of a deeply insecure man into Mahler’s general attitude. Strauss was, at the time, the more accomplished composer, and Mahler felt threatened by a fame and success he had never achieved and desperately desired. His ostensible indifference to public critique of his music was likely to be, as Alex Ross puts it, “a café-table affection” or, more precisely, a disingenuously aloof persona Mahler adopted to deal with his inadequacies. Truth be told, Mahler fought valiantly to have his music performed and appreciated. He hobnobbed with the Viennese musical élite, sending letters and gifts to critics to keep their favours. When a work was well received – as was the case with the Eighth Symphony – he was not immune to the joys of triumph. He reacted, not as a stoic musical god getting his due, but as a human gleefully reaping the rewards of his grueling labours. In word, he disavowed the meaninglessness of success and public recognition yet, in deed, he pursued them relentlessly. In short, Mahler was neither divine nor delusional, but a bit of both. He was an extremely gifted but fl awed man, riddled with doubt and overwhelmed by ambition, struggling to reconcile the demands of his ego with his humanitarian mission – “part Genius, part demon”, in the words of Bruno Walter. In short, he was a double man.

Mahler’s childhood was not an easy one. Born in 1860 into a German-speaking Jewish family in a small village in Bohemia, an outlying province of the Austrian empire, Mahler quickly formed an awareness of himself as the ethnic other. “I am thrice homeless,” he would famously say, “a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a Jew everywhere.” His father, who struggled to make a living as an innkeeper, noted his son’s musical gifts early on, and encouraged him to nurture them. As an adult composer, Mahler would

develop a highly dichotomised style that bore the mark of his early childhood experiences. While still a boy, Mahler lost fi ve siblings in early childhood, and observed their burial “from the family tavern where the singing never stopped”. The result, as Norman Lebrecht noted, was a child’s funeral march in the First Symphony, composed in the style of a drunken jig.

Gustav Mahler’s music abounds with many perverse paradoxes of this kind. Heavenly images of an idyllic afterlife follow on from bleak depictions of earthly torment. Jewish klezmer sounds form an unlikely partnership with hymnal textures evoking the Catholic liturgy. Over-worked sentimentalism rubs shoulders with classical Germanic restraint. Basic, folk-like homophony gives way to counterpoint of Bachian complexity. East and West, the highbrow and the lowbrow are treated with equal respect as fonts of creative raw material. To his befuddled detractors, his symphonies appeared like an absurdist mish-mash of disparate elements, thrown together without rhyme or reason – it’s little wonder the critics reacted so coldly. Mahler himself often struggled with the excesses in his music: “I cannot do without trivialities,” he wrote to Bruno Walter in reference to the newly completed Third Symphony. “But this time, all permissible bounds have been passed.”

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

where he immediately heard a barrel organ grinding out the Viennese folk song Ach, du Lieber Augustin.

“The conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement,” Freud noted, “was from then on inextricably linked in his mind, and the one mood inevitably brought the other.” The observation provides a neat formula for

many of the marked dualities in Mahler’s life and work. Too neat? Possibly. According to

Freud scholar, Ernest Jones, Mahler fi nally “understood why his music had been prevented from achieving the highest rank as a result of the noblest passages, those inspired by the most profound emotions, being spoiled by the intrusion of some commonplace

melody.” Mahler had, for years, managed to mythologise himself as “the untimely

man”. Had this man of reason fi nally found an empirical justifi cation for

his shortcomings as a composer?

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Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto No.1 Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade

Stravinsky The Rite of Spring*

* Only performed on 23 Maywww.limelightmagazine.com.au42 LIMELIGHT APRIL 2015

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