Gustav Mahler

GUSTAV

MAHLER

BRUNO WALTER

TRANSLATED BY

JAMES GALSTON

WITH A BIOGRAPHICAL ESSAY BY

ERNST KŘENEK

NEW INTRODUCTION BY

ERIK RYDING

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

MINEOLA, NEW YORK

Copyright

Introduction copyright © 2013 by Erik Ryding

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2013, is an unabridged republication of the work originally published by Greystone Press, Inc., New York, in 1941. Erik Ryding has prepared a new Introduction specially for this Dover edition.

International Standard Book Number

eISBN-13: 978-0-486-78236-2

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

49217601   2013

www.doverpublications.com

INTRODUCTION TO THE DOVER EDITION

THE YEAR 1894 MARKED A TURNING POINT IN THE LIFE of Bruno Schlesinger, better known as the conductor Bruno Walter (1876–1962). At the impressionable age of eighteen, he encountered a musician with such a powerful personality—a man of such manifest genius—that his attitude toward life and art underwent a major transformation. The man who wrought that change was Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), who immediately took to the gifted teenager and became his mentor and friend.

In the 1890s, Mahler had a reputation mainly as a conductor, though some of his compositions were known to the public and had already prompted the kind of hostile criticism that would persist well into the twentieth century. Undeterred by blistering reviews of Mahler’s symphonies from certain members of the press, Walter would become one of the composer’s most ardent champions. Even if he were not remembered today as one of the great interpreters of the orchestral repertoire, Walter would have secured a place in music history as the conductor who premiered two towering symphonic works of the early twentieth century: Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (1911) and Ninth Symphony (1912). He also assisted in the world premiere of Mahler’s Eighth Symphony, presented in Munich in 1910, and gave the Viennese premiere of that colossal piece in 1912.

Walter’s thorough knowledge of Mahler’s music and his role as Mahler’s close friend and confidant make him an important chronicler of the composer’s life and personality. By the first decade of the twentieth century, Walter was publishing essays about some of Mahler’s works for audiences approaching them for the first time. His most significant contribution to the literature on Mahler, however, appeared in 1936, when he commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of the composer’s death with his short book Gustav Mahler, first published (without Křenek’s essay) by Herbert Reichner Verlag in Vienna. The content was partly a collection of scattered reminiscences, partly a discussion of Mahler’s methods as a conductor and stage director, partly an overview of Mahler’s œuvre, and partly a sketch of the man himself. The book was not intended as a biography, though many of the anecdotes that Walter presents in the opening section are arranged chronologically and have a biographical quality. But, as Walter was aware, it was his firsthand accounts of Mahler as a man and musician that would give the book enduring value. Succinct comments recalled by Walter—Mahler’s observation, for example, that Interesting is easy, beautiful difficult (142) or that The wild oats man has to sow are as a rule the best part of him (149)—often speak volumes about the man who uttered them.

Perhaps predictably, in discussing his larger-than-life subject, Walter often sounds like a protégé still under the spell of his mentor. Yet Walter’s relationship with Mahler was not without friction. When Mahler left Vienna in 1907, Walter mentioned to his parents that he had suffered under Mahler, who had a "terrible side.¹ That side crops up in these reminiscences several times. The great man, we read, could be hard and cutting (145), brutally insensitive to the feelings of others. One day, a composer visited Mahler to play his opera for him. According to Walter, who witnessed the scene, Mahler was

obviously sunk in the depths of boredom and aversion. When the playing had ended, Mahler did not utter a word. The composer, too, probably deeply hurt by Mahler’s silence, said nothing. . . . There was no help for it: the composer put on his coat, wrapped up his score and, after a silence that lasted for several minutes, a coldly polite Auf Wiedersehenl! terminated the painful scene. An entire lifetime of personal relations of all kinds had not supplied Mahler with that modicum of social polish which would have brought the meeting to an ordinary end. (51)

The insensitivity that Mahler showed on this occasion evidently left a lasting impression on Walter, and no wonder: it paralleled Mahler’s sometimes callous indifference toward Walters own compositions.

Walter’s commentaries on the symphonies, providing basic information as well as personal insights, are naturally colored by his own aesthetics. Consider the short work he makes of the Sixth Symphony, now a cornerstone of the orchestral repertoire. It is staggeringly powerful, yet for Walter, who never conducted it, the Sixth—especially in its last movement—conveyed the dismal message that death [is] desirable, and life detested (120), a curiously limited reading of the work. While it almost explains his avoidance of the Sixth, it also raises questions. Was he deaf to its raging energy, its tender plaints, its passages of rapturous beauty—passages that seem custom-made for Walters expressive conducting? Surely the man who so feverishly tore through the Rondo-Burleske of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony in 1938 with the Vienna Philharmonic would have no trouble making a persuasive case for the Sixth, even in its thorniest and most angular passages. The questions linger.

James Galston’s English translation of Walter’s book came out in England in 1937, a year after the publication of the Viennese edition. The American edition, published in 1941, used Galston’s translation but included after it a biographical essay by the composer Ernst Křenek (1900–1991). His essay, while respectful, offers a less reverent view of Mahler than Walter’s. This should come as no real surprise, since Křenek’s artistic goals were markedly different from those of the two older musicians. Eclectic and open to modernist experimentation, he incorporated jazz (which Walter hated) into his hugely successful opera Jonny spielt auf (1927) and wrote a number of works using the twelve-tone method, an approach to composition that Walter publicly condemned as unnatural on several occasions. (Ironically, what appears to be the only twelve-tone piece that Walter ever conducted was written by Křenek—his Second Piano Concerto.)

Throughout his career, Křenek demonstrated a literary flair in essays and books. For his facts about Mahler’s life, he acknowledged a debt to other authors. But Křenek himself had strong qualifications for writing about Mahler: his familiarity with the Austro- German musical scene in the early twentieth century, his role in preparing the score of two movements of Mahler’s Tenth Symphony for their premiere in 1924, his brief marriage to Mahler’s daughter Anna, and his acquaintance with Mahler’s widow, Alma. His contribution to the American edition of Walter’s book, about half as long as Walter’s original, fills in some significant biographical gaps—Walter, for instance, never mentions that Mahler was born Jewish, whereas Křenek brings up the matter in his first paragraph—and offers an alternative assessment of the musical titan.

Unprepared for the scope or tenor of Křenek’s essay, Walter took its inclusion as a personal insult. He objected that this was not a short preface but rather a substantial essay that followed his own.² One can imagine Walter’s shock at seeing his book, previously issued as an independent publication, now coupled with an extended profile of his friend, containing passages that he found irritating and misleading. Yet taken together, the two contributions offer a stimulating early portrait of a composer who, over the succeeding decades, would appeal to both Romantic and modernist sensibilities and whose music, as Mahler himself predicted, would become a staple of the standard repertoire.

ERIK RYDING

Brooklyn, New York

2013

1. Erik Ryding and Rebecca Pechefsky, Bruno Walter : A World Elsewhere (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2001; rev. ed., Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2006), 67.

2.Ryding and Pechefsky, 281.

CONTENTS

Preface

RECOLLECTION

First Meeting

Hamburg

Steinbach

Vienna

Last Years

REFLECTION

Re-Creative Work

At the Head of the Opera

The Conductor

Creative Work

Personality

GUSTAV MAHLER BY ERNST KŘENEK

Bohemian, Jew, German, Austrian

Mahler and Bruckner

Odyssey Through Operatic Province

Prague and Leipzig

Professional Dilemma

Operas

Budapest

Hamburg

Foretokens of Surrealism

Mahler and Strauss

Mahler in Vienna

Life in Vienna

On the Threshold of New Music

Mahler Leaves Vienna

Mahler and America

Exit

Index

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Caricatures by Boehler of Gustav Mahler Conducting

Portrait Bust of Gustav Mahler by Auguste Rodin

Caricature of Gustav Mahler by Enrico Caruso

Preface

FOR MANY YEARS, INCLINATION AND A SENSE of duty have urged me to speak of Gustav Mahler. Checked at every attempt by the insufficiency of the word ’when measured by the mystery of the existence of so great a musician, I had not got beyond a few occasional essays. And now the thirtieth recurrence of the day of his death calls upon me to say what I have to say, or else for ever hold my tongue. To be sure, after so many years of personal friendship with Mahler, and after another quarter of a century of being occupied with his work, there is much on my mind that urgently demands to be put into words. But how to satisfy the urge without running the risk of being wrecked upon the task of describing in mere words the nature of the man and of his work? My professional activity in the service of Mahler’s creative work is here rather a hindrance than an advantage. For every performance shows me anew how much more directly and convincingly Mahler may be interpreted with the baton than with the word. But what if I should direct the light not upon him but upon myself? If I should simply try to tell what the work and its creator were and still are to me? Experience and thought have made a picture of Gustav Mahler develop within me which, by means of self-analysis, I hope to be able to project outwards. Well do I realize that the result of such a method can be but a highly subjective representation, which surely will be afflicted with the shortcomings of one-sidedness and incompleteness but, on the other hand, perhaps also have the advantage of reliability and the power of conviction with which one is able to speak of oneself.

True, it is not a biography that can be produced in that manner, for I do not find within myself an account of the great transitions of his life from childhood to death, nor of the great wealth of his experiences, nor am I even able to bring home to my mind the development of the man from the age of thirty- four, when I first met him, until he had reached the fifties. Biography describes a growth; and since man grows by the world that surrounds him, the biographer must include in the picture of life the parental home, childhood, years of development, time, and contemporaries. I shall have to leave to a more competent man such a biographical delineation of Mahler’s rich existence. As for myself, I considered the only task admitting of achievement, a description of his being that is to say, a reproduction of the picture of Mahler that I carry within me.

That is the reason why, in this book, only the one man appears of whom it treats, and no mention is made even of the beloved wife who so strongly influenced him, nor of the loyal sister who shared his life up to the time of his marriage, nor of the noble friends to whom he was attached to the day of his death. A description of these personal relations would be biographical, and thus contrary to the style of this book. For the same reason, I have denied myself the privilege of writing about his cultural surroundings. My exclusive theme is: What I experienced with Mahler and how I see him.

If, occasionally, I am seen to pause in my recollection to give way to reflection and then to halt in the reflection for the purpose of verifying it by some newly arising recollection, I have yet, in the main, tried to separate recollection and reflection in my endeavor to give an adequate conception of the prodigious event which Mahler’s existence represents in the cultural life of our day.

RECOLLECTION

First Meeting

FROM THE DEPTHS OF MEMORY I CALL UP the picture of Gustav Mahler as he first appeared to me, then a youth of eighteen. A shout of indignation had gone through the musical press in June 1894, as an echo of the performance of the First Symphony—called at that time Titan—on the occasion of the Musicians’ Festival of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Musikverein, in Weimar. To judge by the criticisms, the work had justified indignation by sterility, triviality, and an accumulation of extravagances. It was, above all, the Funeral March in the Manner of Callot which was rejected with anger and scorn. I recall distinctly with what excitement I devoured the newspaper reports on the subject. I admired the daring author of so strange a Funeral March and felt a burning desire to know this extravagant man and his extravagant work.

It was but a few months later that a letter of introduction to Pollini, the theatrical manager, took me as coach to the Hamburg Opera, whose first conductor was the same Gustav Mahler. And there he stood in person, in the office of the theater, when I left Pollini’s sanctum after my first call upon him: pale, thin, small of stature, with longish features, the steep forehead framed by intensely black hair, remarkable eyes behind spectacles, lines of sorrow and of humor in the face which, when he spoke, would show the most astonishing change of expression—the very incarnation of that Kapellmeister Kreisler—interesting, demoniac, intimidating—as he would appear to the imagination of youthful readers of E. Th. A. Hoffmann’s fantastic tales. Pleasantly and kindly he inquired as to my musical ability and knowledge—to which I replied, to his visible satisfaction, with mingled modesty and self-reliance—and left me in a kind of stupor and deep emotion. For my previous experiences, gained in homely surroundings, had taught me that genius was to be met with only in books and musical literature and in the art-treasures of museums, but that living human beings were more or less commonplace and that everyday life was prosaic.

And now I felt as if a higher realm had been opened to me. In his aspect and manner Mahler appeared to me both as a genius and a demon: life itself had all of a sudden become romantic, and I know of nothing that could more aptly characterize the elementary effect of Mahler’s personality than the irresistible power with which his entry into a young musician’s life brought about a complete change in the latter’s views of life.

My next