by Joshua Cohen
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LIKE AN ACTOR, WHO in terms of fame is the true operatic diva of today, or a director, who’s nothing but a remade conductor, Mahler, too, split his time, living bicoastally between the Blue Danube and the Hudson. In American winters he noised famously from the podium, and in European summers he quietly wrote, alternating seasons leading the Metropolitan Opera and the newly professionalized New York Philharmonic with vacations spent in Toblach in the Tyrol (today Dobbiaco, in Italy), assiduously avoiding old friends, jealous of his wife’s love affairs, and working on the last two of his symphonies and the song cycle on Chinese poetry, Das Lied von der Erde.
American critics, though cautious not to appear too Europhilic, generally warmed to Mahler’s conducting while remaining ignorant of his own compositions. At least popular taste would’ve had a better incentive to appreciate the symphonies: Mahler’s occasional quotations were accessible to Europeans and Americans both (many of whom, after all, were Americans of only the first or second generation), and his music’s dance forms and folk tunes, even if invented, his ländler and hatscho, were in their blood, their mothers’ milk. And knowingly sophisticated city audiences in New York as much as in Vienna could have responded to, and so would have been satirized and flattered by, the music’s excesses, its proudly demonstrative kitsch.
Indeed it was in America that coexistence—Old World repertoire, New World scene-set—became crosspollination: Downtown Manhattan, which held thousands of Mahler’s co-religionists, was a raucously simmering “melting pot,” and although the man who came through Ellis Island for the first time in 1907 was certainly remote from those rag-peddlers and rabbis in steerage, he was still party to their mess—a massive influx of Slavs and Mitteleuropeans, from the most talented, which would be him, down to the talentless, with the barrel organist who’d play outside Mahler’s window at the Hotel Majestic on Central Park West situated somewhere in between.
Outside the bounds of biography, these busy American intersections would inspire a reception of Mahler’s compositions that continues to this day. In Mahler’s time, juxtaposing popular music with classical repertory was not new, but regarding the popular as “banal” was, and so Mahler, writing at the very recognizance of kitsch—and at the invention of a strain of European irony more immediately apparent, perhaps, in the journalistic feuilleton—can be heard as the first musical postmodernist, juxtaposing and deconstructing historical periods and historicized qualities: projecting, as Arnold Schoenberg’s friend the musicologist Hans Keller wrote, “a crucial space of historical time against a musical plane.” Keller was citing Mahler’s Third Symphony, which contrasts its scherzo with the scherzo’s historical forerunner, the courtly minuet.
After Classical melody was advanced, next came Romantic harmony, and finally, Mahler’s music seemed to say, the modern superimposition of styles. This phenomenon was only a self-conscious version of what could be found freely in the American streets. Neighbors cramped in tenements spoke different languages, and Mahler’s Jews, many of them Hasidic Ostjuden, were living on the same Manhattan island, just blocks south, but they in sumptuary garb, practicing traditions from centuries past. Meanwhile, America, the democracy in which Mahler marveled that if you wished to say hello to President Roosevelt you could, and if you didn’t, you didn’t have to, already represented the capitalist endgame of the turmoil stirring in revolutionary Russia. The Church had supported Bach, Maria Theresa supported Gluck, Esterházy supported Haydn, Josef II supported Mozart; Ferdinand II, Leopold I, and Charles VI were all patron musicians themselves; Beethoven, to a lesser extent, exploited his various princes and counts, his Waldsteins, Lichnowskys, and Razumovskys; but then patronage faded like gilding, and Wagner had to go begging in support of sartorials and gourmandizing before mad Ludwig II and the luxuries of Bayreuth. Who would support Mahler, or those like him, if any were to follow? Socialism would not. And America’s answer then is America’s answer now, which shocked Mahler’s Europe, used to censors and bursaries, state subsidies and aristocratic meddling. The Invisible Hand of the Market would prove a fickle conductor, impossible to follow.
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JUST AS ONE SITS with a program when faced with an hours-long concert of Mahler’s music, when faced with such a titanic biography there’s nothing to do but first look through the pictures. In the late nineteenth century, Mahler’s parents, Bernhard and Marie, are posed separately in a provincial photography studio; in another shot, their six-year-old son, Gustav, hat in hand, stares off into the distance, molto misterioso. His white lace collar is perfectly in place; his other hand gestures to an ornate ironwork chair, on which rests a folder of sheet music. Following the official press photographs of Mahler’s fame, with their suits, black cravats, and pince-nez, come the candids, the snapshots: Mahler, informally lounging. As if our paparazzi had taken an interest in German opera, the autocrat of the Hofoper is to be seen letting it all hang out: calm at his cottage at Toblach, with his daughter Anna on a rare morning spent outside his Häuschen, or composition hut. Family picnic at the Pragser Wildsee, 1910: Mahler and Alma alongside Oskar Fried, the first conductor to record Mahler’s music, who would commit the Second Symphony to disc more than a decade later. Then, the couple onboard the Amerika, the boat that was bringing Mahler home to die, 1911. In these photos, the tie is no longer immaculate; the hairline has receded, the locks themselves are tangled; the shirt is a touch untucked, and the belly pouches; there is often a hand—the conducting hand, the composing hand—reposing in a pocket.
As technology becomes more familiar, we become more familiar to ourselves. Whereas paintings aggrandize their subjects, photography has a way of scything even a genius down to size. As they enter the twentieth century, Mahler’s symphonies, like the latter images of their composer, become less fit for public consumption. In a Vienna in decline as in an America ascendant, social mores relax like waistbands; we kick off our shoes and, with them, our pretense. From the cracks between empire formality and global informality, neuroses bloom, best described by another Germanic Jew estranged in Bohemia, Kafka, to whom Mahler would be compared by Adorno. Critical theory as pioneered by Adorno would tell us that Mahler’s formal, stylized portraits represent preference as opposed to reality; they show us how Mahler wanted to be seen as opposed to how he actually was, or how he was seen by his contemporaries. Like an antique idea of musical appreciation, the ideal photograph of the old style would confirm nothing more than class or good breeding, not necessarily taste, and certainly not individuality.
Such picture-perfect respectability would be destroyed by WWI, after which Mahler’s disciple Schoenberg would aver that an art that had been popular could not, by definition, be an art that was good, and any music that was hated by the old order was destined to be loved not only by the new but by posterity. The Romantic would birth the revolutionary, then, and times would change, not cyclically but forever; generations would no longer be reactionary toward one another—as the generation that enjoyed Beethoven did not enjoy Wagner, and the generation that enjoyed Wagner did not enjoy Mahler—but instead would become consolidated into a single mass, no longer stratified. Karl Marx described such a revolution against history in political terms; Walter Benjamin, in messianic terms; Mahler’s music provides anthems for both.
It’s telling to remember, amid the twilight of Romanticism and the rise of what Benjamin called “mechanical reproduction,” that no recordings or films of Mahler exist. Neither radio, on which music was first broadcast in 1906, nor audio recording, which didn’t become feasible for orchestras until after WWI, ever captured the maestro conducting—not opera, not any of his own compositions. His absence here speaks every cliché in the world: “louder than words,” certainly louder than de La Grange’s logorrhea. All that exists of a biographical Mahler outside the many pages of his many biographies are four Welte-Mignon pianola rolls of him playing his own li
eder and movements from two symphonies. They are, and the response they engender is, ghostly automatic.
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ULTIMATELY, ASKING HOW OUR time is different from Mahler’s is to ask whether history repeats, and whether yesterday, even if unrecorded, can communicate to the present and future. That history cannot repeat, which is an idea infused with both European Weltschmerz and hopeful American gusto, finds resonance in Mahler’s greatest contribution to compositional technique—what has been called “progressive tonality.”
In this technique, a work begins in one tonality and ends in another, unlike the symphonies of Beethoven, which tend to end in the keys in which they begin: Even a movement of a late Beethoven string quartet begins in A minor and ends in A minor, despite what middle modulations transpire. If Mahler were to have scored history itself, then that music, like the music he actually lived to compose, would grow to oppose sonata form, in which an exposition is always, after a development, brought back to itself with a recapitulation. The philosophical program for this most generative of musical forms is that of dialectics as defined by Fichte, but popularly attributed to Hegel, who was born in the same year as Beethoven, the foremost innovator of the nineteenth-century sonata. In a classic dialectic, a thesis (exposition), followed by an antithesis (development), leads to a final synthesis (recapitulation), which, as a consonance of thought, has more in common with the initial thesis movement than does dissonance, which was always thought antithetical to philosophy and especially religion.*
Such a pattern played out in Mahler’s milieu of Germanic Jews. Mahler, like Kafka, like Marx a generation before, was born into the bourgeoisie, then became an artistic “Bohemian,” if only to redeem himself from guilt, before he was expected to be reabsorbed by the bourgeoisie, in a classical resolution, as if the key of home and hearth were a sunny C major. Except it wasn’t, and the basses surged beneath on a soured tone. Kafka left his parents’ house in Prague for a young Polish-born, ex-Hasidic girlfriend and Berlin; Marx abroad in Paris abandoned verse and metaphysics, entering politics to effect not art but change. Revolution is just that, an inability to be reintegrated, and, unlike his life, Mahler’s music cannot be reintegrated. Forsaking the sonata’s inevitable resolution, his compositions can lead only to discord, in a progressive development with no recapitulation save death. The ultimate modern depressive, Mahler fell in love with his death as the final finale, and this love, a one-man version of Wagner’s Liebestod, is what elicits our empathy today. The soundtrack of this death, because so much about Mahler’s life is cinematic, has become the soundtrack to all death, even to the death of music, and the fact that Mahler’s symphonies lack a certain program or biography for whatever degenerescence has been scored allows us to impute sufferings of our own, to become, in them, acting conductors of our personal mortalities.
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IT’S REDUCTIVE BUT ROMANTIC to say that as Mahler dies, the uppercase Artist goes thanatopsical too. As Karlheinz Stockhausen wrote in his Age of Aquarius introduction to de La Grange’s first volume (1973): “This is one of the first monuments of the new world-era, in which Mahlers will become scarcer while biography upon biography will be written.” After Mahler, Schoenberg’s dodecaphonic disciples equalized dissonance and consonance, then retreated to the academy, where composed music subsists on charity and tenure; with the spread of record and radio, pop repertoire began to trump the classics, and radio began to sell advertising time (it’s advertising that allowed our playbills, the name since trademarked, to be printed and distributed for free from 1884, the year Mahler scored his First Symphony); moving pictures with sound were only a war away, and television would later serve to further moot the visual allure of live music.
The individual genius, like any individual, becomes devalued by a mass market; and an insistence on perpetual revisionism has saved our age both from false artistic gods and from the seriousness necessary to make godlike art. Furthermore, any true biography or program intending to describe Mahler’s “world-era” should engage with the Holocaust, which sounded the last discordant cadence of Mitteleuropean culture. It was the death camps of the east that not only killed but further decontextualized its victims, among them, in American hagiography, Mahler himself. Although the composer could not have been bodily martyred in that tragedy, his posterity was—his symphonies said, by the Mahler-maniacal Leonard Bernstein, to have prefigured the terrors of Auschwitz. Hitler was present along with Mahler at the premiere of Strauss’s Salome and even heard the director of the Hofoper himself conduct Tristan und Isolde in May 1906. But Hitler did not kill Mahler, and contrary to myth, America didn’t either; it advertised and paid well for his talent. Mahler made many times over in New York salary whatever he lost of Vienna’s showy but disingenuous obeisance.
In the end, however, none of these programs work. Mahler supposedly said, “My time will come,” and Bernstein, kitschmeister extraordinaire, did much to make that utterance public. But Mahler, referring to Strauss, had actually written: “My time will come when his is over.” Enter confusion, center stage: Sometimes it’s better to know everything; other times it’s better to know nothing. Between the acts, we can talk, though music is allowed.
* Although Bach and Mozart both ended compositions in different keys than they began them (as did Schubert, Schumann, and numerous opera composers), Mahler applied this practice to pure music, establishing it not as a dramatic conceit but as an analogue, or technique, for transcendence. The term “progressive tonality” was first used by Dika Newlin, a student of Schoenberg’s at UCLA and, later, a punk-rock musician.
FENCING FOR HITLER
ON HELENE MAYER
IF SPORT IS A SURROGATE for war, fencing comes a touch too close to the real—ninety centimeters to be exact—though swords, like lives, were shorter in the Middle Ages. What is athletic now was once practical training for knights: Swords—later “foiled,” beaten not quite into plowshares but into foils, sabres, épées—were only permitted to noblemen, who often got themselves into duels. A man insulted you or your lady and you challenged him to fight. There were rules. There was death.
By the early Renaissance, students too were allowed to carry swords, and a culture of rapier practice emerged that would gradually be officialized, in the German-speaking countries, as Mensur, or “academic fencing”—an extracurricular pastime, organized by university administrations, intended not to settle scores or provide exercise but instead to build character through doing both. Bloody swordplay became ludic fencing—as in the Anglo-Saxon “defense”—a sublimation game without winner or loser.
By the turn of the nineteenth century, Jews had joined the sport through fraternities that provided protection along with a formal, relatively nonviolent way to respond to anti-Semitic provocations and defend honor. Fencing matches between Jewish and non-Jewish clubs to settle individual disputes drew capacity crowds, with the result that the Jewish physique—so subject to stereotype, eugenics, phrenology, Mendelization—was normalized through scars, or “smites,” proud badges of the Kaiserreich-educated. Jewish and non-Jewish women, in turn, formed their own clubs, and the best clubs of both sexes were religiously and ethnically integrated by WWI. In 1924, women’s fencing became an Olympic event (men’s fencing had been admitted to the first modern Games, of 1896). And in 1936, the épée was first fitted with an electrical sensor, meaning a hit, or touch, became pure data, no longer left to a judge’s call. Nazi predilections for technology and taxonomy were about to mark the Berlin Olympics.
The two most compelling competitors were “der Neger,” the American track star Jesse Owens, with his four gold medals, and the German-Jewish fencing goddess Helene Mayer. Born in Offenbach-am-Main in 1910, she was only bat mitzvah age—though she never had a bat mitzvah—when she gave up ballet and won her first German women’s fencing championship. She might have gone to the Olympics that year—1924, the year
after Hitler’s unsuccessful coup in Munich—if Germany, still suffering the Treaty of Versailles, had been allowed to compete. By 1930, she’d won six German championships. Germany was readmitted to the International Olympic Committee in time for the 1928 Amsterdam Games. Mayer won gold.
In the 1930s, Mayer was presented, she self-presented, as an Aryan heroine, a pinup Valkyrie—five foot ten, 150 pounds. As an anonymous scrap of German newspaper doggerel put it:
A female creature of modern times,
she wins handily in her fencing costume,
and behold, she has blond braids,
and ties around them a white band.