No composer has had greater influence on the music of the twentieth century than Gustav Mahler; none wrote more of himself into his music. These truths are as inseparable as they are becoming self-evident.

Mahler was the first composer to seek personal spiritual solutions in music. Where Beethoven addressed himself to universal suffering and Wagner to altering the values of art and society, Mahler from his earliest symphony delved into private experiences and traumas – domestic brutality, bereavement, alienation – searching within himself for remedies to the human condition.

This quest is the key to the remarkable resurrection of Mahler’s music half a century after his death. The first surge of acclamation in the 1960s owed much to the currents of self-awareness and introspection that fostered the Me Generation. But his creations penetrated the underlying culture more permanently than any of the decade’s crop of individualist cults.

A survey of orchestral concerts in London, where Mahler was played only sporadically before 1960, finds him entering the list of the ten most performed symphonists in 1962 and rising steadily every year thereafter. In 1986 he overtook the perennially popular Tchaikovsky to claim fifth place with more than twenty-six complete symphonic performances.1

The first cycle of Mahler symphonies on record was completed by Leonard Bernstein in autumn 1967. In the next twenty years, no fewer than eight conductors have recorded the entire works; several others are in mid-cycle, while Bernard Haitink and Bernstein himself are recording them a second time.2 The demand for Mahler discs seems insatiable.

The enthusiasm is most marked, and to many programmers most puzzling, among the under-twenties. Greeted by a sea of luminous punk hair-styles at Mahler’s Sixth Symphony at a London promenade concert, Klaus Tennstedt reflected: ‘Young people are searching for values that have been destroyed. Long after his death, Mahler fights on against a terrible world. He gives people back their sense of feeling, and fear, and outrage.’3 Perhaps’, suggests Claudio Abbado, ‘young people can find all the great matters of life and death in Mahler’.4

Like Sigmund Freud, Mahler examined himself less as a singular specimen than as a prototype of tormented humankind. ‘Every injustice done to me’, he declared, ‘is an injustice towards the whole universe and must hurt the almighty spirit.’5 ‘The whole world concerns me,’6 he thundered at a narrow-minded musician who, pondering his outburst, concluded that Mahler ‘pursued a constant search for the divine, both in the individual and in man as a whole.’7

Apostles regarded his sense of mission as Messianic, opponents as megalomanic. He and his music provoked extreme reactions because they encompassed unrestrained extremes of emotion and ambition. The richness and contradictions of his vast personality are inextricable from his music, and consequently from all music after him. For, through his own works and the trail of his followers Schoenberg, Webern and Berg, as well as through such diverse connections as Busoni, Varèse and Alfredo Casella, Mahler has influenced every dominant strand in twentieth-century composing apart from the Debussyist, the nationalist and the party-line Stalinist (see Fig. 1). Mahler, writes Pierre Boulez, is ‘indispensable to anyone reflecting today on the future of music.’8

Almost every composer after Mahler has adopted, knowingly or not, at least half of his utilitarian attitude to music: as a means of self-examination, or as a route to moral regeneration. None of his major contemporaries envisaged such aims for their art. Strauss was frankly bewildered when Mahler talked to him of seeking redemption in music. ‘I don’t know what am I supposed to be redeemed from,’ he complained.9 Debussy dined with Mahler, then walked out of his Second Symphony.

‘The symphony must be like the world,’ Mahler told Sibelius, ‘it must embrace everything!’10 His own symphonies invoke both the violent contrasts of the outer world and those of his volatile inner nature, a temperament that hovered on the brink of the clinical manic-depression that has afflicted many of the greatest artists.11

The complexities of his character have intrigued psychiatrists,12 biographers and novelists13 alike. The present book is intended as a basic guide to Mahler’s personality, a half-explored continent with awesome topographic contours.

Images of Mahler

The prevailing profile of Mahler is founded on three primary documents: correspondence published by his widow in 1924,14 her own memoirs sixteen years later,15 and the notes of his adoring companion, Natalie Bauer-Lechner.16 Vital as they are, these volumes have inspired almost as much fantasy as fact. Many concert-goers firmly believe, for example, that the Mahler they are hearing is the hapless hero of Ken Russell’s movie, itself an imaginative distillation of Alma’s memoirs filtered through English landscapes and the director’s personal predilections.17

Any clearer understanding of Mahler can only be obtained by setting aside these overworked sources and seeking out further testimonies to corroborate, balance or refute existing conceptions. The more such materials I assembled, the more I became convinced that Mahler was best perceived directly through the eyes of his contemporaries.

Alma Mahler’s famous memoir appeared in Amsterdam in 1940, at a time when ‘Germany is deprived of his music and the memory of his life and compositions is carefully effaced.’18 Having written it ‘many years ago’19 from her diaries, she brought it smartly up to date in order to settle some burning scores: ‘I therefore have no scruple in saying openly what I know from experience of persons who live their lives and play their parts in the Third Reich.’ In particular: ‘All that I say of Richard Strauss is taken from the daily entries in my diary.’20

Her tales of Strauss, like much else in the memoir, are a subtle blend of truth and malicious gossip. Her original dislike of the composer and his wife was reinforced by anger at his acquiescence to Nazism and his refusal to release his correspondence with Mahler.

Strauss is one of many instances where Alma’s long-standing grievances outweighed any regard for historical accuracy. Much else in her book is prejudiced by personal animosity, a casual attitude to chronology and downright perjury designed to expiate guilt feelings and excuse her marital infidelities.

She portrays Mahler from the outset as prematurely old, in poor health and a confirmed virgin. He was, in point of fact, forty-one years old when they met, in unparalleled command of the world’s most problematic opera-house, approaching his prime as a composer, prodigiously athletic and a veteran of sexual experiences with several singers.

In her autobiography twenty years later,21 Alma admits that she became sick of Mahler and his music at different times; she often sent her small daughter to represent her at concerts.22 The scholarly consensus that Alma ‘is nearly always reliable where she speaks of aesthetic judgements or emotional reactions; it becomes risky to trust her in questions of fact or chronology’23 is no longer tenable. She deliberately misleads too often for her book, compulsively readable though it remains, to be used as the principal basis for considering Mahler’s character. ‘I had known much about Mahler,’ she reflected in a candid, late confession, ‘but ignored his essence.’24

Nor can Natalie Bauer-Lechner’s account, loyal though she was to Mahler, be taken as read. Mahler called certain of his friends ‘my dear Eckermann’, implying that he knew they were taking down his words, like Goethe’s acolyte, for future publication. Well before his thirtieth birthday, he displayed an awareness of his historical importance that in a lesser man would be deplored as mere vanity. In the presence of scribes, he plainly tailored some utterances to mould his image for posterity.

Natalie’s Erinnerungen circulated in Vienna for years in typed versions before her nephew ‘edited’ a truncated selection in 1923. An expanded edition lately issued by her family in West Germany is not nearly as revealing as the original typescripts owned by Baron Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler’s paramount biographer, who has generously allowed me to study and reproduce previously unquoted passages.25

The few other books about Mahler by close associates are in varying degrees unsatisfactory. Bruno Walter wrote a dry, uneasy profile in 1936; his own autobiography is notably more interesting, as are his private letters.26 But Walter’s most vivid account, written in a musical journal months after Mahler’s death, has never since been reprinted.27 The musicologist Guido Adler, Mahler’s lifelong friend and supporter, wrote a biography that analyses the music at some distance from the man; and two critics...