Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler by Bruno Walter is an anomalous memoir of Gustav Mahler by another of the 20th century's great composers, yet it reads more like a hagiography (an idolizing biography) by a venerable disciple who was vastly influenced by Mahler following his acceptance to become the Austrian's assistant at the Vienna Court Opera House. Bruno Walter, German but of proverbial Jewish temperament, enjoyed an intimate musical relationship with his troubled mentor. This monograph allows us to scour the prejudices that have been imputed on Gustav Mahler, be it due to misunderstandings or facile psychologization. Sharing a vocation for the mystical intimacy of music, this memoir reminisces how the tantrums, the irascible dour demeanor, not to mention his petulant and demanding ways, were but the inevitable make-up of a Faustian striving for perfection. Not surprisingly Thomas Mann narrated such fact in fiction in his magnum opus Doctor Faustus, where the composer is a rather faithful description of Mahler and his music (with Theodor's Adorno's musical direction in the matter). The rage that ebbs throughout the life of Mahler is here viewed as an over brimming sense of responsibility, that at the behest of his exalted calling he felt compelled to dedicate his entire being. The many ways he came to shock ordinary people, the Wittgenstein intensity of his preoccupations, and the impetuous genius. By contrast Bruno Walter's style was dictated by a belief in cajolery and tact persuasion, which Mahler was boldly dismissive of. There is an element of a grotesque grandeur that becomes pervasive at lengths as Walter condescends to the fascinating personality of Mahler, and less frequently he becomes apologetic towards a musical idiom that extorted the orchestrations of a a man whose penchant for climactic banalities in music equaled those in his relationship with the world about him. There is not much of interest when it comes to the musical interpretation of Mahler, where the influences of Beethoven is paraphrased, and moreover the distinctive startling juxtaposition of ironic and parodic elements that, although without influence or ancestry, Bruno Walter describes as Post-Wagnerian. The complexity of the psychic disorder and the unprecedented use of the counterpoint to articulate his sense of the radical incompatibility of human experience is overlooked: A blaring oversight which should be unforgivable would it not be for the testament the disciple gives of the man who most influenced him and the personality that deepened his musical intuition. The moment most particular and of greatest philosophical beauty in Mahler's works, is the innocuous heroic dramatization with the chaos about us, which yields nothing more than a tenuous thread of awaiting extinction, where triumphs is achieved by a peaceful resignation, extinguished and extinguishing, where the exhaustion of being is rendered as a culminating surcease, oblivion as a hint of ecstasy before the void cons