The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 by Stephen Johnson

Abstract

Reviews 181 The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910. By Stephen Johnson. London: Faber & Faber, 2020. 314 pp. Paperback £10.99. ISBN 978–0-571–36752–8. The premiere of the Eighth Symphony at Munich’s Musik-Festhalle in September 1910 brought Mahler the greatest success of his life. Opened in 1908, this cavernous space now forms the ‘Verkehrszentrum’ of the Deutsches Museum and hosts a collection of vintage buses, trams and cars. Given Mahler’s love of the unpredictable and paradoxical, this development might well have appealed to him. Within nine months of the concert, however, the composer was dead. Thomas Mann, who had witnessed the triumph, was so shaken by the composer’s untimely death that Gustav von Aschenbach, the tragic artist in Der Tod in Venedig (1912), not only resembles Mahler physically, but even bears his forename. In this innovative study Stephen Johnson writes as both musicologist and cultural historian, championing what is probably Mahler’s most popular symphony but also his most critically contested. Completed in 1906, this twomovement choral work was to be the last piece premiered in Mahler’s lifetime. Dubbed the ‘Symphony of a Thousand’ because of the vast forces deployed at the premiere (858 singers, 171 instrumentalists), this work in its opening movement sets the hymn Veni, creator spiritus, attributed to the ninth-century German monk Rabanus Maurus. The second movement sets the final scene of Goethe’s Faust II. The ‘true connection’ between these very disparate halves is the driving force of love, both Platonic and physical: ‘In the words of the ancient Latin hymn Mahler had read the message that had evidently struck Goethe too: fired by love, real erotic love rather than some disembodied ideal, we too can follow Socrates and scale the Heavens’ (p. 45). By 1910, however, Mahler’s world had been shaken to its core. In 1907 his infant daughter Maria had died; shortly afterwards, he escaped Vienna for New York, only to be diagnosed there with severe coronary disease. On top of this, his wife Alma was sleeping with the architect Walter Gropius, the composer’s junior by twenty years. In despair, just days before the Munich concert, Mahler met with Sigmund Freud who concluded he was suffering from a ‘Holy Mary complex (mother fixation)’. As Freud’s pupil Theodor Reik observed, ‘this will come as no surprise to anyone who knows Part II of the Eighth Symphony’ (p. 277). Johnson’s examination of Mahler’s private catastrophe and public acclaim is searching and sympathetic. The examination of the Eighth’s genesis and purport is followed by a rigorous defence of the Tenth Symphony left incomplete on Mahler’s death. Once more, Johnson reveals the autobiographical impulse of the music, stressing the interplay between the composition and its creator’s attempts to regain his wife’s affections. Near the end of the score, he despairingly inscribed the manuscript with the dedication ‘Für dich leben! Für dich sterben! Almschi!’ [To live for you! To die for you! Almschi!]. The symphony remained unperformed for fifty years, until Alma sanctioned its performance in versions prepared by various Reviews 182 musicologists. Dismissing conductors who reject these versions as unauthentic, Johnson insists that there is far more genuine Mahler here ‘than there is genuine Mozart in Mozart’s fragmentary Requiem’, performed across the world in Süssmayr’s pastiche completion (p. 245). The seminal chapter ‘Questions of Identity’ opens by citing Mahler’s famous remark (as reported by Alma) that he was thrice homeless — as a Bohemian in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans, and as a Jew throughout the world: ‘Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed’ (p. 145). Proceeding from this cri de cœur, Johnson examines the composer’s relationship with pan-German identity and culture, the status of Vienna in particular within that culture, and the city’s strained relationship with its Jewish community. This chapter reveals the range of Johnson’s research and his ability to synthesize complex non-musical issues in accessible prose. An additional pleasure of this study is the author’s skill in conveying how music works and sounds in language comprehensible to nonspecialists . Given that The Eighth is so generously indexed...