Ecstasy

by Mary Sharratt

  “Perhaps coming here was a mistake,” Gustav said, mopping his sweaty brow as their carriage rattled along a rutted road through the vineyards skirting the Rhine. “I’d hoped to finally earn some applause and even some money for my own work. But these people probably won’t like my symphony, let alone understand it.”

  “Nonsense,” Alma said, taking his hand. “You’re admired as a conductor everywhere, but now you have a chance to prove that you’re a great composer. Have courage, Gustl.”

  Alma attended every rehearsal without fail, following the score and taking notes.

  Her husband’s Third Symphony was his most ambitious to date, a work of staggering scope, a behemoth, running more than an hour and forty minutes in length, which explained why it had never before been performed in its entirety. It demanded the combined forces of a full orchestra, a contralto soloist, a women’s choir, and a boys’ choir. Gustav had confided that the Third was his attempt to explore the creative life force in a symphony that embraced every aspect of nature and human experience. Dark and light, comedy and tragedy, decay and resurgence all comingled. It was certainly a challenging piece to perform. Alma observed the perspiring musicians and singers struggling to come to grips with the music. They had just nine days to prepare for the concert. By force of necessity, the rehearsals ran hours over the official time until Gustav and his ensemble were utterly depleted.

  “Almschi, what did you think?” he asked her anxiously, as though he trusted her discerning ear more than any other. He was worried that the concert would be a monumental failure.

  “The contralto’s voice is darkly beautiful, just what you want,” she told him. “But the horns in the first movement sounded mawkish. I think they should be more crisply articulated. And be careful not to let the pace drag, especially in the final movement.”

  Alma felt closest to Gustav when he turned to her like this, addressing her as his partner in music as well as marriage. His soul’s harbor. When it was just the two of them with no family or false friends to interfere or cast judgment on her.

  “All in all, it’s beginning to sound splendid,” she said. “This will be the turning point of your career. I’m sure of it.”

  “In Crefeld, of all places!” He laughed. “I miss home. Don’t you?”

  She lowered her eyes and held her tongue. She did not, in fact, miss their frenetic regime in Vienna.

  “At least I thought I was homesick,” he said, staring into her eyes. “Except now I realize my home isn’t a dwelling place or a city or a country. But another human being. You, Almschi. You are my home.”

  A light blazed inside her, her heart beating like the wings of a thousand white doves.

  The concert day was upon them, the world premiere of the first full performance of Gustav’s Third Symphony. Justine and Arnold Rosé had traveled up from Vienna. Even Richard Strauss had come, the most influential living German composer, hailed as the greatest thing since Wagner. Strauss was a strapping giant of a man who towered over Gustav when he shook his hand. Alma understood it to be a huge victory that such a celebrity had deigned to come all the way to Crefeld to hear her husband’s symphony. But what if Strauss hated it and let everyone know? Gustav’s future as a composer hinged on this performance.

  In that packed and sweltering concert hall, Alma was so absorbed in the music, she forgot about the smell and press of the other sweating bodies around her, about her puffy ankles and aching back. The first movement, opening with the grandeur of eight horns playing in unison, sent tingles running through her. This movement alone lasted forty minutes, as long as an entire Beethoven symphony. Originally, Gustav had conceived it as a tone poem with the title “What the Stony Mountains Tell Me.” Those sonorous horns told the tale of emergent life struggling to break free of dense, inanimate matter until, at the climax, the orchestra erupted into swelling sound, igniting new tension. This symphony was its own universe with exploding volcanoes creating new landmasses. Life evolved, taking on increasingly complex forms. Although Alma had spent more than a week listening to the rehearsals, the music took her breath away, as though she were hearing it for the first time.

  At the end of the first movement, Richard Strauss stood up, and cried, “Bravo!” Leading the applause, Strauss marched up to the conductor’s podium to offer Gustav his official benediction.

  Everything that happened afterward seemed like one magnificent crescendo after another. With each movement, the audience seemed more deeply stirred. Alma watched their spellbound faces as the solo contralto sang “O Mensch! Gib Acht!,” a poem taken from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. In his younger days, Gustav had admired Nietzsche as much as she did. The world is deep, the poem declared, and deep are its sufferings, yet joy runs deeper still, and all joy yearns for eternity.

  After this solemn declaration of the human longing for transcendence, the women’s and boys’ choirs broke into a joyful chorus. The women sang of angels while the boys chanted the tones of ringing bells. Then, in the sixth movement, after the adagio finale, the entire audience leapt from their seats and surged in a frenzy to the stage. Alma laughed and cried at once to see them moved to the heights of ecstasy, just as she was, by this symphonic celebration of love and life. The fickle Richard Strauss sauntered out before the final note, but it no longer mattered. The audience was now as convinced as Alma was of Gustav Mahler’s genius.

  Alma was profoundly and irrevocably in love with Gustav’s music, her previous reservations swept aside. Catching sight of Gustav’s incredulous face when he turned around on his podium to bow to his audience, she felt a rush of pure passion and then the first stirrings of their unborn child, that kick of life inside her. This, her husband’s vindication as a composer and the part she had played in it, bound them together as soul mates far more profoundly than the formal wedding vows they had exchanged in Karlskirche.

  “Almschi, you were right,” he whispered to her later, back in their guest room where they held each other, both of them trembling with wonder at what had transpired that night. “This is the turning point.”

  22

  After the triumph of Crefeld, Alma and Gustav traveled directly to his summerhouse in Maiernigg on Lake Wörthersee near Klagenfurt. Alma thought it would be paradise, just the two of them. The Wörthersee was famous throughout Austria, a sparkling, glacier-fed lake with water that was pure enough to drink. Yet it was also the warmest body of water in the Alps, making it ideal for swimming.

  Their villa was enchantingly situated, complete with its own dock and boathouse. On closer inspection, Alma discovered that the house, built for Gustav by a well-intentioned neighbor and still not paid for, was clumsily constructed, with hideous wooden fretwork over all the kitchen cupboards that attracted cobwebs and dust. Though it might have been a fine retreat for a bachelor and his unmarried sister, it seemed far less suitable for newlyweds expecting their first child. Thanks to the philistine floor plan, Alma and her husband were obliged to sleep on separate floors, she in Justine’s old room sandwiched between the parlor and the guest room. Gustav slept two stories above her, at the top of the house, where he had his bedroom with its own balcony, his study, and his private bathroom.

  Alma could not quite suppress her disappointment regarding their sleeping arrangements. Now that her morning sickness had abated, she had looked forward to their holiday as a time of renewed intimacy and thought they might at least have adjoining rooms. But Gustav insisted that he needed his privacy in order to work. Alma suspected that her mother had taken him aside and warned him that lovemaking during pregnancy could harm their baby—not that he had ever thought to ask Alma her opinions on the subject. To be honest, Gustl, I would much prefer a bit of gentle lovemaking to those grueling walks you drag me on! But to keep the peace, she held her tongue.

  A steep ten-minute hike uphill from the villa led to Gustav’s private composing hut, a stone cabin with windows on three sides. It housed a piano and his complete works of Goethe and Kant. Surrounded by
dense forest, the composing hut afforded no view of the lake below, but Gustav adored it, for he could work in peace with the windows wide open and breathe the pristine air, tangy with the aroma of pine.

  He had brought sketches of his new Fifth Symphony with him—two completed movements with the rest still in gestational stages. Since his summer vacation was the only time he could make real headway composing, he adhered to an even stricter schedule than in Vienna. He arose at six and rang for the maid. On Mama’s advice, Alma had dismissed Resi and hired Elise, a young cousin of Cilli’s who could not have been harder working. Elise prepared Gustav’s breakfast—freshly roasted and ground coffee, milk, bread, butter, and a different jam each morning—which the poor girl then lugged up to his composing hut, taking a separate and more tortuous route than Gustav himself lest he meet her on the way and be jolted out of his creative reverie. After leaving the breakfast tray in his hut, Elise scurried back down before Gustav could catch sight of her.

  Gustav worked until noon, then came down to swim in the lake or go boating with Alma before they shared their midday meal. In the afternoon, they went for three- or four-hour hikes, never mind that Alma was approaching her third trimester.

  “You are young!” Gustav told her, squeezing her hand in encouragement as he guided her up a nearly perpendicular slope. “Healthy exercise will do you and the baby no harm. Oh, Almschi, the world is so beautiful. Together we shall ascend to the very heights!”

  When Alma was ready to weep from exhaustion and throw herself on the ground in defeat, Gustav held her tenderly and whispered in her ear how very much he loved her until she summoned the strength to march on with him, up and up to the stony path. These private moments with her husband were so precious, Alma managed to convince herself that pushing herself beyond the limits of her endurance was holy and good. That it was all worth it just to see him smile at her as though she were his sun and moon, his lux.

  They clambered over fences and squeezed through hedges, avoiding the well-trodden trails. Instead, they sought out deer tracks and less traveled ways until they reached a lonely farmstead where milkmaids busied themselves making cheese while their cows and goats grazed in a high meadow, lush with lady’s mantle and harebells. For a few kreutzer, Gustav bought cups of fresh buttermilk that he and Alma sipped while sitting on a rustic bench beside the water trough, a hollowed-out log through which spring water streamed. Holding hands, they contemplated the view. Far below, the Wörthersee shone like a sapphire in the green velvet hills against a backdrop of diamond-bright Alps. Bees droned in the warm sunlight. Cowbells chimed amid the higher-pitched counterpoint of goats’ bells.

  “Almschi, perhaps I should include cowbells in my new symphony! What could be more pastoral?” Gustav dug his notebook out of his pocket and jotted this down.

  He wore his oldest clothes to ensure their privacy and his anonymity, for nothing irked him more than when strangers presumed to strike up conversations with him. Nothing and no one was permitted to disturb his creative trance. As they made their way back down the steep green slopes, a fit of inspiration seized him. Alma sat at the edge of a wild meadow full of midnight-blue monkshood while Gustav scribbled frantically in his notebook.

  “A new theme for my new symphony,” he told her excitedly, when he closed his notebook. “An adagietto, Almschi, to preserve our idyll for eternity.”

  Taking his hand as they carefully picked their way down the track, Alma reflected on how their life together this summer was stripped of all dross, almost inhuman in its purity. No thoughts of fame or worldly glory seemed to enter her husband’s head. Instead, he lived inside his music, fairly sprinting downhill, and once they had returned to the villa, he retreated to his composing hut to get some more work done while Alma set the table and Elise prepared supper. It was Alma’s task to keep the household running smoothly and discourage inopportune guests so Gustav didn’t need to worry about anything besides his own work.

  Sometimes, for all Alma’s love for Gustav, it was hard not to feel abandoned by him.

  One morning while her husband was holed up in his composing hut, she sat at the piano in the villa. Her hands shook as they hovered above the keys. Even if she could no longer compose, it would be such a solace to play through the score of Siegfried like she used to. Only that was impossible—she mustn’t disturb her husband. Sounds carried farther than one might think. Even now she could hear Gustav’s piano echoing down from the forest along with the birdsong and breeze.

  Biting her lip, she sought to play as quietly as she could, her foot clamped down on the soft pedal, but her every note seemed as jarringly loud as rocket fire. She finally gave up, her stomach knotted in misery when she imagined Gustav’s reproach of her. Then, before she could stop herself, her hands edged to her forbidden folder of music scores. My music! A hollow rattling filled her skull as she glanced through the etudes, rondos, and song cycles she had composed under Alex’s tutelage. To think that just last summer she had been composing the beginnings of an opera! She seized the score.

  I won’t play it, she told herself. With painstaking care, she merely fingered the keys without pressing down or making the slightest sound, chord after chord, bar after bar. Wasn’t this similar to what Beethoven had been forced to do after he lost his hearing? He composed his Ninth Symphony when he was stone-deaf! Studying her own composition, she felt such an upsurge of desire, the frantic urge to create. Then her vision blurred and her own musical notation lost all meaning, as though it were a senseless jumble of hieroglyphics.

  She was possessed by the most piteous yearning for a friend who esteemed her. Who could help her find herself again. For she was a woman who had lost herself. Once she had composed sonatas. Now she was no more than a hausfrau. It was as though someone had savagely grabbed her arm and dragged her away from herself. With all her soul, she longed to return to where she used to be, only now she was without direction. She could no longer find the bridge back to the other side.

  The past eight months, dating from when she first encountered Gustav at Bertha Zuckerkandl’s dinner party in November, floated past her in mockery. That long winter in which she hardly composed while waiting breathlessly for Gustav’s visits and letters. Then she had surrendered her body to him. And now this mindlessly hectic existence, enslaved to her husband’s regime. All her self-contemplation must be abandoned and sacrificed to him. To his career, his genius, his glory.

  Not to mention the loss of her friends. Her eyes filled when she realized how much she missed Alex. And the Conrat sisters. Even Max Burckhard, who could at least make her laugh if nothing else. And what had she gained in return? A husband who seemed incapable of even imagining the grief that racked her. He was simply too absorbed in his work.

  Then again, how dare she complain? Here she was, in a villa on Lake Wörthersee, married to a man whose career was beginning to soar like a meteor. Her suffering was his bliss—how could she refuse a great man like him? Compared to Gustav Mahler, she was a woman of negligible talent. A mere footnote to his brilliance.

  After hiding her music folder in her wardrobe, Alma climbed the three flights of stairs to Gustav’s study, his lofty perch that rose above all mundane concerns. On his desk, she discovered a thick leather-bound book containing the complete philosophical works of Spinoza. As she turned the pages, words and sentences leapt out at her. Immanence. Panentheism. The cosmic animating life force interpenetrates and irradiates every particle of the universe and extends timelessly and spacelessly beyond it, containing every conceivable and inconceivable thing.

  Sinking into Gustav’s desk chair, Alma’s desolation weighed on her. Why had he kept this book to himself instead of sharing it with her, letting her read passages aloud to him after dinner to spark a true intellectual discussion instead of small talk? But, no, he had hoarded it for himself. Perhaps, like his cursed friend Siegfried Lipiner, Gustav thought Spinoza’s philosophy to be far above her head. She, who as an unmarried girl had read Schopenhauer, Goethe,
and Ibsen.

  Hours later, Gustav came bounding down from his hut, his face lit up, suffused in inspiration. He was still brimming with his work that was his sacred vocation, dearer to him than any outer distraction.

  “Almschi!” he cried, holding her by her thickening waist and swirling her in a circle. “You’ve given me such tranquility and peace! I’ve never worked so well in my life.” A slight frown creased his lips. “Except I did hear you on the piano earlier. Perhaps you could play in the evenings after I’ve finished composing.”

  Despite his admonition, he glowed in contentment. But she crumpled in his arms and wept inconsolably.

  “Almschi, why on earth are you crying?” he asked, sounding both confused and perturbed.

  “Why did you never tell me what you thought of my songs?” she demanded, taking an unsteady gulp of air. “Did you even take a proper look at them before forbidding me to compose? You seemed so interested in my music when we first met.”

  She fought back the urge to hammer her fists against his chest and scream in his face. I miss my music so much, I’m dying inside. My soul shrivels a little more each day. Never before in her life had she cried as much as she did now. Infantile. Did her ingratitude prove that Gustav’s friends were right and that she was simply too shallow and immature to be his wife?

  Gustav let out a long breath. “Almschi, I thought you agreed to think of my music as your music. I’m composing for the benefit of all mankind. This is my calling and you’re an indispensable part of that.”

  His attempt to mollify her while sidestepping her question left Alma trembling in rage.

  “Once I had a calling! Once I thought I could be someone!” she shouted, not caring if the boaters on the lake heard her shrieking at her husband like a fishwife. “Gustav, you just want to live your life without sharing it with me, not even your books! You up in your hut composing and I’m not even allowed to play piano in case I disturb you. If you wanted to live like a hermit, why did you marry me?”