert plus one.

Death was the eternal visitant to Gustav’s young life. The boy Gustav told stories to sooth the pain of loss. As a brother he saw die, in the order of their birth, brothers Ernst, Karl, Rudolf, Arnold, Friedrich, Alfred, Otto and Konrad. Isidor, the first born, died before him. Only Alois and Gustav of the males survived into their thirties. Otto shot himself at twenty-one. The others died very young. Their mother bore fourteen children and died, herself, at fifty-two. Three sisters survived to adulthood. Ernst, a year younger than Gustav and his closest childhood companion, died first in his brother’s experience of life, leaving the most grievous scars which would never heal. Ernst died of pericarditis in 1875 when Gustav was fourteen. Shortly thereafter he left Jihlava for Vienna. A friend spoke of the almost maternal affection Gustav held for his younger brother. He stood vigil at his brother’s bedside and told him all the Rübezahl stories he knew and many new ones he made up on the spot. The death of Ernst was the death of the dream of childhood, a dream that now could never be fully realized or fully lived as it had been imagined. His music may be said to reconstruct a world for Ernst, and for himself, that never was but might have been.

Only four years after Ernst’s death Gustav was compelled to compose his first real work, his first masterpiece, his first child of sorrows, as he called it, The Song of Lament (also, song of complaint, of accusation). Curiously, this cantata-like work is a song of fratricide, a good brother slain by an evil brother. Gustav is said to have heard a song on this theme as a child, and the material reaches deep into folk legend. In Gustav’s version, a queen vows that the gallant knight who finds a magical red flower in the forest will have her as his bride. The evil brother kills his good brother to become king, recalling Hamlet’s uncle Claudius. A minstrel comes upon a bleached bone in the forest, carves it into a flute and when he plays upon it, learns the story of the good brother’s murder. The minstrel happens upon the castle on the day of the wedding celebration; the king is exposed and the castle collapses to the ground. The death of Gustav’s brother Ernst is here transformed into a criminal act whose retribution brings death and destruction to the kingdom built upon this evil death. Later in life Gustav will write Songs of Dead Children, written by a man grieving for his son, also named Ernst. Gustav at eighteen, at nineteen, wins the second round in his unending battle with Freund Hein, the fiddler death, the dancing mocking killer.

To know an artist’s family and its background is to begin to understand his work. Imagine yourself a European Jew in a time a century before the Holocaust, a Jew in the cultural morass of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Imagine that the empress Maria Theresa in a fit of pique has expelled all Jews from the Empire in 1744, thus making Gustav and all his forebears, as in ages past, Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew, the outcast, heimatlos, ‘homeless’, as he put it. And then the grand lady changes her mind and permits Jews into the Vysočina, so that in the second half of the eighteenth century the forebears of Franz Kafka, Sigmund Freud and Stefan Zweig may migrate to the Czech lands. Josef II has, by the time of Mahler’s earliest forebears in Czech, admitted minorities but regulated their census, issuing the Kaiserliche Judensystemalpatent in 1797 and forcing the Jews to take German names. Imagine yourself to be Šimon named Mahler, a name of uncertain origin — Müller the miller, Mohel the circumciser — born in 1793, with ancestors made difficult to trace by that change of name. You are expelled from your home town of Lipnice in the Vysočina. You marry the daughter of a tavern keeper and distiller, a pachtýř in Czech, a language you, Šimon Mahler, understand, or a Bestandjude, in the mercantile language of the cities, German, meaning a Jew and a tenant of land and property. You have married Mary Bondy and you aspire to make a name and a living in the small towns where your presence is tolerated. Your marriage, however, is unregistered and your children are all illegitimate, as you are not the first-born son of your father. You go into your father’s business and keep a tavern in Kaliště and your marriage is finally legalized in 1850. Many have been forced to bribe local Catholic officials for registration. In 1860 the capricious young emperor Franz Josef issues a Diplom permitting Jews to live in the cities; almost at once your son Bernhard, with a Heimatschein, or certificate of right to settle, moves his young family from Kaliště in Bohemia to nearby Moravian Jihlava and applies for a liquor license. He is at first denied but, strong-willed, he petitions again and in 1861 begins his Factory, as he calls his distillery. In 1867 Franz Josef surprises us again with the Ausgleich or ‘compromise’, giving all minorities civil rights; these decrees are followed by later declarations of religious liberty for all, legalizing Judaism and turning the crotchety old Empire unexpectedly into one of the most progressive confederacies of nations in the world. Your son Bernhard will have his formal citizenship in 1873. You will die in 1862 as the owner of a house in Havlíčkův Brod, the first Jew to own property there and a legend in your own time. Your home will be pointed out as the Mahler house for generations of Mahlers to come, until the Nazis. So far and so remarkably have your fortunes turned about in your own lifetime.

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St. Jakub, seen from an alley

Gustav grew up accustomed to Jews and Christians living in harmony in Jihlava. His friend Theodor Fischer was the son of the music director of St. Jakub, from whom he learned the Catholic liturgy and the principles of musical harmony. He studied with numerous musicians in town; his musical education did not suffer, it thrived. He attended the synagogue with his family, but was not moved by his Jewish faith. Being a Jew seemed to him as being born disabled, much like having one arm longer than the other, or having a peculiar stuttering walk, like St. Vitus’ dance. One had to adjust and one had to work harder. His father Bernhard encouraged his reading and his musical ambitions. Gustav would learn that being a Jew