Mahlerhis Life and Music

Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music Professor Robert Greenberg THE TEACHING COMPANY ® Robert Greenberg, Ph.D. San Francisco Conservatory of Music Robert Greenberg has composed over forty works for a wide variety of instrumental and vocal ensembles. Recent performances of Greenberg’s work have taken place in New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, England, Ireland, Italy, Greece, and The Netherlands, where his Child’s Play for string quartet was performed at the Concertgebouw of Amsterdam. Professor Greenberg holds degrees from Princeton University and the University of California at Berkeley, where he received a Ph.D. in music composition in 1984. His principal teachers were Edward Cone, Claudio Spies, Andrew Imbrie, and Olly Wilson. Professor Greenberg’s awards include three Nicola De Lorenzo prizes in composition, three Meet the Composer grants, and commissions from the Koussevitzky Foundation of the Library of Congress, the Alexander String Quartet, XTET, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, and the Dancer’s Stage Ballet Company. He is currently on the faculty of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, where he served as Chair of the Department of Music History and Literature and Director of Curriculum of the Adult Extension Division for thirteen years. Professor Greenberg is resident music historian for National Public Radio’s “Weekend All Things Considered” program. Professor Greenberg has taught and lectured extensively across North America and Europe, speaking to such corporations and musical institutions as Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting, Harvard Business School Publishing, Deutches Financial Services, Canadian Pacific, Strategos Institute, Lincoln Center, the Van Cliburn Foundation, the University of California/Haas School of Business Executive Seminar, the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, the Chautauqua Institute, the Commonwealth Club of San Francisco, and others. His work as a teacher and lecturer has been profiled in the Wall Street Journal, Inc. magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and The Times of London. He is an artistic codirector and board member of COMPOSER, INC. His music is published by Fallen Leaf Press and CPP/Belwin and is recorded on the Innova Label. Professor Greenberg has recorded 256 lectures for The Teaching Company, including the forty-eight–lecture super- course How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership i Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music Table of Contents Professor Biography............................................................................................i Course Scope.......................................................................................................1 Lecture One Introduction and Childhood.......................................2 Lecture Two Mahler the Conductor................................................5 Lecture Three Early Songs and Symphony No. 1...........................10 Lecture Four The Wunderhorn Symphonies .................................14 Lecture Five Alma and Vienna.....................................................17 Lecture Six Family Life and Symphony No. 5 ...........................20 Lecture Seven Symphony No. 6, and Das Lied von der Erde.............................................23 Lecture Eight Das Lied, Final Symphonies, and the End ..............................................................27 Vocal Texts........................................................................................................31 Publication Credit ............................................................................................36 Timeline.............................................................................................................37 Glossary.............................................................................................................39 Biographical Notes............................................................................................40 Bibliography......................................................................................................41 ii ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership Great Masters: MahlerHis Life and Music Scope: To a greater degree than that of many other composers, the work of Gustav Mahler is a highly personal expression of his inner world, a world characterized by an overwhelming sense of alienation and loneliness. Some of this feeling can be attributed to Mahler’s Jewish heritage and his critics’ response to it. Part of his isolation began in childhood, a reaction to a brutal father and the loss of eight siblings, including his beloved brother Ernst. From the beginning of his compositional career, at age six, to its end, Mahler’s music focuses on the lonely, isolated individual attempting to cope with romantic rejection, the struggle between hope and despair, the questions of death and redemption, and the grieving process. Mahler’s work constitutes the first generation of expressionism, the early twentieth-century art movement that celebrates inner reality as the only reality. Unlike other expressionist composers, however, Mahler used the musical language of the nineteenth-century to explore expressive themes very 20th century in their nature. Mahler also had an exceptional career as a conductor, beginning in a small theater in Austria and culminating at the Royal Vienna Opera, the New York Metropolitan Opera, and the New York Philharmonic. His performances were almost magical for his audiences and he ultimately achieved critical acclaim for his conducting. His conducting career was nevertheless marked by difficulties, because of Mahler’s tyrannical stance with performers and theater management and because the anti-Semitic press, particularly in Vienna, continued to attack him with a ferocity that we must consider almost pathological. In the last years of his life, Mahler’s older daughter, Marie, died of scarlet fever. Soon after, Mahler himself was diagnosed with a heart condition that was not serious at the time but would contribute to his death in 1911. We are left with Mahler’s unique and all-inclusive body of workhis symphonieshis universal statements about life, death, love, redemption, religion, God, nature, and the human condition. ©2001 The Teaching Company Limited Partnership 1 Lecture One Introduction and Childhood Scope: One of the most significant aspects of Mahler’s life was his sense of alienation, brought on largely by his Jewish heritage and his critics’ reaction to it. In fact, the tension created by the Czech, Germanic and Jewish culture of which Mahler was a part may be one of the elements that makes his work so striking and fascinating. As a child, Mahler built a fantasy world to which he retreated as a defense against abuse and loneliness. This ability to retreat reveals itself in the highly personal inner landscapes of Mahler’s music. From the time he was quite young, he was entranced by music and became devoted to the piano from about the age of five. Outline I. A central fact of Mahler’s life is his isolation and alienation. He was psychologically and culturally alone, the eternal outsider. A. Mahler wrote, “I am thrice homeless, as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, as a Jew throughout the world, everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.” B. Mahler’s “Jewishness” was held against him as a man, a conductor, and a composer, both during his lifetime and after. C. On April 10, 1897, two days after the announcement of Mahler’s appointment as conductor of the Vienna State Opera, the Viennese newspaper Deutsche Zeitung attacked what it called “the frightening Jewification of art in Vienna” and questioned whether a Jew could perform “our great musicour German opera” (Lea, 51). D. Even reviews published later in Mahler’s life echo these sentiments. E. I might suggest that we find Mahler’s music so unbelievably moving today because its angst; its uncontrollable extroversion, optimism, and pessimism; its sheer power and often schizophrenic emotional progressions are even more relevant to us than to the music’s original audience. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 1, movement 4 conclusion [1888].) F. Mahler’s music is a mixture of brilliant, rich, irregularly changing harmonies; of extraordinary (often grotesque) juxtapositions of moods: tragedy, humor, farce, irony; constant, almost obsessive melodic activity; sudden, unexpected explosions of passion or rage that disappear as quickly as they come; strutting march music heard back-to-back with Viennese love music; and a pure, crystalline, overwhelming passion untempered by the “civilizing” effect of artistic control and manipulation. (Musical selection: Symphony No. 5, movement 2 opening.) II. Mahler was born to Jewish parents in the Bohemian town of Kalischt in 1860, in what was then part of the Austrian Empire and is today the Czech Republic. A. Like so many emancipated Jews in their part of Europe, the Mahler family considered themselves assimilated Western European Jews. Typical of the Czech (Bohemian and Moravian) Jewish community, the Mahlers spoke German at home, not Yiddish, and moved in a cultural orbit that was distinctly Austrian/German. B. While growing up, Mahler had little contact with Jewish religious practices. According to biographers Kurt and Herta Blaukopf, he was more familiar with Catholic religious practice than Jewish. C. Little documentary evidence exists that Mahler considered his Jewish heritage as anything other than a burden to be overcome. D.

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