Alma Schindler—the composer’s name when she wrote the songs we hear today—was notorious in Vienna as a teenager and became ever more so after marriages to Gustav Mahler, architect Walter Gropius, and writer Franz Werfel. She documented her long life in diaries, letters, and two memoirs. Her story has proved irresistible, which is why she and so many others have told it, including biographers, novelists, playwrights, and filmmakers (and even inspiring operatic treatments). She reveled in the challenge: “No one will ever succeed in completely describing me, not even I myself succeeded. I am full of enigmas that can’t be solved.”
Biographies run the gamut from condemning to supportive, with titles that include Passionate Spirit, Muse to Genius, The Art of Being Loved, The Malevolent Muse, and Bride of the Wind, the last also the title of a painting of her with, and by, another lover, Oskar Kokoschka. For many, her life is comically encapsulated in a song the humorist Tom Lehrer wrote upon her death in 1964, including the lines “Alma, tell us! All modern women are jealous, Which of your magical wands, Got you Gustav and Walter and Franz?” But as Schindler’s music has become better known, and her story been better told, it is clear that the prevailing image trivializes the life and achievements of an independent woman who deftly negotiated a cultural landscape in fin-de-siècle Vienna inhospitable to creative women.
Particularly revealing are the published diaries Schindler kept between the ages of 18 and 22 that convey her intelligence, ambition, frustrations, and passions. Music was at the core of her life; she was an accomplished pianist who started composing as a child, later studying with Josef Labor and Alexander von Zemlinsky. She came from a distinguished artistic Viennese family. Her father, whom she adored, was the landscape painter Emil Schindler. He died when she was 12, and three years later her mother, Anna, a former singer, married one of his pupils, Carl Moll, a founding member of the Secessionist movement.
The family milieu gave access to a wide array of prominent cultural figures, many of whom became infatuated with her and she with them. Her first significant romantic relationship was at 17 with the painter Gustav Klimt, then considered a subversive Secessionist radical. Other older men appear throughout her teen years, with several proposals of marriage, before she met Mahler when she was 22. The most important relationship was with Zemlinsky, her principal teacher. Although she considered him horribly ugly, her comments frequently exhibiting the vicious strain of anti-Semitism that ran throughout her life, they fell in love. He taught her well and supported her talent.
Schindler attended concerts and operas many nights each week, and it was where, from afar, she first encountered Mahler, the director of the Court Opera. She thought him a great conductor, although she wrote, “I don’t believe in him as a composer.” They met in November 1901, started a whirlwind romance, married in March, and had their first child in November. Mahler was 41, nearly two decades older than Schindler, and had recently survived a life-threatening medical crisis. He wanted to settle down and start a family. He also set down his non-negotiable terms.
On December 19, four days before announcing their engagement to family, Mahler sent a 20-page letter demanding that Schindler give up composing and tend entirely to his needs: “You have only one profession from now on: to make me happy!” We don’t know her exact response as she destroyed her letters to him while doctoring and suppressing some of his, including this crucial one. In a recent article in the Journal of the American Musicological Society titled “#AlmaToo: The Art of Being Believed,” musicologist Nancy Newman examines Mahler’s imperious demands. Schindler lamented “how full my life was once, how empty now!” On another occasion, she wrote that “he thinks nothing of my art and much of his, while I think nothing of his and much of mine.”
Even though Schindler composed the songs we hear today before her marriage, Mahler is relevant to their later history. In 1910, he learned she was having an affair with Gropius and sought help from Sigmund Freud. The couple seem to have worked things out for a while, and Mahler began to support her music. He arranged for his publisher to release her Fünf Lieder from 1900–1901 (of which we hear the first four today in orchestrations by David and Colin Matthews from 1995). They were credited to Alma Maria Schindler-Mahler, and the cover matched that of his own Eighth Symphony, which he dedicated to her. (Two more sets appeared after his death, in 1915 and 1924, for a total of 14 published songs; little else survived her emigration during World War II.)
In March 1911, two months before Mahler died, soprano Frances Alda sang “Laue Sommernacht” in New York. Already deathly ill, Mahler, who was the music director of the New York Philharmonic, could not attend the event. Schindler later recalled how eager he was to hear how it went: “He said he had never been in such a state of excitement over any performance of his own works. When I told him it had been encored he said: ‘Thank God!’ over and over again. He was quite beside himself with joy.” Arnold Schoenberg had heard some of her songs a few months earlier in Vienna and wrote to her: “I liked them very much. You really have a lot of talent. A pity you didn’t continue that work. It would certainly have led somewhere.” She went on to become an important advocate for the new music, supporting Schoenberg and others personally, financially, and through her salons.
In her dozens of songs, most now lost, Schindler set classical German poets such as Goethe, Heine, and Novalis as well as contemporary ones. (So far as we know, all were male.) She particularly admired Richard Dehmel, an avant-garde figure now most remembered for writing the poem on which Schoenberg based his landmark Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night). “Die Stille Stadt” (“The Silent Town”) shows Schindler as a passionate Wagnerian—she considered his opera Tristan und Isolde “the greatest work of art of all times”—and it is not surprising that she begins with an allusion to the “Tristan chord.” Like most of her songs, it is richly chromatic, filled with lush chords, and tends to avoid obvious word painting in favor of capturing the general mood of the text.
The longest song of the set is “In meines Vaters Garten” (“In My Father’s Garden”) to a poem by Otto Erich Hartleben that may well resonate with her own happy memories of her father. She wrote it in November 1901, the month she met Mahler. “Laue Sommernacht” (“Warm Summer Night”), to a text by Otto Julius Bierbaum, follows before the peaceful “Bei dir ist es traut” (“With You I Feel at Ease”) to a poem by Rainer Maria Rilke.
It is inevitable that among the works of the symphonic masters, some are ignored or considered problematic. With more than 100, Joseph Haydn, the so-called father of the symphony, occasionally produced routine ones to please an employer. Truth be told, Mozart’s first 20 or so symphonies, composed when he was a teenager (and earlier), would scarcely be remembered today had he not written his magnificent mature ones. And even among Beethoven’s mighty nine there are some odd ones out—or, more accurately, even ones: The Second and Fourth turn up most often as part of cycles for the sake of completeness. Schubert apparently viewed all but his last symphony (the “Great” in C major) as student efforts and left many unfinished (not just the “Unfinished”).
Over the course of the 19th century, there was a marked decline in the total number of symphonies composers produced, continuing the path from Haydn to Mozart to Beethoven. The glib answer as to which of Brahms’s four is the best may be “the last one I heard,” but nevertheless the Third, with its subdued ending, is now the least often presented. Bruckner endlessly revised his symphonies, causing performers all sorts of problems. Dvořák thought his First Symphony was lost and published other ones out of order, which led to considerable confusion in their numbering. Then there are the one-hit wonders: Georges Bizet with his teenage Symphony in C major and César Franck with his old-age effort in D minor.
In this context Mahler proves an interesting case, worth setting against the symphonic tradition that he inherited. On the one hand, each of his symphonies has a special character, unique musical profile, and distinctive trajectory. As he commented while writing the Fourth: “It is so utterly different from my other symphonies. But that must be; I could never repeat a state of mind, and as life progresses I follow new paths in each new work.” This individuality has elicited an enormous amount of critical commentary, beginning in his own time. On the other hand, one could argue that Mahler ultimately created just one vast symphonic universe and that his symphonies (and songs) are interconnected. The famous remark he allegedly made to Jean Sibelius seems relevant: “A symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.”
The Seventh has traditionally been viewed as Mahler’s “problem” symphony, although not for any of the reasons previously mentioned. It is a mature work, not significantly revised, and not disowned or in any way rejected. Indeed, Mahler wrote in a letter: “It is my best work and predominantly of a cheerful character.” Yet it is the least frequently performed of his purely instrumental symphonies. (The Second, Third, and Eighth place far greater practical demands on the performing forces.) The Seventh was the last of Mahler’s symphonies to enter the repertory of The Philadelphia Orchestra, coming only in 1978, a delay of more than 70 years. Commentators, including some of Mahler’s most sympathetic and passionate advocates, have sometimes been at a loss to explain the work, especially its final movement.
We can gain some perspective on the piece by looking at its genesis. Mahler’s position as music director of the Vienna Court Opera, arguably the most powerful post in Europe, restricted most of his composing to the summer; that of 1904 proved unusually fruitful. He wrote three of his haunting Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children), completed the Sixth Symphony, and started work on the Seventh, for which he composed two Nachtmusiken or Night Music pieces, eventually the second and fourth of the Seventh’s five movements.
It appears that Mahler did not have a clear vision of the entire piece when he began writing it in 1904 and was seriously blocked when he tried to resume work the following summer. After a couple of frustrating weeks in which, by his own admission, he “sank into gloom,” he decided to take a break to recharge by going hiking in the Dolomite mountains. It was on his return to the house he had built in Maiernigg, on the Wörthersee, that the solution came to him. As he later recounted in a letter to his wife, Alma: “You were not at Krumpendorf to meet me, because I had not let you know the time of my arrival. I got into the boat to be rowed across. At the first stroke of the oars the theme (or rather the rhythm and character) of the introduction to the first movement came into my head—and in four weeks the first, third, and fifth movements were done.” By mid-August he could write (in Latin!) to his friend Guido Adler: “My Seventh is finished. I believe it has been well conceived and born under favorable auspices.” This still meant that much of the orchestration and revision would continue during the season.
Mahler held off the premiere of the Seventh Symphony for more than three years. For one thing, the Sixth had yet to be unveiled first, which happened in May 1906 at the Essen Festival of Contemporary Music. The official critical response there, as well as in Berlin and Munich later that year, was largely negative. These disappointments only compounded the critical reaction that had greeted the premiere in Cologne of the Fifth Symphony in 1904. Mahler remarked that he had given up “reading the reviews … These little people are always the same. Now all at once they like my first five symphonies. The Sixth must just wait until my Seventh appears.”
Mahler premiered the Seventh in Prague in September 1908 during celebrations honoring the 60th year of Emperor Franz Joseph’s reign. Although that concert is often portrayed as yet another failure, reviews suggest that audience’s response was in fact extremely positive. Critic Felix Adler reported in a German-language Prague newspaper:
A surprise: Yesterday, after the final notes of his Seventh had faded, Gustav Mahler was celebrated with all imaginable signs of sincere, honest, and unfeigned admiration. Frankly, not even his greatest supporters and friends expected this. The history of Mahler premieres has a great abundance of failures and embarrassing errors; each symphony precipitated a “clash” between his advocates and his enemies. Anyone who understands the nature of Mahler’s creative works cannot be surprised by this aspect of their reception: it lies in the nature of true novelty to evoke negative first impressions. Philistines are always offended by what they do not understand …
Mahler conducted the work four more times over the next 13 months, in Munich, The Hague, and Amsterdam. He considered presenting it in New York, but decided against it, saying, “For an audience that does not yet know anything I have written, the work is too complicated.” This remark points to another of the work’s challenges: It is a decidedly more Modernist piece than most of his earlier music. The symphony proved particularly attractive to Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, and other younger Modernists, all of whom revered Mahler.
By the time Mahler composed the Seventh, he had decisively moved away from explicit programs, from giving listeners “crutches,” as he once dismissively called them, to guide their hearing. He had based his first four symphonies partly on his own earlier songs or had actually incorporated songs and choruses within them, for the most part drawn from the folk poetry collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn). Symphonies Five, Six, and Seven are a trilogy of purely instrumental works that mark his ostensible retreat from overt programs. During this time as well, he stopped using the folk Wunderhorn poetry and began writing songs based on the more elevated poetry of Friedrich Rückert. Even though songs are no longer boldly sung or plainly quoted in his middle symphonies, they go “underground,” as Mahler scholar Donald Mitchell has put it, and nonetheless leave traces.
The change in Mahler’s compositional strategies coincided with crucial developments in his personal life. A medical crisis in early 1901 brought the 40-year-old composer close to death. Soon after he resigned his position with the Vienna Philharmonic, and by the end of the year was engaged to be married and starting his own family—another kind of bid for immortality, as psychoanalyst Stuart Feder has observed. The range of emotions in the Fifth Symphony, beginning with the opening funeral march, to the “love song” of the famous Adagietto, to the blazing triumph of the last movement, may give some indication of Mahler’s hopes. The Sixth Symphony, which briefly carried the title “Tragic,” charts a very different course. The Seventh, like the Fifth, seems a journey from darkness to light, but the work is more poetic and eclectic in mood, and has proved more baffling. The Seventh does not have the relatively clear narrative scheme found in earlier Mahler symphonies, let alone in ones by Beethoven, Berlioz, and Tchaikovsky.
Mahler’s own rare comments about the Seventh are not very revealing, which leaves us with conflicting reports from Alma, friends, colleagues, and commentators. Alma says he found inspiration from the German Romantic writer Joseph von Eichendorff, whose poems had earlier captivated Schumann, Brahms, Wolf, and others. Conductor Willem Mengelberg states that Rembrandt’s The Night Watch inspired Mahler, while another colleague says the composer “cited the painting only as a point of comparison.”
There are intriguing musical emblems within the symphony itself. The eminent Mahler biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange comments: “The various symbolic sounds—cowbells (pastoral), deep bells (religious), birdsong, military signals—are puzzling because they appear at random, out of context, and thus apparently devoid of any symbolic meaning. Even the main ‘themes’ of the work, nature, day, and night, are far more complex and ambiguous than they appear at first sight.” These ambiguities posed challenges from the start. Felix Adler’s sympathetic review noted: “The value and significance of the Symphony lie in the purely musical. The work does not describe, narrate, or illustrate; nor is it written merely for the sake of combining sonorities. Rather, it harkens back to the original purpose of music—to express moods, feelings, and emotions for which there are no words.” Yet exactly these qualities frustrated others in 1908, as it has some listeners since. Critic Richard Batka, writing in another Prague German newspaper, remarked of the premiere:
Mahler unfortunately pays tribute to the principle of hidden programs, so we do not know why the marchlike night music of the second movement is followed by a somber Scherzo-capriccio, which is in turn succeeded by a night music with the character of a serenade. We must guess why or mindlessly accept these facts. Likewise, we do not know why in the second and last movement cowbells suddenly ring, etc. I understand that an artist like Mahler objects to the excessively literal use that the public often makes of detailed programs. But his opposition—avoiding even the briefest of hints that could point to the work’s overall sense and coherence—only pushes us from an erroneous understanding into a complete lack of one.
The rhythm of the oars on the boat trip that broke Mahler’s creative block mark the opening of the work (Langsam), against which the tenor horn, an instrument associated more with military bands than symphony orchestras, intones an angular, disjointed melody. A funereal and spectral mood eventually gives way to a fast tempo (Allegro risoluto) and to a more lyrical and yearning theme in the strings. The lengthy movement masterfully alternates between the deathly and the celebratory, traversing other states as well.
The form of the symphony is symmetrical—two large framing movements enclose the two “Night Music” movements that in turn surround the central Scherzo. Mahler at one point referred to all three of the middle movements as “night music,” one reason the work has been called the “Song of the Night.” The first of these movements (Nachtmusik: Allegro moderato) opens with a distinctive horn solo that is answered by a muted horn—their dialogue is interrupted by sounds of nature, such as the trilling of bird calls and later the sound of cowbells. The central Scherzo, marked Schattenhaft (Shadowy), introduces a more sinister and grotesque element, one into which Mahler mixed the kind of popular gestures that so baffled many of his contemporaries. The second Nachtmusik (Andante amoroso) is scored for reduced orchestra. As Mahler was well aware, the idea of “night music” was historically associated with the genre of the serenade, and that spirit is brought out in this movement with the distinctive use of the harp and two less-common orchestral instruments: mandolin and guitar.
The triumphant C major of the Rondo-Finale (Allegro ordinario) harkens back to the victorious finale of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, and even more to Wagner’s lone mature comic opera, Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, to which Mahler seems to allude. (He programmed the Prelude to Wagner’s work together with the symphony at an Amsterdam concert in 1909 as if to highlight the connection.) Like the first movement, this finale juggles a wide variety of moods, allusions, and musical symbols, including a grazioso section and one that seems to evoke Turkish music, as Beethoven had done in his Ninth. Mahler ends the work by bringing back the opening theme of the first movement, together with orchestral bells and a final appearance of the cowbells.
—Christopher H. Gibbs
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