Fate, death and Alma

Gustav Mahler is the most subjective, the most autobiographical, of composers. Other composers, particularly in the previous century, have asked their audiences to show an occasional interest in their private lives, sometimes in rather coded ways. There are the allusions, which of course never were completely private, of Schumann’s piano cycles, Carnaval and Davidsbundlertanze; there are the heartbreaking bits of autobiography in the late Beethoven string quartets; there are significant mottos about private acts of adoration even in Brahms’s third symphony; and, much later, a hidden love affair to be decoded in the Berg Lyric Suite.

But these were occasional diversions, for the most part, and music continued to be as impersonal, public and abstract an art as it ever was. Only a fool would seek to discern an autobiographical statement in, say, the Surprise symphony, the Moments Musicaux, or the Poet and Peasant overture. Mahler is unusual in asking his audience to accompany him on an intimate journey, and sometimes a determined effort is needed to shut out the well-known fragments of autobiography now fossilised in his works. The Kindertotenlieder is forever tied to his daughter who died after its première. The second subject of the sixth symphony is about his famously awful wife, Alma. The bass drum in the unfinished tenth symphony is about a dead New York fireman, apparently. And so it goes on, the listener quite often wondering whether music is ever really ‘about’ anything at all, despite Mahler’s best efforts.

One subjectivity deserves another. Like many people, I came to Mahler when I was 14 or so. Simon Rattle was busy hawking the Deryck Cooke completion of the tenth symphony round the country with his Birmingham orchestra. It was pubescent love at first hearing. How sad! How beautiful! And it was all about Alma and a poor dead New York fireman, too.