The Mahler Enigma: A Myth, A Culture, The Wonder

By Franz Loschnigg

Intended for lovers of the arts, this "big think" book engages the dynamic of culture and the creative mind. It deconstructs, layer by layer, misconceptions about Gustav Mahler. A unique and much deeper understanding of his mind and world emerges.

By the early 1970s Franz Loschnigg realized that a myth was developing

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stratton Press
• Release date: Jun 10, 2022
• ISBN: 9781648959707

Franz Loschnigg

Intended for lovers of the arts, this "big think" book engages the dynamic of culture and the creative mind. It deconstructs, layer by layer, misconceptions about Gustav Mahler. A unique and much deeper understanding of his mind and world emerges.By the early 1970s Franz Loschnigg realized that a myth was developing around Mahler based on the assumptions of Henri de la Grange. Rather than accepting this work as definitive, the author turned to primary sources, the contemporary writers and poets of fin de siècle Vienna, and to the mid-20th century sciences of cultural anthropology and social psychology, as well as the author's own familiarity with Vienna's musical culture. With this synthesis of disciplines, he revealed the illusions of an established narrative around Mahler, upon which decades of interpretations are based. This study did not begin with a theory, but discovered inductively that a deeper, simpler wellspring drove Mahler's interior life, and this author knew where to find it.Something like a work of investigative reporting, anchored in meticulous research, this is an inquiry into the dynamic of an artist and his culture: Mahler embedded in his culture, deconstructing notions of his childhood, with marvelous stories of ordinary life in imperial Vienna, a surprising critique of the Conservatory's composition training, and his subsequent breaking free to become a singular creative mind.

Book preview

Note on the Author’s Thinking

In the early 1970s, Franz Loschnigg wondered what had really motivated Gustav Mahler, who as a composer had been mostly ignored and sometimes reviled for half a century. Clearly, he thought, something else was going on than what most commentators assumed.

Having listened to music in Vienna throughout the midtwentieth century, Franz had more exposure than most to Mahler’s music, which was still not widely appreciated. Listening every night in Stehplatz (standing room) and later studying music theory and composition as an older student at the Hochschule for Music and Performance Arts in Vienna, he had seen little interest in Mahler. But he became fascinated with the continuing mystery of what Mahler was up to—the true origins of that incredible oeuvre—and began years of reading and research. The mythmaking around Gustav Mahler drew the author into interdisciplinary studies while at the School of Music, University of Wisconsin: Anthropology, the new psychology of culture, sociology, natural sciences, literature, and mythology. Following a doctorate in music theory and history, the author began rewriting the Mahler book and planning future volumes rethinking the phenomenon of Western music in general.

The study evolved. What had begun simply as a conviction that Mahler’s image needed revision moved to grander questions of the power of culture and myth as a field of reference for creative motivation in composers. Surely, there was more to Mahler’s music than martial tunes, folkloric simplicity, and overwrought sorrowing laments. Neither was it a religious expression. Some profound abyss was being plumbed, the author thought—perhaps the horror and ecstasy of life itself.

This recognition came about through three encounters:

The first story is of music itself, the general state of music as an art form at the end of the era of tonal music and how music is currently perceived. In the human sciences, the discussion of music is not engaged as are other art forms. As a concept, music does not yield to rational definition and lacks a comprehensive theory, making it difficult to handle. But some kind of definition of music must be possible. Here, the author discovered the theoretical work of Ernest Ansermet.

Something like the Einstein of music theory, Ansermet, who was also a trained physicist, integrated aspects of music theory, aesthetics, and criticism with the sciences, psychology, philosophy, and theology. He studied the nature of music and its phenomenology as a means of expression in Western civilization. Perhaps Ansermet’s thinking was generally ignored by musicology because it was too difficult, too deep, too grand, and disquietingly prophetic. Yet he seemed to be the only profound thinker to bring the myth of Western music as a subject into the human sciences—and music theory and history as modern sciences into the new anthropology that was emerging through the work of thinkers such as Ernest Becker, Joseph Campbell, Edward T. Hall, Marvin Harris, or Lewis Mumford. And beyond them, the towering comprehension of Otto Rank and Carl G. Jung.

The other encounter was with Gustav Mahler himself, his very existence. He seemed more controversial than his contemporary, Richard Strauss, more tragic and obscure. Was this a reliable historic image? Important premises about him, as presented by the handful of professionals who had made Mahler their main interest, were unsustainable. The making of myth and legend, even a cult of hero worship, characterized the accounts of commentators and his widow, Alma. Then in 1973, Henry-Louis de La Grange published the only definitive biography of Mahler at the time.

Franz Loschnigg reacted strongly. He saw then that serious thought needed to be devoted to Ansermet’s assessment of the state of music theory and history; it was so contrary to conventional wisdom in the discipline. It seemed the world of music would never be the same again. With too many of the historic reports on Mahler being tainted with partisan sentiment or hero worship and certainly not integrative, his image and its meaning for the contemporary musical scene had to be completely reexamined. The biographical, psychological, and philosophical narrative in the usual orthodox presentation seemed distressingly antiquated and did not add up to a coherent image.

Something was still missing. A third element emerged, which became the subject of this study. It became clear that neither the whole complex of western music theory and music history nor a single era or composer could be studied adequately unless this was done in a state of mind prepared to acknowledge the force that propels all art and every creative being into life and creation, and that is culture (from the later Prologue draft).

It was senseless to unravel any of the key questions about Mahler’s motivation without recognizing the single most important factor in the forming of an artist’s mind (i.e., being embedded in a culture—what the author called cultural education). (Even so simple a thing as there not being an idiom for mind in German complicates the study of a mind in Austrian culture. And the meaning of culture is reduced today to mean simply the arts.)

The dynamics of culture work outside of the realm called consciousness and, because of that, are terribly effective. What kind of grip did culture have on Mahler? The new perceptions and methods of modern cultural anthropologists and macro thinkers needed to be integrated into this pursuit of an artist’s core, his identity and work.

So the author knew then that I was quite alone. His concerns were not reflected in the literature on Mahler, nor were they evident in the disciplines of music history and criticism. The rest of the learned world, on the other hand, was too distant from the actual world and mind of a composer to have anything conclusive to say.

The author’s thinking evolved in the course of this study, which was no longer about music. Listening to the inner conversations, exploring new disciplines and sources, and following the thread of this adventure of the mind, this erudite and critical thinker became a seeker. Not trying to come up with a definitive answer (For who can know another’s mind?), he urged that deeper questions be asked—and in the process contributed novel insights. Two are especially stunning:

I dispute that Mahler knew what suffering was! (personally, that is). His music was not about himself.…His works were not about himself and his own suffering; they were about ‘someone else.’ His creations were truly fictional, utilizing music to shape characters, plots, tragedies and forces. Mahler as composer was creating, as any author, a work of fiction to describe life. So much for the assumptions of a century.

The persistent inconsistencies and lack of awareness of a deeper element in Mahler were unsettling. What could all this mean? Was everyone wrong about who he was? The accuracy of his image and its meaning had to be reexamined from the ground up—not only in the musical world but also for fields concerned with the major spiritual endeavors of Western civilization. The breadth and depth of what came next expanded to the most vital and elaborate of human artifacts which were at the same time the chief mind makers, namely culture and myth.

Everything else hinged on this: Studies on art and religion as springing from the same original impulse; the role of the arts as bearers of cultural ideology; the gradual merger of the physical and the metaphysical realms; the new understanding of rational versus irrational, masculine versus feminine, artist versus art and both versus the cultural collective—all these were elaborations on the meaning of culture. And all were fundamentally important as ways of understanding an era—and its protagonists—in which cultural finesse and the esteem of the arts reached such extraordinary proportions.

The culminating awareness…converged in the distance upon a possible closure of an age in philosophy and science as well as in the arts. Little wonder that I felt excited and challenged not only to take a fresh view of that particular era but to pry deeper into the motivations of a Mahler, however enshrouded to himself, not knowing where this would lead me.

(a later Prologue draft)

By the early 1980s, deepening his study of Prigogine, Norman Brown’s Life Against Death, and Freud himself more thoroughly, the author came upon a major burst of new understanding. He found mounds of references to check out and books to read and felt he would have to scrap most of what I wrote and start afresh, especially chapter 5.

This author was a consummate observer and an inductive thinker. He did not begin with a set of ideas, preconceived notions, as he would call it; he rather went about discovering heuristically, piece by piece, fitting the puzzle together to reimagine Mahler.

Franz Loschnigg died in Austria in February 2011. In his lifetime, the author had thought this book to be contrived (serving an academic purpose); the intended revision—the first of three volumes—was to have polished the ideas and language. But his thinking and personal evolution followed ever new directions, leaving the Mahler work behind.

Now, as the work of this remarkable composer only grows in acclaim and understanding in the musical world, it seems time to bring the author’s unique, even singular study to light. Besides exhaustive research into unique writings and lines of thought, the author brings his own personal familiarity with Vienna’s cultural life and language as a kind of participant observer. He tells the long story.

Care has been taken to preserve the language and tone of the author, even as the work has been tightened and edited. Its structure remains intact. Fresh translations from the German, always of original documents, are by the author.

Since this study, many books have been written about Mahler and his epoch. Carl E. Schorske’s esteemed historical work Fin-de-siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (Random House, 1980) initially interested the author; nevertheless, he found himself reading it, by turns, in rebellion or boredom. Jens Malte Fischer’s biography Gustav Mahler (Yale University Press, 2011; first published in Germany in 2003) is indeed definitive and might have been admired by the author. Others apply today’s neurosciences to the arts as if they are merely workings of the brain. It is precisely this reductionism (and scientism) that the author was at pains to dispel. Rather, Jesse J. Prinz’s new exploration of how culture and social forces affect our lives (Beyond Human Nature, Norton 2012) contributes to the direction the author pursued. And surely, Robert Weldon Whalen’s beautiful Sacred Spring makes the same point.

What was important to Franz Loschnigg was how a creative individual absorbed and then freed himself from his culture to become a singular human event—as he himself was.

*   *   *

Note on the Author’s Thinking was written by Helen Loschnigg-Fox, who also edited and updated the foreword, integrating a later prologue, notes, and letters of the author.

Foreword:

Putting Hamlet Back in the Play

This study opens worlds. Neither biography nor music criticism, it investigates the culture and myth in which Gustav Mahler lived—its grip on him—and the assumptions from which an image of this first influential composer of the twentieth century was assembled. It is born out of the necessity to decode the culture and time in which Mahler’s oeuvre emerged and was left to us as a monument of human existence in its highest euphoric form. Its central question: what were the forces and impulses that are truly the foundation of Mahler’s work—the collective cultural force underlying individual artistic expression?

Instead of the conventional ways of viewing Mahler, the work of twentieth century social anthropologists and cultural psychologists are brought together with poets and writers of Mahler’s time to comment on forces beneath the visible spectacle of culture. Together, they speak like the chorus in a Greek tragedy—Ernest Becker, Edward T. Hall, Joseph Campbell and Otto Rank, Zweig and Kafka, Herzl, Bahr, Wildgans, Schnitzler. Only the Chorus is unmasked; only the Chorus understands. While not part of a larger school of thought, their common insight is that culture is an organism. To understand one piece, the whole must be examined. Yet it resists scrutiny when the observer participates in the culture. The adventure here is to break out and join the Chorus—to find a holistic point of view. And to enter into the age, the field in today’s language, to find out what it felt like to be Mahler.

What went into the making of a mind like Gustav Mahler’s? Is one mind ever on its own? Is mind nearly synonymous with internalized culture, as the anthropologist Edward T. Hall thought? If so, then the interest shifts to culture. And what is culture? Such questions are novel to a study of music-historical interest, but Mahler offers an extraordinary chance to ask them. What he created is still an unsolved mystery—the power of artistic expression, the force of a creative mind.

In what way was Mahler’s mind internalized culture? Was that time and place the only conceivable frame of mind for this composer? Perhaps Ernest Becker’s insight that creature consciousness is always absorbed by culture, indeed that culture is an heroic denial of creatureliness, reached its height in the Viennese culture of the approaching fin de siècle. Denial of creatureliness was in fact the main preoccupation of that culture and its inhabitants. How indeed does culture form the mind of an artist? This process of questioning turned a study in music history into an exploration of the creative mind.

Knowledge of Mahler and the culture in which he lived—the premises, assumptions, and myths from which his image was assembled—has relied on disclosures blurred by subjective motives. Early myths and legends, influenced first by Alma Mahler and later by Henry de La Grange’s biography (1973), persisted in presenting a seriously sorrowful childhood, a tormented stormy life, and a body of work wholly explainable by the events of his life—or divine revelation.

Even later biographies, while greatly expanding the arc of Mahler’s accomplishments and environments, have not yet reached the essence of the man and his work. Who was he really, particularly in those hours when he composed, was seized, was and swept away by the torrents of his music, especially when, on the surface, he appeared to be at peace? Our minds are not comfortable with admitting to mystification or ignorance, surprise or paradox—the chaos of our mental landscape.

So a more encompassing perspective emerges from the convergence of two extraordinary phenomena: (1) the close of one epoch in philosophy, science, and culture at the turn of the nineteenth century—including tonal music and the animist heroic tradition (in which belief in a personal God and an immortal soul were significant cultural factors); and (2) the dawning awareness and new thought of those few American thinkers in twentieth century sciences whose explosion and scope opened the possibility for a more integrative, more profound look at the human experience of creativity.

In the work of this handful of modern American authors, a liberating synthesis existed. It had an exhilarating force of conviction, unparalleled in modern Europe. The American human sciences might not be free of avoidance and denial, but they attacked it boldly; Europeans, by contrast, seemed hopelessly in the grip of it. Through this, the author realized that repression, avoidance, and denial were important strategies in every aspect of life, the feuilleton and scholarly thought included, making history manageable.

These contemporary thinkers were empiricists. They made connections and integrated, and, like the author, they were lifelong students—potential universalists. Through this study, they began to converse with one another in something like a domain, a continuum of thought not necessarily visible in the mainstream of disciplines. So the author found a new way of looking at existing concepts and definitions of things that were hidden or scattered, spoken in a thousand competitive voices, in the words of Ernest Becker.

With this larger view, instead of analyzing Mahler through the lens of a specialized profession, such as music criticism or music history or psychology, there was another way—with the possibility of (almost) grasping what was going on in Mahler’s mind. Or, at least, seeing his work as an adventure of the mind. Unless one understands Mahler’s existence as a response to specific cultural realities, unless one interprets through a modern liberated approach the nature of the artistic endeavor called Western music, and unless one articulates at least some of the vital interests and dynamics existing between the artist, the artistic endeavor, and the human collective, there is really no way of discussing meaningfully something of such complexity as Mahler’s music.

Biographers, music historians, music critics, and commentators have an assumed competence, as if they knew Mahler’s life closely. They have regarded Mahler within the frame of their disciplines and treated him as an isolated phenomenon, inadequately judging the culture in which he lived and not keeping abreast of developments in other fields concerned with Western civilization and its major spiritual endeavors. Those commentaries that engaged in psychological interpretations seem antiquated—mechanistic and reductionist. Is Mahler’s body of work totally explainable by the events of his life? Or analysis of psychological fragments—death wish, fratricidal, guilt complex—or the composer’s alleged personal suffering? Psychology fails as explanation. A more empirical search is made here to uncover the obscure origins of what is known about his life and to study holistically the making of a mind like Mahler’s, seen from outside the music professions.

Unusual sources are excavated and illusions revealed: Contemporaries of Mahler describing their school years and the peer culture of the gymnasium; what Mahler did not learn in a useless academic and Conservatory environment—confirmed by Brahms’s observations; a broad and penetrating look at the city of Vienna when enthusiasm for the arts and great masters permeated its culture and inflamed the boys then as sports do today; the city’s elaborate rituals; the progressive and liberal mentality of the time; insightful thought on Jewish intellectual and artistic predominance in Vienna in Mahler’s time; the composer’s fascination with physical and metaphysical phenomena, with life itself; and bringing forward the unique understanding of Mahler by Natalie Bauer-Lechner. This ignored source offers particular insight into Mahler’s philosophical thought, recording it with comprehension and care. The author provides new translations to replace misleading ones in biographies. And his rich and remarkable bibliography of over a hundred items is a treasure trove for Mahler students.

Although cited in The Biography Book by Daniel S. Burt (Oryx Press, 2001), entitled then The Cultural Education of Gustav Mahler (1976), this study was never intended to be biographical. Begun as a disciplined essay in music history—a revision of the image of Mahler—it converged ever more into questions of how the artistic mind is formed: the process of individuation within a cultural context. The author meant it to be a first report in a continuing adventure of the mind. As such, it is as fresh today as when it was written.

The enigma of this artist is Mahler as creator of his own myth, the center of a mythology of his own, as Joseph Campbell described the uniquely individuated person. Once the layers of image-making are peeled off—Alma’s role in designing Mahler’s image as part of her myth and the misconceptions and illusions of commentators—the author makes a case that Mahler knew exactly what he was doing and where it came from. Working inductively, building suspense, this study finally approaches and analyzes Mahler’s manifesto for the Third Symphony—his own explanation of what happened when he composed.

Mahler’s songs and symphonies are not about a walk in the springtime, as the author once said, but life and death. The immensity of life can be touched only through music, Mahler discovered to his horror. Life’s beauty is pierced through music, as the universe is through mathematics. Metaphysical concepts (not to be confused with divine revelation), death and rebirth, are the foundation of Mahler’s art, inseparable from his musical creations.

This is a new direction, a modern view of the interplay of art and culture where an intensely creative mind grapples with the awe and ecstasy of existence. It puts the spark, the soul back into the story of Gustav Mahler—Hamlet back in the play. He is revealed as an artist who set out to express in music some of the mystifying and deep-seated urges of the human spirit. The author’s attitude is one of curiosity and wonder.

Edited by Helen Loschnigg-Fox

Part 1

Introducing Concepts and Sources

Chapter 1

An Unexamined Image

In Vienna, the home of four major professional symphony orchestras, two prestigious and powerful concert societies, with concert halls still among the best in the world, the performance of a Mahler symphony was for half a century only an occasional event. For many music lovers then, listening to most of his music was an ordeal. There were few Mahler enthusiasts.

In contrast to his own homeland, Mahler’s music gained substantially in appreciation in England and the US. By 1971, Laurence Davies pointed out that from about 1950 onwards Mahler’s stock has continued to rise in Britain until we have reached the almost comical situation that confronts us today, in which the Albert Hall is filled to hear his Fifth Symphony.¹

Harold C. Schoenberg gave a reason for Mahler’s rising reputation:

It is believed that [Mahler] represents certain urges of the contemporary psyche. It was not very long ago that a performance of any Mahler symphony was a rarity. Today Mahler probably pushes Brahms and Tchaikovsky aside in the popularity sweepstakes. And therefore every conductor wants to show how he can handle Mahler. Whether or not he likes the music or has any sympathy for it, Mahler has become a part of his life and hence must be conducted.²

In this, Mr. Schoenberg lifted only a tiny corner of the cover of substantial interests and interdependencies that accounted for a Mahler renaissance. Probably the interest of the listener represented only a fraction of this mass, being less important than economic interests. For symphony orchestras in midtwentieth century America, there was a lack of challenging contemporary pieces that would also draw an audience and, thus, support. Since Mahler had not been played much, his music appeared fresh and intriguing—for players and conductors as well as listeners who developed a taste for Mahler.

How did commentators paint the prevailing image of Mahler? Perhaps this could help to explain how he became so attractive a composer. Henry de La Grange’s biography suggests that it was because of the startling nervousness of his music:

Mahler’s glaring paradoxes and contradictions have been pointed out many times, and they are indeed unique in the history of music …. Within his music itself, the contrasts are … startling: Tragedy/Mockery; Pathos/Irony; Nobility/Vulgarity; Gravity/Humor; Folkloric simplicity/Technical refinement; Romantic visionary mysticism/Critical modern nihilism.³

The list grows; these are only the crudest and most apparent characteristics of his oeuvre. Yet La Grange thought they could be fully explained, that "many apparent inconsistencies can be dispelled thanks to a thorough and detailed knowledge of Mahler’s private and professional life, and that this knowledge is essential to the understanding of his music.⁴

But in a profound work in music criticism, A. Salazar insists that it is not the authors who should be investigated but rather their works, and he cautioned that even there, music history has largely lacked wisdom:

In speaking of the works themselves it is necessary to guard against a myth. This myth maintains that the works of a certain author are the fruits of a system of ‘intentions’ that belong sometimes to the emotional and sometimes to the technical. From this has been born a whole series of doctrines, now dated as the period of isms. They are in large measure conventional and artificial.⁵

Interpretations of Mahler never fail to imply such intentions in his work. He is advertised as the artist who best articulated the inner conflicts and struggles of his neurotic and driven age.⁶

To learn about these conflicts of his neurotic age, one should be able to observe them in his time and society. But the perplexity and tedium reflected toward his works in Viennese musical circles suggest that Mahler the composer was neither understood nor widely appreciated by people in his own age. Did they not feel articulated? Does the present culture sense its own conflicts and struggles, its fear and longings reflected in the torn and tragic musical creations of Mahler? Or is current interest in Mahler a willingness to understand truly the conflicts and struggles of the culture in which he lived, to decode compassionately and mourn its tragedy and decline?

Ironically, Mahler’s position and impact on the magnificent musical scene of his age was the highest and most powerful that can be imagined—as a conductor. The means at his disposal were the dreams of his less fortunate contemporaries.

In the early twentieth century, Mahler’s fame and esteem were unparalleled among the musical celebrities of Central Europe. In spite of this unique charisma, however, he was largely rejected in his time as a composer.⁷

It is Mahler’s complex personality and tragic existence that has occupied his commentators. There is hardly another composer in the history of Western music whose work has been so closely tied to his life by scholars. His very existence was thought to be the mainspring for the specifically Mahlerian musical expressiveness. This permeates all the literature on Mahler and is still the basis for his historic image.

To find the origins of the seemingly bizarre elements in Mahler’s music, it has been the norm to concentrate on his family circumstances, childhood experiences, and, as La Grange terms it, the psychological atmosphere that prevailed in the Mahler family.⁸ But sorting through the many notions and interpretations that make up the prevailing image of Mahler reveals that his childhood, background, and even his adolescence and entire education are largely obscure!

A suspicion creeps in that this image is not based on reliable documents, empirical scrutiny, and intelligent scholarship, but on hearsay, subjective and biased interpretations, and sometimes even on manipulation (conscious or unconscious) of his background by Mahler himself. Furthermore, large areas of his cultural environment have hardly been considered. So the image of Mahler as it persists in the history of Western music may be unreal.

Childhood events are said to have been decisive for his later life and as a composer; they are called traumatic experiences. Among these are the harshness of his father, the weakness and submissiveness of his mother, and tragedies involving Gustav’s brothers and sisters. Add to the mix ethnic, racial, and political conflicts—and the cultural environment so often recounted: the military band marching by, the barrel organ of a street musician, or the little child going off on his own or being left alone and abandoned. Said to have a tragic effect on the child, most writers deduce or suggest early suffering. Gustav Mahler’s was a traumatic childhood, they say.

Mahler’s formal education, its alleged formative impact, is another misconception. Describing where he studied, writers have used data gathered in old archives in Austria and Czechoslovakia and what Mahler told to friends. Scholars drew conclusions, as one does with historical biography, sometimes in great detail.

What is missing appears only if Mahler’s image is extracted from the