Composer on the couch.(Stuart Feder Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis)(Book Review)

Stuart Feder Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis. Yale University Press, 353 pages, $39.95

In July 1910, the fifty-year, old Mahler--at the apex of his renown and creative gifts, despite the omnipresent threat of heart disease--discovered that his wife Alma had begun a passionate affair with the young Walter Gropius. Subsequent decades proved that for Alma's husbands, cuckoldry constituted the job description's sine qua non (Tom Lehrer devoted one of his most mordant lyrics to this fact), but Mahler understandably reacted with raging anguish, aggravated by bewilderment that Alma should have shucked her helot status. "You must," he had announced before their marriage, "give yourself to me unconditionally, shape your future life, in every detail, entirely in accordance with my needs."

He likewise squelched her youthful composing ambitions: "The role of composer falls to me--yours is that of loving companion!" (One sardonic reviewer of a 1978 Mahler biography commented: "The notion that a great artist must surely manifest 'greatness of soul' in his human relations was knocked from its Romantic pedestal long ago.")

Faced with Alma's adultery, Mahler consulted Freud. This four-hour meeting of minds--which reads like the scenario for a Tom Stoppard play--occurred during August in Leiden, Holland. About the session Mahler said uncharacteristically little. Freud, for his part, described it solely in long-delayed reminiscences, generic and reductionist even by Freudian standards:

 
   The necessity for the visit arose, for him, from 
   his wife's resentment of the withdrawal of his 
   libido from her. In highly interesting expeditions 
   through his life history, we discovered 
   his personal conditions for love, especially his 
   Holy Mary complex ... 

Nine months after the Leiden visit, Mahler died. He left incomplete his Tenth Symphony, of which he had finished only the first two movements. With his conducting--especially via his decade-long dominance of the Vienna Opera--Mahler embodied a singularly lucid belief: audiences and performers must be antagonized on all possible, and many hitherto impossible, pretexts. For him, the customer was always wrong. Yet from his almost lunatic certitudes as executant, his approach to composing greatly differed, being prone to the drastic revisions that indicate fundamental lack of self-confidence. One seeks vainly in Mahler a detailed creative credo, as distinct from occasional opaque epigrams ("it [a symphony] must contain everything"). Outstanding composers need not, of course, have any such credo, but this particular gap greatly impedes psychobiographers, since it emphasizes their interpretations' conjectural nature.

Mahler possessed nothing of Mendelssohn's or Wagner's verbal facility, never mind Schumann's or Berlioz's. Almost every time he verged on genuine literary discernment, an attack of the Deep-and-Meaningfuls (going well beyond the sufferance which Teutonic culture traditionally extends) overcame him. Aged thirty-four, he bailed up his disciple Bruno Walter with this adolescent monologue: "Whence do we come? Whither do we go? Why am I made to feel that I am free while yet I am constrained within my personality as in a prison? What is the object of toil and sorrow? Will the meaning of life be revealed by death?" While in 1897 he converted to Catholicism--a necessary step in late-Habsburg Austria for the musical posts he coveted--he seldom alluded to his newfound religion, and gave the periodic impression of shame over having adopted it.