Mahler Revisited

When Gustav Mahler stepped down from the podium one evening in 1895 after conducting the first full performance of his Second Symphony, the Berlin audience was hostile, and the critics fumed about "the cynical impudence of this brutal music maker." The response was characteristic of most Mahler premieres. Venerated by a handful of his fellow musicians, Mahler was misunderstood by his public and despised as a martinet by the singers and players who performed under his baton. Now, in the centennial year of his birth, the musical world is taking a fresh look at the last of the great Austrian symphonists. A spate of anniversary performances was inaugurated last week by the New York Philharmonic, playing Mahler's Fifth Symphony under Guest Conductor Dimitri Mitropoulos.

A slight man, Mahler wrote giant-sized, tempestuous music that echoes his countryman, Anton Bruckner; on first hearing, a Mahler piece usually sounds like far-out Brahms with Wagnerian delusions. To Mahler, the symphony was the ideal musical form; he composed no chamber music, no music for solo instruments, no small-scaled choral pieces; even his famous song cycle, Das Lied von der Erde, calls for a full orchestra. Of the ten symphonies he wrote, only the First and Fourth are of normal length; the rest run on for as much as 90 minutes and employ vast orchestras. Symphony No. 8, dubbed "the Symphony of a Thousand" by one impresario, calls not only for an orchestra beefed up with a special brass choir, but for two mixed choruses, a boys' chorus and eight solo voices.

Thunderously emotional at times, monumentally high-flown at others, the symphonies glow with richly romantic colors and a kind of mystical fervor. Too often they tend to be bombastic and sentimental. But in his finest pages, as in the slow movement of Symphony No. 9, Mahler wrote some of the most eloquent music of his age.

Behind the Curtain. By all reports, he was at least as distinguished a conductor as he was a composer. Born into a non-musical Jewish family (his father owned a distillery) in the town of Kalischt in Bohemia, Gustav Mahler left home to study at the Vienna Conservatory at the age of 15. At 37, after years of composing and a succession of provincial conducting posts in Austria and Germany he became head of the Vienna Opera, and from that time on (1897), he was one of the most powerful men of music in Europe. He renovated the opera company, fired old, worn-out singers, banished the claque and refused admittance to late arrivals. At the end of ten years, he was so hated that he fled Vienna to become a conductor at the Met, then took over as conductor of the New York Philharmonic.

But in New York as in Vienna, Mahler quickly earned a reputation for playing favorites among the orchestra personnel.

One day he was summoned to the home of the chairman of the orchestra's executive committee and accused of "mistaken conduct." When the argument with the angry ladies became heated, Mahler's hostess drew a curtain, revealing a lawyer scribbling verbatim notes. Before Mahler left, he was forced to sign a legal document refusing him the right to choose programs and requiring him to dismiss a member of the orchestra who had kept him informed about what the others were saying about him.

Haunted by Ghosts. For all his unpopularity, Mahler also had powerful admirers--Bruno Walter, Richard Strauss, and particularly Arnold Schoenberg, who called him a "saint" and confounded Mahler vith his own early experiments in atonalism ("I don't understand his music," said Mahler. "I am old, and I daresay my ear is not sensitive enough").

As he grew older, Mahler became more and more terrified of the madness that haunted his family. He often refused to work in the isolated studio outside his summer home in Switzerland because he was convinced that every move he made was watched by a vengeful "goat-god." On the score of his tenth and last symphony, he scrawled despairing words: "The devil dances with me. Madness seizes me, accursed that I am--annihilates me, so that I forget that I exist, so that I cease to be . . ." Feverish and with a badly weakened heart, he conducted his last concert with the New York Philharmonic against his doctor's orders, and developed the streptococcus infection that killed him in 1911 at the age of 50. Strangely, his last whispered reference was to Mozart, a composer poles apart from the German romantic tradition that died with him.

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