Gustav Mahler’s Letters to His Wife

He is considered the last great symphonist and even with all his wife Alma’s irritations, including infidelity, Gustav Mahler was particularly annoyed at her packing skills. The failure to have packed a comb, which one expects would have resulted in giving the composer something of a pleasing storm-clouds-raging-in-the-brain look of Beethoven, is quite an issue in this new edition of 350 letters from Mahler to his wife, half never before published. The further joke is that Alma seems to have taken these complaints so seriously, going as far as to edit them out when she originally published the letters. It is fascinating to think what preoccupies the mind of geniuses, for both spouses were.

Gustav was 42 when he married the 21 year-old Alma. As his symphonies attest, he was an open-hearted, emotionally sensitive man, but as these letters attest he could also be a misogynist. The neurotic Mahler declared he would “only marry a beautiful woman” and photos of Alma depict a woman of strong features and fierce beauty, words easily applicable to Mahler’s music. But in Belle Ã?Â?poque Vienna, Alma wanted to be more than angelically objectified. At the time of their marriage, she was a highly talented pianist and had been learning composition skills from Alexander von Zemlinsky. She had hopes of her own success as a composer. Mahler wrote to her,
“A husband and wife who are both composers: how do you envisage that? If, at a time when you should be attending to household duties or fetching me something I urgently needed âÂ?¦ if at such a moment you were befallen by ‘inspiration’: what then? From now on you have only one profession: to make me happy! You must renounce everything superficial and conventional, all vanity and outward show. In return you must wish for nothing except my love.”

This comes of course from a man who described his 8th Symphony, ‘The Symphony of a Thousand’ as “the universe beginning to sing and resound. It is no longer human voices; it is planets and suns revolving.” Perhaps he was more egoist than misogynist. In the end, he was cuckold.

Alma never forgave him for the curbing of her ambitions. She left only sixteen compositions and though none reach any heights of merit, they sadly reflected a musical spirit too promising to have been caged. Her bitterness grew to the extent she blamed Gustav for the death of one of their daughters at the age of four. Writing his Kindertotenleider or Song on the Death of Children cycle with the children playing in view, she claimed, had lead nature to take its revenge.

She found her revenge in the arms of architect Walter Gropius, later founder of the Bauhaus. In 1910, doctors warned Alma about her physical and mental health. They suggested she check into a spa. It was summer and Gustav usually reserved this time for composing. He left her to recuperate at the spa and went off to Toblach to work on the never to be completed 10th symphony. Gropius was at the spa.

It seems Walter and Alma’s affections were clear to anyone who saw them in each other’s presence. Gustav should not have been surprised what happened when the two were left together. He wrote to her, “It worries me today to have no letter from you after your so sad one of yesterday. Are you hiding something? For I feel there must be something to be read between the lines.”

Legend has it the affair was revealed when a letter from Gropius to Mrs. Mahler was misaddressed to Mr. Mahler. Gustav chose dramatic discussion over dramatic action. The three sat down to decide their fates. Gustav finished by grabbing a Bible and demanding of Alma, “Whatever you do, will be well done. Choose!” Alma chose Gustav, fearful that her rejection would kill him.

It mattered little, for Alma no longer loved Gustav and he knew it. He had first courted her with poems such as “Who would have thought it right / That harmony and counterpoint / Should put a heart so out of joint.” He returned to such horrible verse. He went to see Freud for marital advice. Issues of Mahler’s mother predictably came up. He then wore himself down with travel. In February of 1911, his end summoned him. Alma orchestrated his return to home and her. He died in May, almost a year after their marital crisis had begun.

He once wrote to her, after failing to buy a birthday present, “What more can one give, when one has already given oneself?” Theirs was a love certainly abnormal, but no less legitimate than any other.

This is a wonderful book, less about how geniuses do and do not compose symphonies than it is about how people do and do not make marriages.