Gustav Mahler: Volume 3. Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904-1907) [Hardcover]

I have not been disappointed. The extensive detail, expansive footnoting, and thorough research that went into this work is evident from the very first paragraph.

Highly recommended for any serious Mahler enthuasist.

detailed physical description of Mahler by Alfred Roller, a Hofoper associate; and much other information that will be new and interesting even to long-standing Mahlerites who thought they knew it all.

However, de la Grange's almost exclusive focus on the externals of Mahler's life works to the detriment of the inner life, and this is the major shortcoming of his biography. There is little probing of the wellsprings of the mighty Mahlerian will that powered a colossal productivity, nor of the fierce vitality coexisting with neuroses. Nor, surprisingly, is much explanation offered as to why a tyrannical ascetic like Mahler would suddenly decide to marry someone half his age, a decision that took even his closest friends completely by surprise. Why didn't he stay single, or marry someone his own age, such as the devoted and musical Natalie Bauer-Lechner?

This question is important because it bears on the crucial one: Would Mahler have succeeded in solving the central problem of his last years -- keeping reality at bay in order to maintain the inhuman intensity needed to complete his unique artistic mission -- without the tension generated by this inappropriate (but for him richly symbolic) and largely sexless marriage, for which he, and to some extent also Alma's parents, were guilty? Did he feel this guilt and at a certain level feed on it? de la Grange draws a blank on these questions. Here Alma's book "Gustav Mahler, Memoirs and Letters" is a better source, though one has to read between the lines.

de la Grange clearly dislikes Alma and would minimize her role. He also worships Mahler and will not permit him the slightest fault. Two examples: He cannot conceive that the hero may have had a congenital heart defect, it must have been acquired from throat infections. He omits to mention that Mahler's idolized mother Marie was born lame and with a defective heart. According to Alma, who'd have no reason to make this up, all the children were handicapped by the mother's heart disease; there is also anecdotal evidence provided by Bruno Walter and others. Another example: de la Grange will not admit that the finale to the Seventh may be a miscalculation, however interesting. Thus he advances a tortured argument to turn black into white, and puts himself in the position of an "apologist nervous to the point of obduracy" (Adorno's words). In the process, he

completely ignores evidence that Mahler himself was uncomfortably aware of the problem (see the foreword by Redlich to the Eulenberg pocket score of the Seventh).

Mahler is a Freudian figure if ever there was one, and one can argue that the ideal of the eternal feminine, as symbolized by the composite Alma/Marie, became crucial to Mahler's sense of purpose, a major engine of his drive to create. Toward the end, he was psychologically completely dependent on her, even to the point of spouting nonsense regarding her abilities as a composer -- this, from the stern, inflexible director of the Hofoper! (The sad spectacle of Berlioz and his second wife Marie Recio comes to mind as another example of great-composer weakness.) That he had a mother fixation is attested by many, including Alma and Freud, and this would account for his lack of sexual interest; according to Alma, sex played only a very small part in his life. In any case, artistically the union was a brilliant success, even the marital crisis at the end serving to spur him on to new heights -- witness the Tenth Symphony with its impassioned marginalia addressed to Alma. With perfect timing, death then supervened to carry him off at the peak of his powers.

Although the music has lost none of its power and can speak for itself, there is still an unsatisfied need for a different kind of Mahler biography, one that is better balanced and probes the psychology of the man. For hagiography aside, Mahler's maladjustment was staggering even for his time, the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Vienna just barely making his unique kind of greatness tenable. A great tortured artist on the scale of a Gustav Mahler is inconceivable today, our time doesn't allow it; we've been there, done that. He would be cured or killed at once, and in either case silenced. And for you computer game programmers out there, take heart -- in addition to a "Freudian" biography, there may be material here for an oeuvre of another sort perhaps more congenial to our age -- a soft-core computer game called "Let's cuckold Mahler". In any case, the music remains.