he made his fondness for money too obvious. “More of a stock company than a genius,” Kraus later said.
And was there something a little Jewish about Strauss? So said the anti-Semitic French journal La Libre Parole. It did not go unnoticed that Strauss enjoyed the company of Jewish millionaires. Arthur Schnitzler once said to Alma Mahler, with ambiguous intent: “If one of the two, Gustav Mahler or Richard Strauss, is a Jew, then surely it is … Richard Strauss!”
Der Mahler
Berlin, where Strauss lived in the first years of the new century, was the noisiest, busiest metropolis in Europe, its neoclassical edifices encircled by shopping districts, industrial infrastructure, working-class neighborhoods, transportation networks, and power grids. Mahler’s Vienna was a slower, smaller-scale place, an idyll of imperial style. It was aestheticized down to its pores; everything was forced to glitter. A gilt sphere capped Joseph Olbrich’s Secession building, a shrine to Art Nouveau. Gold-leaf textures framed Gustav Klimt’s portraits of high-society women. At the top of Otto Wagner’s severe, semi-modernistic Post Office Savings Bank, goddess statues held aloft Grecian rings. Mahler provided the supreme musical expression of this luxurious, ambiguous moment. He knew of the fissures that were opening in the city’s facade—younger artists such as Schoenberg were eager to expose Vienna’s filigree as rot—but he still believed in art’s ability to transfigure society.
The epic life of Mahler is told in Henry-Louis de La Grange’s equally epic four-volume biography. Like many self-styled aristocrats, the future ruler of musical Vienna came from the provinces—namely, Iglau, a town on the border of Bohemia and Moravia. His family belonged to a close-knit community of German-speaking Jews, one of many pockets of Judentum scattered across the Austro-Hungarian countryside in the wake of imperial acts of expulsion and segregation. Mahler’s father ran a tavern and a distillery; his mother gave birth to fourteen children, only five of whom outlived her.
The family atmosphere was tense. Mahler recalled a time when he ran out of the house in order to escape an argument between his parents. On the street, he heard a barrel organ playing the tune “Ach, du lieber Augustin.” He told this story to Sigmund Freud, in 1910, during a psychoanalytic session that took the form of a four-hour walk. “In Mahler’s opinion,” Freud noted, “the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was from then on inextricably fixed in his mind.”
Mahler entered the Vienna Conservatory at the age of fifteen, in 1875. He launched his conducting career in 1880, leading operettas at a summer spa, and began a fast progress through the opera houses of Central Europe: Laibach (now Ljubljana in Slovenia), Olmütz (now Olomouc in the Czech Republic), Kassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, and Hamburg. In 1897, with seeming inevitability, but with behind-the-scenes help from Johannes Brahms, he attained the highest position in Central European music, the directorship of the Vienna Court Opera. Accepting the post meant converting to Catholicism—an act that Mahler undertook with apparent enthusiasm, having more or less abandoned his Judaism in Iglau.
Strauss, who had known Mahler since 1887, worried that his colleague was spreading himself too thin. “Don’t you compose at all any more?” he asked in a letter of 1900. “It would be a thousand pities if you devoted your entire artistic energy, for which I certainly have the greatest admiration, to the thankless position of theatre director! The theatre can never be made into an ‘artistic institution.’”
Mahler accomplished precisely this in Vienna. He hired the painter Alfred Roller to create visually striking, duskily lit stagings of the mainstream opera repertory, thereby helping to inaugurate the discipline of opera direction. He also codified the etiquette of the modern concert experience, with its worshipful, pseudo-religious character. Opera houses of the nineteenth century were rowdy places; Mahler, who hated all extraneous noise, threw out singers’ fan clubs, cut short applause between numbers, glared icily at talkative concert-goers, and forced latecomers to wait in the lobby. Emperor Franz Joseph, the embodiment of old Vienna, was heard to say: “Is music such a serious business? I always thought it was meant to make people happy.”
Mahler’s composing career got off to a much slower start. His Symphony No. 1 was first played in November 1889, nine days after Strauss’s Don Juan, but, where Strauss instantly won over the public, Mahler met with a mixture of applause, boos, and shrugs. The First begins, like Strauss’s Zarathustra, with an elemental hum—the note A whistling in all registers of the strings. The note is sustained for fifty-six bars, giving the harmony an eternal, unchanging quality that recalls the opening of Wagner’s Ring. There is a Wagnerian strain, too, in the theme of falling fourths that stems from the primeval drone. It is the unifying idea of the piece, and when it is transposed to a major key it shows an obvious resemblance to the motif of pealing bells that sounds through Parsifal. Mahler’s project was to do for the symphony what Wagner had done for the opera: he would trump everything that had gone before.
The frame of reference of Mahler’s symphonies is vast, stretching from the masses of the Renaissance to the marching songs of rural soldiers—an epic multiplicity of voices and styles. Giant structures are built up, reach to the heavens, then suddenly crumble. Nature spaces are invaded by sloppy country dances and belligerent marches. The third movement of the First Symphony begins with a meandering minor-mode canon on the tune “Frère Jacques,” which in Germany was traditionally sung by drunken students in taverns, and there are raucous interruptions in the style of a klezmer band—“pop” episodes paralleling the vernacular pranks in Strauss’s Don Juan and Till Eulenspiegel. Much of the first movement of the Third Symphony takes the form of a gargantuan, crashing march, which reminded Strauss of workers pressing forward with their red flags at a May Day celebration. In the finale of the Second Symphony, the hierarchy of pitch breaks down into a din of percussion. It sounds like music’s revenge on an unmusical world, noise trampling on noise.
Up through the Third Symphony, Mahler followed the late-Romantic practice of attaching detailed programmatic descriptions to his symphonies. He briefly gave the First the title “Titan”; the first movement of the Second was originally named “Funeral Ceremony.” The Third was to have been called, at various times, “The Gay Science,” “A Summer Night’s Dream,” and “Pan.”
With the turning of the century, however, Mahler broke with pictorialism and tone poetry. The Fourth Symphony, finished in 1900, was a four-movement work of more traditional, almost Mozartean design. “Down with programs!” Mahler said in the same year. Concerned to differentiate himself from Strauss, he wished now to be seen as a “pure musician,” one who moved in a “realm outside time, space, and the forms of individual appearances.” The Fifth Symphony, written in 1901 and 1902, is an interior drama devoid of any programmatic indication, moving through heroic struggle, a delirious funeral march, a wild, sprawling Scherzo, and a dreamily lyrical Adagietto to a radiant, chorale-driven finale. The triumphant ending was perhaps the one conventional thing about the piece, and in the Sixth Symphony, which had its premiere on May 27, 1906, eleven days after the Austrian premiere of Salome, Mahler took the triumph back. Strauss’s opera had been called “satanic,” and, as it happens, the same adjective was applied to Mahler’s symphony in the weeks leading up to the first performance. Mahler, too, would see how far he could go without losing the vox populi.
The setting for the premiere of the Sixth was the steel town of Essen, in the Ruhr. Nearby was the armaments firm of Krupp, whose cannons had rained ruin on French armies in the war of 1870–71 and whose long-distance weaponry would play a critical role in the Great War to come. Unsympathetic listeners compared Mahler’s new composition to German military hardware. The Viennese critic Hans Liebstöckl began a review of a subsequent performance with the line “Krupp makes only cannons, Mahler only symphonies.” Indeed, the Sixth opens with something like the sound of an army advancing—staccato As in the cellos and basses, military-style taps of a drum, a vigorous A-minor theme strutting in front of a wall of eight horns. A little later, the timpani set forth a marching rhythm of the kind that you can still hear played in Alpine militia parades in Austria
