Gustav Mahler by Stephen Downes

Gustav Mahler

by Stephen Downes

Reaktion Books 2025

Leonard Bernstein pronounced, in his famous Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, that three deaths were prophesied by Gustav Mahler’s Ninth Symphony: the composer’s own, that of musical tonality, and that of society. Tonality remains alive and well while society continues to hang on, but even the first prophecy has been meaningfully broken, largely due to Bernstein’s success in reviving interest in Mahler’s music after decades of comparative neglect. The composer is now more popular than ever, especially among conductors, who find in his unwieldy, strenuously instructive scores the opportunity to showcase their technical abilities and to simulate the Bernsteinian moment of ecstasy: mouth agape, arms stretched wide apart, stick-waving homo musicalis in communion with the heavens.

For not unconnected reasons, Mahler also attracts the interest of biographers and commentators, who see in his life those sought-after characteristics of the valid artist: intensely expressed inner turmoil, a minimum of external tragedy, a lack of contemporary recognition, and a level of explainable coherence between the life and the work. The extensive Mahler literature is brought to bear with impressive command by musicologist Stephen Downes, in a concise and discursive survey of the composer’s life and the corpus of writing it has inspired.

Being part of Reaktion Books’ series of short and accessible Critical Lives, this volume is understandably constrained in its degree of biographical detail, but it has no notable omissions. From the birth in 1860 near the Bohemian-Moravian border, we move through the relationship with the parents (complicated), early musical experiences (first instrument was a toy accordion), the child prodigy phase (performed the Liszt Midsummer Night’s Dream Variations at 12) and reactions to folk music and the sounds of nature, which would go on to figure so prominently in the symphonies. The mere facts are accompanied by the requisite psychoanalytical discussion and Downes dutifully reproduces the critical trope of discerning a latent childhood in the mature artist.

Mahler’s student years in Vienna are framed by his reading, whose basis was Goethe and the German Romantics, of course included Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, and reserved an exalted place for Dostoevsky. After giving evidence for these literary and philosophical influences in the music, Downes moves on to a useful discussion of the student compositions, most of them lost. Mahler’s well-documented conducting career is narrated swiftly up to his storied tenure with the Vienna State Opera, which receives ample attention, as does his time in New York.

At around this point in the book, an untold assumption by the writer, all too common in discussions of this composer, becomes too evident to ignore. That is that Gustav Mahler was a Genius, a misjudged Genius, deserving of so much better than he got, if not a Prophet then an Angel, the Hero, simply and totally Good. Yes, he was neurotic and unpleasant, but Prometheus acted grumpy too.

So, it is axiomatically taken, Mahler’s failures were the fault of the world. For example, the damning reviews of his radical performances of Beethoven, which included cuts and re-orchestrations, are ascribed to anti-semitism and “tell us more about Viennese culture than Mahler as conductor” (never mind the similar responses from critics in New York). Negative reactions to the Hero’s work are condescended to and reframed as being “more bewildered than bewitched” or “less than enthralled.” When Henry Krehbiel, reviewing Mahler’s performance of his First Symphony for the New York Daily Tribune, deemed the composer “a prophet of the ugly,” it was only because he was unable to understand what he had heard.

The Romantic hero worship of Mahler is not-so-subtly summed up by Downes’ choice of comparison for a photograph where the composer is striking a casual pose in the mountains:

Acknowledging the obvious differences between an artistic canvas and holiday snap, it is instructive to compare a famous photograph of Mahler walking in the Dolomites near Toblach in 1909 with Caspar David Friedrich’s now well-known ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ … The landscape is staged as if it were a projection of the wanderer’s imagination … The wanderer also ‘stands as a kind of trope for origins’, for the creative act … The face of Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer’ is unseen, so the figure is a universalized, anonymized Everyman, and his distant gaze offers no obvious line of sight or way through the landscape. Mahler, by contrast, looks almost straight to camera; he stands on a well-trodden valley path, the erosive mark of humanity’s presence. His garb and stance are favoured ones – gentlemanly tweeds, resting on his walking stick. Mahler is a tourist at leisure. But his facial expression and wistful smile suggest a relationship with the landscape of both pleasure and pain.

The most critically nuanced part of the book is the chapter on Mahler’s relationship to his infamous wife, Alma. But there, too, the composer is spared any negative judgement, even after the disturbing quote from his letter asking her to give up her compositional aspirations for his own. “Alma’s musical abilities,” we are reassured, “were allowed a subservient outlet – copying parts from the manuscript as Gustav completed the Fifth Symphony.”

However uncritical, this expertly researched and passionate volume deserves its place in any musical library. It serves uniquely well the Mahler neophytes and the non-specialists. The only injustice is done to Gustav Mahler himself, who was far too interesting to be branded a saint.

Nikolas Mavreas is a reader living in Athens, Greece.