CorrespondenceOn December 9th, 1910, Alma Mahler sent a telegram to her husband, the composer Gustav Mahler, in which she described her train journey from Buffalo, NY to New York City while reading The Brothers Karamazov, which Gustav had recommended to her: "Journey with Alyosha [Karamazov] splendid." Gustav replied: "My Journey with Almiosha even more splendid . . ."
The tender simplicity of the reply is like a Zen koan: in its seven words it invokes the huge scale of Mahler's love for his wife in their own nine-year journey from 1902 to 1911, and is all the more remarkable given the difficulties the couple had just overcome because of Alma's infatuation with the much younger Walter Gropius. The telegram also turns out to have been the last message Mahler ever sent to Alma, as within six months he had died.
From 1902 until his death Mahler worshipped Alma, but the demands he made on her were huge. From the outset their relationship was a challenge for them both. On the one hand, Alma Schindler (the daughter of the painter) was a young woman in her early 20s, and was an accomplished musician and composer in her own right.
On the other hand Gustav Mahler, already in his 40s, was 20 years her senior with an established reputation. In the manner of a neurotic composer, unable to abide the thought of competition from his wife, he forbade her to compose, insisting she should be there for him. He asked her: "If you were to give up your musical ambition to take possession of me and my music . . . do you believe you would have to relinquish an indispensable part of your existence?" That she did just that was testament to her own love for him and to her sense of her duties as the wife of one of Europe's most famous musicians.
Mahler's conducting career took him on tour to many centres of musical excellence. His directorship of the Vienna Hofoper ensured his fame as an opera conductor was unparalleled but it was through his engagements as a conductor with orchestras abroad that his own fame as a composer was established.
It was while he was on these frequent tours that the bulk of these letters to Alma were written, and the sheer quantity of the correspondence (350 letters) means that he wrote to her almost every day that they were separated, even if it was only the briefest of notes.
While there have been previous editions of Mahler's letters, they were not uncut. Alma Mahler, in her editing of the letters for Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters, published 197 letters, 159 of which were written to her, but she frequently removed anything that cast her in a poor light, or which may have resulted in legal difficulties under libel laws, as many of the parties written about were still alive. This present volume, drawing on the archives of the late Hans Moldenhauer (now housed in the Bavarian State Museum), focuses entirely on the 350 letters Mahler wrote to Alma during the nine years of their marriage. Of these, only 37 have been previously published unabridged, while a further 188 have never been published at all. This volume therefore represents a major addition to the canon.
The book is enhanced by having meaningful extracts from Alma's diaries that place the letters in some kind of context, mitigating to an extent her sad destruction of her own side of the correspondence, with the exception of her very first letter to him (addressed to Herr Direktor, and signed Alma M. Schindler).
Highlights of the letters that leap off the page for the casual reader are Mahler's low opinions of Brahms, Sibelius, Pfizner, Walter and Bruckner as composers (composers, it seems, are never nice to one another) and the state of Richard Strauss's marriage (sadistically comic). Most touching of all, though, is the way Mahler dealt with the crisis in their marriage in 1910 when he sought out the infatuated Walter Gropius, brought him back to their house, and calling Alma to join them, left them together to sort it out, but not before telling her: "Whatever you decide, you will be doing the right thing."
The man who comes across in these letters is warm and sincere, with a deep humanity, and a wonderful optimism about life.
Fergus Johnston is a composer. He is currently working on an RTÉ orchestral commission for the RTÉ Living Music Festival next month
Gustav Mahler: Letters to his Wife Edited by Henry-Louis de la Grange and Gunther Weiss in collaboration with Knud Martner, translated by Antony Beaumont Faber & Faber, 431pp. £25