Gustav Mahler
by Leon Botstein
Why Gustav Mahler?
When Gustav Mahler died in 1911, at the age of 51, few would have predicted that 100
years later his music—nine completed symphonies, the fragment and posthumously
completed version of the Tenth, and the many songs, individually and in cycles,
particularly the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (Songs of a Wayfarer), Das Lied von der
Erde (Song of the Earth), and
Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children)—
would occupy a place in the world of classical music and the symphonic repertory equal
to, if not larger than that of Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky. Writing just two years
after Mahler’s death, the widely read and respected critic Walter Niemann concluded that
it was Mahler’s fate to have never achieved true greatness. Niemann’s colleague Karl
Storck defined Mahler as a “problem.” Despite Mahler’s ambitions, his music would
never last.
Yet today Mahler’s fame and popularity as a composer rival Bach’s and Mozart’s.
Mahler, the object of commemoration in 2010–11—the twin years that mark the 150th
anniversary of his birth and the 100th anniversary of his death—has become the
composer whose work and life seem to mirror and express, through music, the
predicament of the human condition in modernity.
The explosion of interest in Mahler’s music began in earnest after World War II, in the
late 1950s and early 1960s. Although Mahler’s music had never entirely disappeared
from the repertoire, thanks to the advocacy of his protégé Bruno Walter and other
conductors such as Dimitri Mitropoulos, the Mahler revival in performance and recording
was pioneered by the American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, who saw in
Mahler a reflection of himself. During the turbulent 1960s, the sprawling, lush sonorities
of Mahler’s symphonic writing, the confrontation between fragmentation and a long,
dramatic arc, the intensity of the climaxes and the proliferation of familiar sounding
themes and musical gestures, many of them directly evocative of the daily world, both of
nature and the town square and street, all elicited a sympathetic response in listeners.
But what was decisive for Bernstein and his audiences was the idea that Mahler’s music,
the songs and the purely instrumental symphonies alike, mirrored our subjective
experience of the world. There was an aspect of the psychological confession audible in
Mahler. The emotional range of his music—its intensity, intimacy, and scale—offered the
listener a temporal framework that permitted the expression of an individual’s
psychological struggle with expectation, desire, pain, elation, and loss in a fragmented,
complex, and terrifying world. In an era caught up in self-absorption and marked by a
passion for pop psychology as well as serious self-analysis—in which inherited
boundaries between the private and the public became attenuated, rendering sexuality and
intimacy primary aspects of politics and public discourse—Mahler’s music became a
widespread object of enthusiasm, not only for connoisseurs but also young first-time
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listeners to classical music. Mahler’s popularity extended well beyond Europe and North
America into the regions of the world where Western classical music was attracting new
audiences: Japan, Korea, China, and South America.
Mahler’s reputation was enhanced not merely by its unique synthesis of grandeur and the
intimate, its reconciliation of tradition with innovation. The brilliance and variety of
sonority in Mahler’s music were captivating. Post–World War II recording techniques,
particularly the long-playing record and the CD, combined with the advanced electronics
of post–World War II sound reproduction to give the birth to the cult of high fidelity.
This made Mahler’s music accessible to an extremely wide audience whose primary
access to music was through listening to recordings at home or in the automobile, often
with headphones. For many, listening to Mahler’s extended musical essays became a
profoundly personal experience. The golden age of recording in the second half of the
twentieth century facilitated what has now become a universal, if not fanatical embrace of
Mahler’s music as the high point of the symphonic tradition in music history.
A composer of such popularity and currency easily becomes the stuff of legend. In the
late 19th century, the true character of the lives of the great composers, particularly
Mozart and Schubert, became distorted to fit a romantic paradigm of the artist as outsider,
a person apart, someone exempted from the expectations of respectability or ordinary
happiness. The great composers were alleged to be misunderstood, stricken by poverty,
and unappreciated in their times. They were said to be lovelorn and condemned to die in
obscurity. The notion of a composer as an isolated individual ahead of his time was a
myth made particularly popular by Richard Wagner, who used it to deflect criticism of
his own music. His was “music of the future.” Negative reaction in the present was proof
of greatness.
History tells a different story. Wagner’s ideal of the artist, Beethoven, was immensely
successful and lionized in his own time. Perhaps Beethoven did wish for a fulfilling love
life, but he did everything to make that impossible. Yet he shrewdly courted fame and
respectability. His 1827 funeral was the largest public event in Vienna’s history. Haydn,
too, was a legend in his own time. His world-famous contemporary, Mozart, both earned
a great deal of money and spent it. He was buried in a common grave in accordance with
the fashion of the times, not because he languished in poverty or obscurity. His death in
1791 was mourned the world over. Although Schubert’s death at age 31 seems premature
by our standards, the average life expectancy in the late 1820s was only in the mid-30s.
He, too, was published and performed, troubled only by the failure to write a truly
successful opera.
Since the 19th century, audiences have continued to enjoy myths about their favorite
composers. These myths put artists at a safe distance. Artists, after all, engender both
fascination and ambivalence. They are permitted everything we are asked to deny
ourselves as upstanding citizens, yet precisely because they are bohemian, irresponsible,
and eccentric, we also shun and misunderstand them. The audience consoles itself that its
own failure to be truly creative and artistic has its positive benefits: sanity, community,
and happiness. We do not fawn over artists who appear too normal, such as Felix