The books of Robert Seethaler, one of Europe’s pre-eminent novelists, include a 2020 novella about Gustav Mahler: Der letzte Satz. It’s just appeared in English as The Last Movement. It seeks to explore the final turbulent years of the Mahler odyssey. So does my own 2023 Mahler novel: The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York. Scanning the similarities and differences observable in these fictitious recreations of an actual life, does a coherent “Mahler” emerge?
The Last Movement, I would say, studies an exceptional personality who happened to have been a famous composer and conductor. Seethaler spends little time with music. He makes no particular attempt to align Mahler’s compositions and performances with personal attributes. Rather, he exercises a novelist’s imagination to bring a story vividly to life. When Mahler sailed home to Europe for the last time, in 1911, did he lean against a deck container upon which a coil of rope sat “with an iron hook sticking out”? Was the hook “rusted at the tip” and the rope “frayed and black with oil”? It matters not. I would hesitate to call The Last Movement “historical fiction.” Rather, it’s an exercise in fiction that happens to deploy an actual historical personage.
The Marriage is also an exercise in fiction. But the incidents I relate, and the characters I describe, are invariably matters of historical record and many passages incorporate Alma’s letters and reminiscences verbatim. Also, Mahler’s music and music-making are major topics; rather like Thomas Mann, I find myself using words to describe not just the affect of music but the sounds themselves. What is more, I have an agenda – to juxtapose the Mahlers, Gustav and Alma, with a new environment: New York City, where between 1907 and 1911 Mahler conducted both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Mahler’s continued ignorance of the city’s musical life (which unfortunately also afflicts his biographers) furnishes an illuminating commentary on Mahler the man. The resulting novel, I would say, is less “historical fiction” than “creative non-fiction.” Its author is a cultural historian seeking new avenues of inquiry.
And yet the two books have much in common. Both writers deploy first-person narratives to explore what’s inside Mahler’s head. And both situate Mahler aboard a trans-Atlantic vessel, where the contemplation of sky and water inspires philosophical reverie. The entirety of The Last Movement, in fact, transpires in April 1911 aboard the Amerika. Terminally ill, Mahler is heading home to die in Vienna. The turbulence of his recent personal affairs is recalled in flashback. In The Marriage, there is a single ship-born episode midway through, but it crucially limns the essential interiority of the Mahler persona.
Here’s a sampling of Seethaler:
Sitting on the sundeck, Mahler contemplated the meaninglessness of life with a twinge of baleful resignation. Life was little more than a brief exhalation, a breath in the storm of the world, yet he loved it so much that his sadness at the futility of this love almost broke his heart.
“It could have all have gone quite differently. We should have swum across to the other shore. It was a mistake to turn back halfway. Who does such a thing?”
Mahler spoke into the wind. His head jerked up, and he blinked in the bright sunlight . . .
The cloud had vanished; the sky was white and empty. Mahler leant against the steel wall at an angle and tried to bear it. He could hear voices again on the lower deck. People were talking over each other; someone laughed, and then it was quiet again, apart from the wind and the sound of the sea.
Tears suddenly sprang to his eyes and he sobbed into his palms. He thought of the others, their faces and voices, and his guilt.
“I would so have liked to live longer,” he said out loud.
This made him feel ridiculous, and he was embarrassed. . . .
It’s full of life down there, he thought. Quite unlike the heavens. Up above, it’s all empty and dead. Strange, really, for people to hope that’s where they’ll go. . . .
And here – from an earlier stage in the story — is a bit of Horowitz:
“Vita fugax.” This fleeting life. My work unfinished.
And yet: How beautiful the world is! How can any clod claim indifference? How detestable is a “worldly” cynicism! Man is such a marvelous machine. When we see a complex mechanism – a motor car – do we assume that no means of propulsion is present merely because none is visible? So it is with Nature.
He was leaning on the railing, facing sky and water. The great ship was asleep. The enveloping blackness signified the hidden presence both of stars and clouds – and also no doubt of an impregnating deity. Left behind was the concrete of the city, its rackets of noise and miniature facsimiles of lake and forest. Soon he would return to the wooded seclusion of his composing hut the thought of which caused him to sink far into himself, a narcotic sensation laced with the sublime privacies of creative introspection. Lost to the world.
Gradually a half moon appeared, its outline diffused by drifting wisps of colored air made visible by the pale yellowish light. Directly underneath, darting specks, also yellow, lit the Atlantic: Kantian ephemera, a flickering, fickle world of appearances masking the elusive profundities of existence itself. . . .
The opening pages of the new symphony – his Ninth: dangerous epochal number – had for some time congealed in his ear: a cradle song for violins, harp, and quivering violas – a waterscape, clear or turbid, light or dark in hue, whose tolling brass and timpani intimated shoals of foreboding. . . .
In the world of external events, both novels use dialogue to recreate the marriage crisis of August 1910: Mahler discovers a love letter from the young architect Walter Gropius, addressed to his wife. Here is Seethaler:
He thought back to the previous summer. On the way to Toblach he had grabbed Alma by the arm to confront her. She looked at him, and a shadow flitted across her forehead, although the day was hot and cloudless.
“It’s not true,” he said.
”Let go,” she said. “You’re hurting me.”
He let her go, and for a moment they stood facing each other in silence.
“It’s not true,” he said again.
“Stop it. I’ve told you everything.”
“No, you haven’t. I read the letter.”
“It’s just words on a piece of paper. People always read what they want to read. Why did you have to read it, anyway? It was my letter you should have kept your hands off it.”
“It was addressed to me.”
“By mistake. You know that.”
“Your architect is an idiot. You’re the lover of an idiot.”
“I’m not his lover.”
“What are you, then?”
“I am what you could see, if you ever really looked at me properly.”
Her dark eyes were very wide. There was expression in them that he had only ever seen once before, and it frightened him.
“Do you think I like being like this?” he said. “I don’t recognize myself any more. But maybe I’m just imagining it, and I’ve never really known myself at all. I’m jealous. I hate you. And I love you. You’re my light.”
“My God, you’re so dramatic.”
“I only ask one thing. Don’t lie to me any more. Tell me about him. Tell me who he is.”
“He’s a person. He moves and speaks. He breathes. He has a little hollow in the muscles of his arm, just above the elbow. I haven’t worked out what it is and I haven’t yet dared to ask.”
“You bitch!” he said.
“What do you expect? Everything I once believed in has ceased to exist. Maybe it was never there. They did warn me. All he thinks about is his music. . . . ‘’
“Will you see him again?” he asked abruptly.
“What if I did?” she said. “I’m a woman. He’s a man. It’s that simple. Of course, you have no clue about that. A genius doesn’t concern himself with such things. . . . “
“Forgive me,” he said. He abruptly thudded to his knees and clasped her hips in his hands. “Please, please forgive me!”
Alma’s whole body trembled. She put a hand on his head, and at the same time made a feeble attempt to pull away.
“Get up,” she said. “Please, get up!”
Mahler pressed his face to her belly Then, slowly and with difficulty, he unclenched the fingers he had dug into her skirt and got to his feet.
And here, incorporating Alma’s actual correspondence with Gustav, is Horowitz:
He looked up at the vacant room and in a choking voice cried: “Alma!” She duly appeared. “What is this?!” He stood and handed her the letter. She briefly examined it, blanched, pushed it in her pocket, and replied:
“I met a young architect at the sanatorium. Purely by chance. And he fell in love with me.”
She spoke in frozen tones. Her husband’s stricken countenance, the neediness of his bulging reddened eyes, registered the unmediated child in mocking contradiction of the deep furrows of his pale and sunken cheeks, the scarred lines of his high forehead, the incipient graying of his thick and unkempt forest of black hair. His strangely large head, its sallow color and parallelogram shape, looked suddenly reptilian.
“I had been living like a monk, on lettuce and buttermilk. Exercising in the rain, bathing in the hot springs,” she continued. “Then the doctor prescribed dancing. He introduced me to a young German — a student of Behrens, who had been a friend of my father’s.”
She realized with relief that he was not angry. That he was panicked made her guilty and confused. She felt pity. She felt revulsion.
“An architect?!”
“Gustav: you sent me to Tobelbad for nearly a month. You told me to stay ‘as long as possible.’ You wrote every day, complaining about your stomach, complaining about your arm, complaining about the noisiness and unruliness of the village children here at Toblach. Informing me that you were eliminating butter from your diet. Lecturing me about Plato and ‘Platonic love.’”
“And anxiously inquiring why you were writing so seldom, and so impersonally. . . . Alma: Do you love me still?”
Involuntarily, even – in his panic – subliminally, he observed her altered appearance. Since the marriage, her buxom shape had turned more monumental, her face puffier, blurrier. But now her skin resumed its marble luster. Her chiseled lips and firm chin were softer. A sultry allure he had quite forgotten had like a dangerous ghost reinhabited her visage.
“For eight years I have been a hermit. Your Hausfrau, rolling up my sleeves, your book-keeper, your maid, at your beck and call. . . . I am depressed. I drink. I faint. My heart complains. Now it is my gall bladder, Fraenkel says. And my body – it has all but dried up. At Tobelbad I played the piano every day – ‘Du dist der Lenz.’ The Liebestod!”
“ . . . What is his name?”
“Walter Gropius.”
“And why in the world would he have addressed this letter to me?”
“I do not know.”
“It could only have been deliberate.”
“I do not know.”
“Alma — What will you do?”
”I must think about it. I must think about it alone.”
And she was gone. The room was mute. Prior to her departure, neither of them had moved so much as an inch. She had seemed to him unapproachable, inviolable. He looked to the piano, for the letter, then remembered it was in her pocket. So she is reading it now. The piano was trembling. He sat. His pulse was pounding. Was this it, the heart attack he had so long anticipated and feared?
He did not care.
If the role of Alma Mahler looms far larger in The Marriage than in The Last Movement, it is because Seethaler’s topic is Mahler and mine is indeed the marriage – and its response to stresses and opportunities posed by a new environment. That said, Alma – demonized in many a Mahler biography — emerges in both books as a victim of her husband’s self-absorption, itself an understandable dimension of his genius.
Early on in The Last Movement, Mahler remembers observing his wife “waiting, just as she has been waiting for something or someone ever since childhood, while life just passes her by. That, at least, was what she often said when she spoke of her ‘half-lived life.’ He couldn’t take his wife seriously in this regard.” When Alma expresses a desire to experience the novelty of a New York City drugstore, Mahler instructs himself: “No idea what that is, but don’t forget. Don’t forget, don’t forget.” In the wake of the Gropius crisis, he thinks: “She had been right. He hadn’t seen her. He had looked at her as you might contemplate a vase.”
In The Marriage, Alma encounters a couple of professionally fulfilled women: the Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad, who was the Maria Callas of her time; and Natalie Curtis, who trekked West to document the songs of Native America. Of Curtis, Alma muses: “Her mission in life is settled. For Mahler, by comparison, composition is a lonely necessity. It is his way of communing with himself, and now more than ever. . . . Though he swears that he needs me, I am an appendage merely. When he creates – what he feels set upon the earth to do – he is the epitome of self-sufficiency. His very being teems with as much activity as he can tolerate. He bans conversation at dinner. He insists on separate bedrooms. But I require the stimulus of human contact: people.” She subsequently asks herself: “How is it possible that I remain so hollow and indistinct?”
Late in life, Mahler was interviewed by a journalist from Etude magazine and carelessly revealed how little he knew of America’s composers, and how little thought, generally, he had ever given to American music. Ignoring the influential advocacy of “Negro melodies” by Antonin Dvorak in New York two decades previous, and the assiduous investigations into “African-American folk song” by his New York nemesis Henry Krehbiel, Mahler tactlessly added: “That the Negroes in America have accomplished so much is truly amazing. In their music they doubtless copied and varied the songs of the white households to which they were attached. Their love for singing and their sense of rhythm assisted them in this. But to expect that they would evolve an original folk song is preposterous in itself. . . . Surely American music based upon the ‘slave songs’ of the African American, or the crude dances of red-skinned aborigines, is no more representative of the American people today than are the Indians or the Negroes representative of all Americans.”
In The Marriage, I envision Mahler’s interlocutor from Etude as a knowledgeable young man who necessarily speaks German, and who discloses a keen interest in Mahler’s own Fourth Symphony. Caught off guard, Mahler’s stops pontificating to inquire: “Would you perhaps like some cake? Some coffee? . . . Put away your book and tell me about yourself. Almschi, bring us something to nibble for Mr. . . . What is your name, by the way?”
In The Last Movement, Seethaler, too, invents a young man who penetrates Mahler’s self-involvement. He is assigned to look after the dying composer on board the Amerika. An early exchange reads:
Mahler gazed out over the sea, which still lay grey and empty. . .
“Can I do anything else for you, Mr. Director, sir?”
“Yes, throw me in the sea.”
“I’m not sure I understand . . . ?”
“Never mind. Bring me another tea.”
“Certainly, Mr. Director, sir!”
The boy left.
Forty pages later:
“Mr. Director,” said the boy.
“Yes?” said Mahler. He had half-closed his eyes and was listening to the pounding of the engines.
“What kind of music do you make? Will you tell me something about it?”
“No. You can’t talk about music; there’s no language for it. As soon as music can be described, it’s bad.”
The boy looked at him with big, shining eyes.
“I think I’ll go now,” he said. ”Shall I bring you another pot of tea?”
Mahler shook his head.
“Make sure you stay warm,” said the boy. “Mind your feet, especially.”
“Yes,” said Mahler, “Have they told you that I’m dying?”
“No,” said the boy, and Mahler could see it was a lie.
And near the end:
“You should sit down again . . . “
Mahler looked the boy straight in the face. He wanted to tell him to go to hell, to go and get on someone else’s nerves, but he looked serious and sad, and Mahler’s fury disappeared as quickly as it had come.
“You’re right,” he said.
Finally: are these two Mahlers, rendered as fiction, the same? The soprano Lilli Lehmann, who was worldly and never naïve, wrote of Gustav Mahler that his coats were missing buttons, that he was “a nervous fanatic of art,” that he “had no talent for handling people, or for business. . . . There was much that, as a practical friend, one had to teach him.” That is more the Mahler of The Marriage than of The Last Movement, I would say. But both Mahlers, mine and Seethaler’s, so sporadically aware of others, are outwardly captious, ironic, neurotic. Inwardly, essentially, their naivete is consumed by honesty. It anchors a capacity to feel and to love.
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