was keen to write something for his American fans, and in the customary shipside press conference he floated the idea of an opera set in the Wild West. “I have read Bret Harte’s novels,” he said, “and I think there is great scope in your Western life for operatic treatment.” He also looked into African-American music, or “coon songs,” as the Times called them. Black musicians were summoned to the home of Dr. and Mrs. William Tillinghast Bull, so that the maestro could hear them.
Puccini returned to Italy with the plan of making an opera out of The Girl of the Golden West, by the playwright-showman David Belasco, who had also written the play on which Butterfly was based. The score branched out in a couple of new directions. On the one hand, Puccini demonstrated what he had absorbed from several encounters with Salome, as well as from a study of Debussy. Act I begins with blaring whole-tone chords, which must have alarmed the hordes who had fallen for La Bohème. Act II culminates in a “tritone complex” of the kind that had often appeared at climactic moments of Salome and Elektra—chords of E-flat minor and A minor in minatory alternation. At the same time, The Girl of the Golden West gamely tries to do justice to its classic American setting; intermittent strains of the cakewalk echo whatever it was that Puccini heard at Dr. and Mrs. Bull’s, while a Native American Zuni song furnishes material for (oddly) an aria by a black minstrel. The most remarkable thing about the work is that a fearless, independent woman occupies the center of it; in an age when women in opera almost invariably came off as diseased and deranged, Puccini’s Minnie is a bringer of peace, a beacon in a darkening world.
Mahler arrived in New York on December 21, 1907, taking up residence at the Hotel Majestic on Central Park West. His performances at the Met went splendidly, but trouble was brewing behind the scenes. Heinrich Conried, who had hired Mahler, was forced out, partly because of the Salome debacle, and the board expressed a desire to “work away from the German atmosphere and the Jew.” Giulio Gatti-Casazza, of La Scala, became the new manager, bringing with him the firebrand conductor Arturo Toscanini. But another opportunity arose. The society figure Mary Sheldon offered to set Mahler up with a star orchestra, and the New York Philharmonic was reconstituted to meet his needs. Mahler believed that this arrangement would allow him to present his own works and the classics under ideal conditions. “Since [New Yorkers] are completely unprejudiced,” he wrote home, “I hope I shall here find fertile ground for my works and thus a spiritual home, something that, for all the sensationalism, I should never be able to achieve in Europe.”
Things did not turn out quite so rosily, but Mahler and America got along well. The conductor was no longer so addicted to perfection, nor did he hold himself aloof from society as he had done in Vienna. On a good night, he would take all seventy of his musicians out to dinner. He went to dinner parties, attended a séance, even poked his head into an opium den in Chinatown. When traveling to a concert, he refused the assistance of a chauffeur, preferring to use the newly constructed subway system. A Philharmonic musician once saw the great man alone in a subway car, staring vacantly like any other commuter.
A New York friend, Maurice Baumfeld, recalled that Mahler loved to gaze out his high window at the city and the sky. “Wherever I am,” the composer said, “the longing for this blue sky, this sun, this pulsating activity goes with me.” In 1909, at the beginning of his second New York season, he wrote to Bruno Walter: “I see everything in such a new light—am in such a state of flux, sometimes I should hardly be surprised suddenly to find myself in a new body. (Like Faust in the last scene.) I am thirstier for life than ever before …”
In his last New York season, Mahler ran into trouble with Mrs. Sheldon’s Programme Committee. A streak of adventurous programming, encompassing everything from the music of Bach to far-out contemporary fare such as Elgar’s Sea Pictures, met with a tepid response from traditional concertgoers, as adventurous programming often does. Meanwhile, Toscanini was ensconced at the Met, winning over New York audiences with, among other things, a Puccini premiere—the long-awaited Girl of the Golden West. For a time, it looked as though Mahler would return to Europe: the local critics had turned against him, as their Viennese counterparts had done, and he felt harried on all sides. In the end, he signed a new contract, and retained his equanimity of mood.
On the night of February 20, 1911, Mahler announced to his dinner companions, “I have found that people in general are better, more kindly, than one supposes.” He was running a fever, but thought nothing of it. The following night, against his doctor’s advice, he led a program of Italian works that included the premiere of Ferruccio Busoni’s Berceuse élégiaque, a beautifully opaque piece that seems to depict a soul entering a higher realm. This was Mahler’s final concert; a fatal infection, in the form of subacute bacterial endocarditis, was moving through his body. The remaining Philharmonic concerts were canceled. Mahler returned to Vienna, and died there on May 18.
European commentators made an anti-American cultural parable out of Mahler’s demise, as they had in the case of Symphonia domestica at the Wanamaker store. The conductor was a “victim of the dollar,” one Berlin newspaper said, of “the nerve-wracking and peculiar demands of American art.” Alma Mahler helped to foster this impression, perhaps as a way of diverting attention from her affair with Walter Gropius, which had caused her husband more angst than any of Mrs. Sheldon’s memos. “You cannot imagine what Mr. Mahler has suffered,” she told the press. “In Vienna my husband was all powerful. Even the Emperor did not dictate to him, but in New York, to his amazement, he had ten ladies ordering him about like a puppet.”
Mahler himself did not blame the dollar. “I have never worked as little as I did in America,” he said in an interview a month before his death. “I was not subjected to an excess of either physical or intellectual work.”
Resting on Mahler’s desk was the manuscript of his Tenth Symphony, which exhibits unmistakable evidence of the composer’s agony over the crisis in his marriage, but which may also contain a reflection of certain things he saw and felt in America. One American feature of the score is well known: the funeral march at the beginning of the finale—a dirge for tuba and contrabassoons, interrupted by thuds on a military drum—was inspired by the funeral procession of Charles W. Kruger, deputy chief of the New York Fire Department, who had died in 1908 while fighting a blaze on Canal Street.
There might also be an American impression in the symphony’s first movement, the climax of which contains a dissonance of nine notes. This awe-inspiring, numbing chord is usually associated with Mahler’s anguish over Alma, but it may also point to a natural phenomenon, some craggy, sublime feature of the American continent. Like the chords at the beginning of Strauss’s Zarathustra, it is derived from the overtones of a resonating string. The relationship becomes clear at the end of the movement, where the harmonic series is spelled out note by note in the strings and harp, like a rainbow emerging over Niagara Falls.
Stunned by his rival’s death, Richard Strauss could barely speak for days afterward. He commented later that Mahler had been his “antipode,” his worthy adversary. By way of a memorial he conducted the Third Symphony in Berlin. In a more oblique tribute, he decided to resume work on a tone poem that he had begun sketching some years before—a piece called The Antichrist, in honor of Nietzsche’s most vociferous diatribe against religion. Mulling over this project in his diary, Strauss wondered why Mahler, “this aspiring, idealistic, and energetic artist,” had converted to Christianity. Each man misunderstood the other to the end; Strauss suspected Mahler of surrendering to antiquated Christian morality, while Mahler accused Strauss of selling out to plebeian taste. The split between them forecast a larger division in twentieth-century music to come, between modernist and populist conceptions of the composer’s role.
In the end, Strauss’s last big orchestral work carried the more prosaic title An Alpine Symphony. It depicts a daylong mountain climb, complete with sunrise, storm, a magical moment of arrival at the summit, descent, and sunset. Beneath the surface, it may be partly “about” Mahler, as the critic Tim Ashley has suggested. In the section “At the Summit,” the brass intone a majestic theme,
