Alma Mahler Past — Aspect Chamber Music Series

PROGRAM NOTES

Was there another woman in history who had as many famous lovers as Alma Mahler, née Schindler? Despite the fact that being a genius seems to have been a prerequisite for anyone wanting to have a relationship with her, there was no shortage of successful applicants. On her side, her first infatuation was with the painter Gustav Klimt, whom she met in the spring of 1899, when she was nineteen, though their relationship seems to have remained platonic. The following year Alma began studying with the composer and conductor Alexander Zemlinsky. Her first impression of him was unflattering: ‘The man cuts the most comical figure imaginable’, she confided to her diary. ‘A caricature – chinless, small, with bulging eyes and a downright crazy conducting style.’ But by the autumn of 1901 her view of Zemlinsky had changed: ‘I find him neither hideous nor grotesque’, she confided to her diary, ‘for his eyes sparkle with intelligence, and such a man is never ugly.’ For his part, Zemlinsky fell deeply in love, and planned to marry Alma. The thought of bearing his children appealed to her in typical fashion: ‘His blood and mine, commingled: my beauty with his intellect’, she wrote on 7 October 1901 – the day Zemlinsky’s sister Mathilde married Arnold Schoenberg. But as things turned out, their passionate affair came to an abrupt end, and by the end of the year there had been a profound change in Alma’s life. ‘The latest news: Mahler engaged to Alma Schindler’, Zemlinsky told Schoenberg and Mathilde with bitter irony on 28 December.

Alma’s marriage to Gustav Mahler lasted from 9 March 1902 until the composer’s death some nine years later – despite her affair with the architect Walter Gropius which began in the summer of 1910. The next of Alma’s lovers, following Mahler’s death, was the painter Oskar Kokoschka, who was so obsessed with her that he wrote her more than four hundred love letters. After their affair was over Kokoschka commissioned a life-size doll of her which occupied a prominent place in his studio, and no doubt elsewhere in his apartment, too. Alma subsequently resumed her relationship with Gropius, and the pair married in the summer of 1915, though they divorced five years later. It was in memory of their daughter, Manon, who died of polio at the age of eighteen, that Alban Berg composed his well-known violin concerto.

The last of Alma’s famous husbands was the writer Franz Werfel, whom she met in 1917. They married twelve years later; and since, like her first husband, Werfel was Jewish, the Anschluss in 1938 forced them to flee from Austria. They travelled first to France, and eventually to Los Angeles, where Werfel, who had suffered for several years from a weak heart, died in 1945. The following year Alma moved to New York, where she lived until her death in 1964.

Gustav Mahler

(1860–1911)

‘Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht’ (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen)

‘Rheinlegendchen’ (Des Knaben Wunderhorn)

‘Ich atmet’ einen linden Duft’ (Rückert-Lieder)

‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ (Rückert-Lieder)

Alma Mahler

(1879–1964)

‘Die stille Stadt’ (Fünf Lieder)

‘Laue Sommernacht’ (Fünf Lieder)

‘Bei dir ist es traut’ (Fünf Lieder)

‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’ (Fünf Lieder)

‘Lobgesang’ (Fünf Gesänge)

Gustav Mahler’s first song cycle was the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen (‘Songs of a Wayfaring Lad’), which was published, simultaneously with the composer’s own orchestrations of the songs, in 1897. Mahler had, however, written the original version with piano as early as the mid-1880s. He claimed to have written the texts himself, though the poem of the first song, ‘Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht’, draws heavily on verses from the collection of folk poetry called Des Knaben Wunderhorn (‘The Boy’s Magic Horn’), which was an important source for some of Mahler’s subsequent songs. The abrupt changes of tempo in ‘Wenn mein Schatz Hochzeit macht’ seem to demarcate switches between objective and subjective points of view. The quick sections, with their disturbing metrical changes, suggest the bride’s happiness – albeit in a minor key; while the slow passages convey the poet’s despair at seeing his sweetheart give herself to another man.

In the case of the cheerful ‘Rheinlegendchen’, Mahler thought of the melody first, and then looked for a poem from Des Knaben Wunderhorn to which it might be suited. The music is in the style of a ländler, and the way it begins, with a graceful, hesitant ritardando leading into the melody, may remind us of the similar beginning to Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. The swings between major and minor in the piano’s prelude anticipate the song’s middle stanza, describing how the ring thrown into the Rhine is eaten by a fish, which, in turn, is served up at the king’s table.

In February 1901, in the midst of a particularly strenuous bout of work, Mahler suffered a severe internal hemorrhage that must have forced him to confront his own mortality; and it was in the summer of that year that he turned his attention to setting the contemplative verse of Rückert, producing not only the Kindertotenlieder, but also the first four of the five miscellaneous songs known simply as Rückert-Lieder. Mahler sketched out ‘Ich atmet’ einen Linden Duft’ on 9 June 1901. The languorous spread chords in the piano part of the opening bars and the gently murmuring accompaniment that runs throughout the song capture perfectly the perfumed atmosphere of Rückert’s poem, which plays on the German words ‘Linde’ (lime, or linden), ‘gelinde’ (gentle) and ‘lind’ (balmy).

The message conveyed in ‘Liebst du um Schönheit’ seems to be of a strictly personal nature. Mahler probably composed his song in the summer of 1902, as a love-letter to Alma, whom he had met the previous year. Significantly, perhaps, this is the only one of his Rückert settings of which he never made an orchestral version.

During most of the period of his marriage to Alma, Mahler seems actively to have discouraged her from cultivating her ambitions as a composer, and so the greater part of her surviving output – including, notably, a series of seventeen songs – dates from her earlier years. The first of them to appear in print was a collection of five Lieder published in 1910. The opening song, ‘Die stille Stadt’, sets a poem by Richard Dehmel, whose often openly erotic verse was the subject of scandal in Vienna in the last years of the nineteenth century. It was a poem by Dehmel that inspired Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht. ‘Die stille Stadt’ is a dreamlike night-time scene depicting a town lying among the mountains. The only sound that disturbs the calm is that of children’s voices singing a song of praise. At the end, the song’s short chromatic introduction returns in a slower tempo, as though in the form of a distant memory.

The sensuous ‘Laue Sommernacht’ is another night scene, in which a couple’s search for a meaning to their life has been shrouded in darkness, and is eventually revealed by the light of their love. ‘Bei dir ist es traut’, to words by Rilke, is a song in which the comfort of togetherness is suggested by the warmth of the smoothly moving parallel thirds in the piano part. The entire setting never rises above a hushed pianissimo. The very short ‘Ich wandle unter Blumen’, to a poem by Heine, begins in a dreamlike state, as the lover is intoxicated by flowers in a garden. But the music undergoes a sudden transformation in mood and tempo, as he impetuously begs his partner to hold him tight, lest he fall at her feet – which, with typical Heine irony, could prove an embarrassment, since the garden is full of people.

‘Lobgesang’ comes from a set of songs published in 1924. In it, Richard Dehmel compares the inexhaustibility of love to the infinite breadth of the sea, with its many facets governed by the weather and by the phases of the moon. From its quiet beginning, the song rises to a climax of almost Wagnerian ecstasy – a reminder, perhaps, of the deep impression Tristan und Isolde had made on the young Alma Schindler.

Alexander Zemlinsky

(1871–1942)

Three Pieces for cello and piano

Humoreske

Lied

Tarantell

As a composer, Zemlinsky wrote important works for the stage – in particular, two single-act operas drawing on Oscar Wilde: Eine florentinische Tragödie (‘A Florentine Tragedy’) and Der Zwerg (‘The Dwarf’), adapted from Wilde’s short story ‘The Birthday of the Infanta’. Among Zemlinsky’s other works are the Lyric Symphony for two solo voices and orchestra, clearly inspired by Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde but much more erotically charged, as well as four string quartets and a large number of songs. The Three Pieces for cello and piano are early compositions, and they remained unpublished during Zemlinsky’s lifetime, coming to light only comparatively recently. The lively Humoreske is a Schumannesque piece with a slower and more lyrical middle section for which the music moves from minor to major. The second piece, entitled simply Lied, has the cello spinning a long melody that is eventually taken over by the piano, while the concluding Tarantella moves at breakneck speed until, near the end, a more easy-going phrase in the major suggests the music might take off in a new direction. This, however, is a false alarm, and the music is swiftly wrapped up, back in the minor.

Erich Korngold

(1897–1957)

Piano Trio in D major, Op. 1

Allegro non troppo, con espressione

Scherzo. Allegro

Larghetto

Finale. Allegro molto e energico – Allegretto amabile e giocoso

In 1906, when he was just nine years old, Erich Wolfgang Korngold played his cantata Gold to Mahler. The great composer hailed the boy as a genius, and recommended that he be sent to Zemlinsky for composition lessons. Korngold had soon written a piano sonata as well; and in 1910 came a second sonata which was championed throughout Europe by no less a pianist than Artur Schnabel, as well as a dance-pantomime for two pianos called Der Schneemann, which was eventually orchestrated by Zemlinsky for performance at Vienna’s Hofoper (or Staatsoper, as it later became). A subsequent opera called Violanta was praised by Puccini; and at the age of twenty Korngold composed Die tote Stadt – the opera that was to bring him worldwide fame.

In 1934 the famous theatrical producer Max Reinhardt, who had collaborated with Korngold on several occasions, took him to Hollywood, and the following year he adapted music by Mendelssohn for the film of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which was co-directed by Reinhardt. Korngold remained in Hollywood for the rest of his life, throwing himself enthusiastically into writing film scores. His work on The Adventures of Robin Hood and Anthony Adverse won him Oscars, and he used themes from his film scores in his Violin Concerto of 1945, which was premiered by Jascha Heifetz. In acknowledgement of the encouragement her first husband had given him right at the start of his career, Korngold dedicated the concerto to Alma Mahler-Werfel.

At the time he composed his Piano Trio in 1909, Korngold was regarded as the greatest instance of musical precociousness since Mozart. There is, indeed, a sense in which Korngold’s youthful talent was even more remarkable than Mozart’s: whereas Mozart’s earliest compositions are strictly modeled on the prevailing style of the day, Korngold’s Piano Trio is no sense derivative, and the individuality of both its musical style and its forms is striking. It is almost impossible to imagine a twelve-year-old boy having been able to produce a piece of such maturity, to say nothing of music of such sensuousness. There is, of course an essential difference between Mozart and Korngold: while Mozart eventually blossomed into one of the most profound and original of all great composers, the adult Korngold never managed to recapture the adventurous spirit of the music he had written during his Viennese years.

The rhapsodic opening theme of the Piano Trio is typical of the heightened romanticism and intensely chromatic harmony that permeate the work as a whole. The theme makes an impassioned return, played fff, much later on in the movement, at the start of the recapitulation. At the end, a rising and falling phrase first heard near the close of the movement’s opening section makes a triumphant return, before the music sinks to a close with gentle D major chords punctuated by pizzicato notes on the cello.

The wit of the Scherzo, with its abrupt and irregular-length phrases, is counterbalanced by a much slower middle section in which the meter changes from three beats to the bar to two, and the violin introduces a languorous new melody. The middle section’s highly perfumed style also permeates the erotically charged slow movement. The shape of its swooning melody is woven into the accompaniment, too, so that the whole piece seems to unfold in a single long span.

Following an introduction by turns impulsive and lyrical, the Finale’s flowing theme forms the basis of a very free series of variations in which the music constantly threatens to break into a waltz, without ever quite doing so. In the final variation the waltz rhythm at last breaks through, and we seem to find ourselves wittily transported to the Viennese cafés of the early years of the twentieth century. With considerable ingenuity and subtlety, Korngold manages to weave fleeting reminiscences of the themes of all three preceding movements into the fabric of his waltz, before a piano glissando sweeping over four octaves, and a series of rousing chords, bring proceedings to a riotous conclusion.

Alma Mahler: MUSE OR MONSTER?

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR MAILING LIST