Archives for July 8th, 2005

Gustav Mahler, born July 7, 1860; died May 18, 1911.

Yesterday, the phenomenal composer Gustav Mahler would have celebrated his 145th birthday. Unfortunately, he was felled
by infectious endocarditis 94 years ago, and has since been decomposing ruhevoll, poco adagio in the Grinzinger cemetery outside Vienna, Austria. His premature death was a great loss for humanity, especially for his many devoted admirers — myself included.

I’ve had the pleasure of hearing Mahler live in Slovenia on two occasions: The first was the 300th anniversary concert of the Slovenian Philharmonic
in 2002, in which they walloped my soul with a stellar performance of
his 8th symphony. The other occasion was an equally glorious
performance of the
4th Symphony, by the greatly talented (but poorly funded) Maribor Philharmonic. The fourth remains a personal favorite of mine; the third movement alone (sample here) is so celestial that NASA should be shooting probes into it to see how it works.

The first symphony I heard by Mahler was, logically enough, the First Symphony.
I didn’t enjoy it at all; like the audience at its premiere in Budapest
in 1889, I didn’t know what the hell was going on. According to some
accounts, the crowd in Budapest seemed to be doing fine until the
tragi-comic todtenmarsch (funeral march) towards the end. Even if you’ve never even heard of Mahler, you’d probably recognize it. If you listen here, you’ll notice it’s a version of the popular ditty Frère Jacques. (Slovenes will recognize it as Mojster Jaka.)
Mahler goes all over the place with it: sentimental, trivial, bizarre,
grotesque. Sigmund Freud, who sat down for some friendly psychoanalysis
with Mahler in 1910, concluded that the reason Mahler always spoiled
noble moments with vulgar melodies was that:

"Mahler’s father
treated his wife very badly, and when Mahler was still a small boy an
especially embarrassing scene had taken place between them. It became
unbearable for the little one, and he ran away from home. But just at
that moment the well-known Viennese song Ach du lieber Augustin
rang out from a hurdy-gurdy. Mahler thought that from this moment on,
deep tragedy and superficial entertainment were tied together
indissolubly in his soul and that one mood was inevitably tied to the
other."

But
I don’t want to focus too much on Mahler and his oedipal problems. I’m
actually bringing him up because of a little-known fact: Gustav Mahler
lived and worked in Ljubljana (as a conductor) from 1881 to 1882. And
Slovenia has almost nothing to show for it. A phonebook search reveals
that there is not a single Mahler Street in the entire country. Take a look at this:

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