Henry Louis de la Grange (Oxford)
April, 2008
Henry-Louis de la Grange’s fourth and final volume in his epic Mahler biography takes a firm, even polemical position on the composer’s American years, and this gives the writing an urgency and thrust that sets it apart from the previous three volumes (a revised and enlarged Volume I is still forthcoming). The title “A New Life Cut Short” says it all. At 50, Mahler was still relatively young when he died. His career in New York represented an ongoing success and source of satisfaction. Until the very end, when he realized that he had contracted a fatal illness, he was looking forward to a secure future, to new compositions and new conducting opportunities. De la Grange proves his thesis in the most persuasive possible way: by letting the abundant evidence speak for itself, quoting primary sources extensively and exhaustively. Readers of the previous volumes will already know that de la Grange leaves no Mahlerian stone unturned in his quest to document every aspect of the composer’s life, and the sheer body of knowledge that has been subsumed and mastered in producing this volume silences criticism.
In defending his position on Mahler’s American period, the author has had to overcome three very serious obstacles. The first of these is the view of Mahler’s last works as the product of a sick man whose death-obsession metamorphosed into a musical prediction of his own demise. Such, for example, is Bernstein’s widely propagated view of the Ninth Symphony as “four gestures of farewell.” How can music so intensely expressive, so evocative of suffering, resignation, and despair, come from a physically and mentally healthy person? Alma herself had already asked that question in connection with the composition of the Kindertotenlieder. It’s worth recalling that both Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony were written in the wake of the death of Mahler’s daughter, and so to the extent that they are indeed autobiographical they show him working through that crisis, and moving on to a deeper appreciation of life’s evanescence. The result may be incredibly moving, sad, often tumultuous, and only tenuously life-affirming, but it is hardly death-directed, let alone some sort of musico-supernatural prognostication (rather a silly notion when you come to think about it).
It’s also worth pointing out that the other two of the infamous “three blows of fate” that struck Mahler at this time, the diagnosis of his heart condition and his resignation from the Vienna opera, sound better as literature than they turned out to be in real life. Mahler was never so busy as he was in the period 1908-11, and as de la Grange points out, he realized very quickly that his medical condition was not going to prevent him from resuming his normally frantic pace of activity. Additionally, bitterness over his departure from Vienna was more than ameliorated by his lucrative new contracts with the Metropolitan Opera and (later) the New York Philharmonic, as well as the thrill of building and being in charge of a first-rate concert orchestra for the very first time in his life. It is in this connection that de la Grange successfully confronts another significant obstacle: the European belief (fear?) that Mahler couldn’t possibly find satisfaction in America as compared to the Continent. This prejudice constantly crops up, in the European press, and in the remarks of Mahler’s friends (and enemies). And yet, as the evidence shows, both Mahlers were for the most part happy in the States, especially Alma. Indeed, it’s probably fair to say that living in New York went a long way toward helping save their marriage during the Gropius affair.
This brings us to the third obstacle, de la Grange’s handling of which represents perhaps the most important and revelatory single element in the entire narrative: the subject of Alma. De la Grange observes that our view of Mahler’s last years has always been colored by Alma’s written account of him as physically weak and at times mentally unbalanced. This portrait, written to justify her own often ignominious behavior, needs to be sifted very carefully to find the grains of truth buried in piles of selectively edited, misremembered, or just plain falsified information. It was Alma herself whose affair with architect Walter Gropius, aided and abetted by her similarly philandering mother, inflicted the single greatest injury to Mahler during this period. And as de la Grange notes, while Mahler has been the subject of a great deal of psychological study, Alma deserves at least as much attention. De la Grange does not claim to be qualified in this respect, but he understands that this narcissistic, vicious, jealous, passionate, and (yes) loving woman is necessarily as much the central player in Mahler’s final years as is the great man himself. The narrative brings her character, motivations, and actions, both good and ill, vividly to life in the most sensitively balanced way.
Having put these three major barriers to understanding Mahler’s last years into their proper perspective, de la Grange is thus free to present to us a man full of positive energy, increasingly admired and appreciated by the public (if not always the press) as both a performer and a composer, operating at peak form in both arenas. This makes his illness and death all the more tragic for their suddenness, a fateful irony made crueler because Mahler was so very close to overcoming the personal crises that beset him during this period. Just at the point of realizing his ambitions both as a performer and composer–to be able to work and create on his own terms–he died. It was all over in a few short weeks. So successful is de la Grange in recreating this feeling of compressed time as he recounts Mahler’s final days that the end of the written narrative comes as something of shock, even after 1277 very full and amply annotated pages.
Of course, it’s not really the end: we also get a number of those famous appendices, including discussions of Das Lied von der Erde, the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies, Mahler’s arrangements of other composer’s works, a very intelligent essay on movement order in the Sixth, and a brilliantly researched study of Mahler performances (more than you might have thought possible) in the decades following his death. This landmark tome sells at the equally landmark price of about $120. It’s thus not a book for Mahler beginners, those wanting merely the basics of his life and works. De la Grange is to Mahler what Thayer was to Beethoven, only more so. A biography this comprehensive, fair, and thoughtful may be subject to corrections or amendment from time to time, but like the great life and works that it celebrates, it will never go out of fashion. For serious Mahlerians and scholars of the period it will surely become the definitive source of information, well, forever…forever….
David Hurwitz
