Joseph Horowitz and “The Marriage – the Mahlers in New York”
It was never my intention to turn this blog into a site for reviewing books, but as with Richard Cockett’s book on inter-war Vienna, a book occasionally comes around that fills an important gap. At least it filled a gap in my own knowledge and experience. This being the case, it’s worth writing about. As with Cockett’s book, this is less a book-review in the traditional sense, and more an outline of how this fits into what I’m already familiar with, and what it adds. Joseph Horowitz has written a good deal on the Russian, Eastern European, Austro-German diaspora that came to America at various points and the many contributions to their new homeland they made. His most recent book, The Marriage – The Mahlers in New York, offers a similar view while being conceived as something that might be thought of as a non-fiction-novel. In all the various biographies I’ve read, the chapter on Mahler in New York was always the one that left me unsure about his actual contribution and success (or lack thereof).
Intriguingly, this book’s German translation leaves “the marriage” out of the title, and calls it simply Die Mahlers in New York. The German version was initially sent to me, and given the amount that is quoted from correspondence and diary entries, it arguably offers a more idiomatic portrayal of the individuals. Eventually, the original English version was also sent, by which point I was already halfway through the German.
The reason, perhaps, I have never had a clear idea about Mahler and this point in his biography is because it came towards the end of his life and the general consensus always seemed to be that he had been “driven out of Vienna” by an antisemitic press and into the arms of wealthy Americans. I’ve already contested this view by pointing out that the important papers and music journals in Vienna were nearly 100% Jewish owned and edited. They were largely very friendly towards Mahler. At some point, my translation of Feuilletons from Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse will be published and people can read for themselves reviews from the paper Joseph Pulitzer called “The best newspaper in the world”. Pulitzer’s comment came in 1906, during the time Mahler was active in Vienna. There were essays on Mahler written by Eduard Hanslick, Julius Korngold, Paul Stefan, Joseph Reitler, Stefan Zweig, Egon Wellesz and many others. The Culture Section of the Neue Freie Presse was edited by Theodor Herzl, so accusations of “antisemitism” are off the mark. Even the two most anti-Mahler critics in Vienna were themselves Jewish: Max Graf and Robert Hirschfeld. If antisemitism was expressed in the Viennese press is was in the satirical and extremely antisemitic Kikeriki! (In English: Cock-a-doodle-do!) But that, along with a few pan-German papers had minimal influence in comparison. The most vicious and continuous racist attacks came from Germans writing in Munich and Berlin such as Rudolf Louis and Alfred Heuß. Given Mahler’s close personal relationship with Julius Korngold, I suspect we can accept his view that Mahler believed ten years at Vienna’s opera was more than enough. In addition, his beloved daughter had just died, placing a literal pall over his life and work in the city. When the offer from New York arrived, it was for more money than anyone had ever paid before. The many petty intrigues and inside attacks aimed at Mahler would have inevitably taken a toll. Nevertheless, he discovered his health was deteriorating, and following the unexpected death of his daughter, the financial security being offered by working in America would have tipped the scales.
Horowitz creates something that is neither a monograph nor specifically a novel, but something in-between. By taking existing documentation, he creates a novel in which third person accounts are in the minority compared with what are made to appear as letters, interviews, diary entries, articles or even thoughts written by the protagonists themselves. It fleshes out the tensions in the relationship between Alma and Gustav. The age difference comes alive as an issue when she starts her affair with Walter Gropius, a handsome, immensely virile much younger German – indeed, several years younger than Alma, making the age difference even more pronounced.
For me, the most important aspect of this book was a clarity of context. It is too easy to read a biography of Mahler and assume the institutions we know today such as the New York Philharmonic or the Metropolitan Opera are exactly analogous to the institutions Mahler encountered. The chasm between what was then and what is today is significant enough to present a much more nuanced understanding of Mahler’s New York experience. America was then a country that had few if any high-quality conservatories, meaning talented players, soloists and composers would have received the majority of their training in Europe. This was obviously not feasible or even possible for most orchestral players, meaning orchestras, unless handpicked such as the ensembles in Boston or Chicago would come across as unserious or even amateurish. As money appears to have flowed freely, Europe’s biggest named conductors and soloists were regular visitors. Given the fees that were paid, it they had something negative to say about the standards of music making, they kept it to themselves.
As in Germany and Austria, the absolute flower of music journalism was in its fullest bloom in the years leading up to the First World War. Not only were journalists allowed copious copy, they expected a degree of musical literacy from readers that today would hardly be creditable. The environment was also different in as much as there were many more orchestral concerts in New York than in Berlin and Vienna, with orchestras playing in various venues on a near daily basis. Hans Gál remarked in an interview he gave to Südwestfunk that musical life in Vienna was exceptional, but the concerts given by the Philharmonic were subscription and infrequent. There were other orchestras that eventually merged to form the Vienna Symphony Orchestra, but for sheer number of performances, New Yorkers had many more opportunities to hear orchestral concerts than their counterparts in Europe. There were two competing opera companies as well, each kitted out with the biggest named singers of the age. But standards of orchestral music making were audibly not the same and America was still searching for its unique cultural identity. Dvořák, full of his own experiences of Czech nationalism assumed America could create a similar national school based on the music of African-Americans. He probably came closer to achieving this goal than the generation of American composers at the time, who mostly attempted to compete stylistically with Grieg or Schumann. Only MacDowell managed to stay the course into the present.
Yet WASPs – “White Anglo-Saxon-Protestants” still called most of the social shots, even if in New York, antisemitism did not exist on the same scale as in Europe. It was the wives of wealthy bankers and industrialists who made high-culture their business. And perhaps this was the biggest surprise of all since the idea that culture should be limited to the whims of social advancement or point scoring was alienating. European musical stars were happy to take the money and run, but having to take orders from society ladies was a new and for most, unpleasant reality check.
When the end came, Mahler insisted on dying in Vienna, despite the enormous hardship involved in such a journey. In my translations of feuilletons from the Neue Freie Presse, I include Paul Zifferer’s imagined view of Mahler’s journey by limousine, ocean liner, train and car, published on May 13, 1911. Five days later, Mahler was dead. Horowitz captures the same spirit of helpless desperation, while Stefan Zweig in a following article in the Neue Freie Presse, offered memories of crossing the Atlantic on the same ship with Mahler and sharing hushed moments with fellow passenger Ferruccio Busoni. Why did Mahler wish to die in Vienna? It was where his beloved daughter had died and he apparently wanted to be near her. At least this is the suggestion that comes across. Yet after reading so many of the contemporary essays on Mahler, I also have the feeling it was where he felt truly at home. Vienna is a city that is much like New York – even today. So many people who call themselves Viennese weren’t born there and don’t speak the local dialect. The city has a mysterious hold on people. It absorbs the stranger so totally that within the shortest period of time, they “go native”. Mahler would have been aware of Vienna being the city with the greatest gravitational pull. He conducted everywhere but it was Vienna, with all of its sophisticated misanthropy that was home.
This is important because there is a popular view that Vienna drove Mahler away. The city is viewed as antisemitic (which it was), but the world in which Mahler moved welcomed him and other Jews contributing to cultural life. The Emperor would not tolerate criticism of Mahler as a Jew, answering only that he was “the director of my opera house”. Basta! Yes, we know that twenty-seven years after Mahler’s death, the city celebrated Hitler’s annexation of Austria with a pogrom so brutal it shocked the rest of the world. But this was also after losing a world war that cost Austria its empire leaving it as a carbuncle tenuously attached to its larger linguistic neighbour. It only made Austrians angry and historic antisemitism was re-awakened by the propaganda of the day denouncing Jews as being responsible for the humiliation. It’s too easy, perhaps even intellectually and historically lazy to extrapolate that Vienna, a city that was home to some of the worst Nazi criminals and crimes after 1938, would inevitably make Mahler a victim of a movement that did not exist during his actual lifetime. He was a victim post-mortem when his works and most of his interpreters were banned and banished. But during his lifetime, Vienna became his home and it was where he felt most comfortable. The antisemitism of his day was veiled in bourgeois gentility. Assimilated Jews such as Karl Kraus would pander to it in an obvious attempt of over-compensation. An example of such ambivalent lazy prejudice is apparent in Alma Mahler herself, not to mention her first son-in-law, the composer Ernst Krenek. Alma and Krenek were both driven out of Vienna managing to take their antisemitic views with them. Perhaps they assumed their prejudice was a nobler, more “informed” one than the murderous antisemitism of the Nazis.
Joseph Horowitz makes an important point when he writes that New York would have been a welcoming and refreshing experience for Mahler as the city did not exhibit the same degree of antisemitism as Vienna. I suspect this point might be argued. For one thing, even today clubs exist in America where Jews are excluded from membership. Genteel, bourgeois antisemitism was never meant to be understood in the context of Auschwitz. But after Auschwitz, how could it be understood in any other way? Auschwitz, sadly still colours much Mahler scholarship.
Nevertheless, for me, the most interesting part of this important book was the Afterword, in which Horowitz gives us a truly fascinating account of New York’s musical biotope at the time of Mahler’s arrival. It was certainly no cultural desert, and the city’s critics were as informed and indeed, as literary as Vienna’s best. Where Horowitz is on the mark is that Jews were not a recent phenomenon in New York. In Austria, the freedom for Jews to live and work wherever and marry whomever they wished was relatively new. In Habsburg Austria, Jews had only been socially and politically emancipated and enfranchised for forty years. This was the emancipation trajectory that led to assimilation as over-compensation. Such a trajectory did not exist in New York, though to be sure, the Wasps of Wall Street would probably have balked at the thought of their daughters marrying a Jew. We’re also introduced to the writings of Henry Krehbiel, a self-taught musician, polymath and enormously wide-ranging intellectual. He, along with W.J. Henderson, could be understood as New York’s answer to Julius Korngold or London’s George Bernard Shaw. In addition to much else, musical life was not only more prolific in New York than in Berlin, London or Vienna, it was more diverse with opera performed in the original language. With so many Italian and German residents, this is hardly surprising and seems more similar to the Vienna of Joseph II and Mozart.
This is an ingenious means of illustrating Mahler’s time in New York. De la Grange takes the better part of 2000 pages to cover the same ground. Horowitz is subjective and he defends the musical integrity of New York in a manner de la Grange does not. Horowitz also offers a more objective view of Mahler in New York than the Viennese press of the day, who felt betrayed by a city that could lure him away for vast sums of money only to heap him with such insurmountable workloads as to finish him off. Horowitz points out that Mahler already knew he had limited time left and he needed to earn enough to keep his widow and daughter secure. New York seemed an obvious solution. There are few historic novels that can offer such engaging insights and disseminate so much important information. The clever means of telling the story by switching narrators gives us opposing and parallel interpretations of events. It is definitely one of the better books on Mahler, certainly one of the most readable.
A splendid review, to make my mouth water.
Bravo Michael, thanks for that wonderful review, I think I’ll order a copy of the book! A point about antisemitism in Vienna. Although the press and the intellectual classes were Jewish and favorable to Mahler, the non-Jews of the elite classes who pulled the strings were not, if one can take Vienna’s mayor as representative of the official stance on the Jews. Even if they didn’t do anything overtly antisemitic, including towards the despised “ostjuden” like my family who arrived in Vienna from Czarist Russia, there was always a wall of underlying hostility and aggression that had official sanction. Herzl appeared for a reason and Mahler must have felt uncomfortable with that hostility, perhaps his conversion can be taken as proof, but I agree that antisemitism probably wasn’t an issue when deciding to go to NY. Thanks for the absorbing read.
Thanks for writing – I wonder, and have often wondered, where the line was drawn between Ostjuden and Shtetljuden. After all, Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Roth, Manès Sperber, Paul Celan, Karol Rathaus, not to mention Jascha Horenstein etc. etc. etc. were ALL Ostjuden, but none were from the Shtetl. The Shtetl Jews were looked down upon by everyone, including other Jews in Vienna (e.g. Gustav Mahler himself, who remarked that he couldn’t imagine what he had in common with them). Ostjuden met a different sort of prejudice, which I assumed was typified in Ernst Krenek’s memoirs writing about Karol Rathaus: he spoke better German than the natives, was better dressed than any of his contemporaries and gave the general appearance of over-compensating. That sort of patronising snobbery as opposed to the outright bigotry against Stehtl Jews is worth an examination on its own. Lueger was a confessional antisemite who believed that once you converted, you ceased to be a Jew – a view that was not held by the NSDAP and other pseudo-Darwinian tribes looking for a scientific basis for their prejudice. I think things were a good deal more nuanced than the binary of Vienna being a city of Jews and antisemites. But as I wrote, no antisemitism, regardless of how genteel, can be viewed outside of the context of Auschwitz.
I was not aware of the distinction between Ostjuden and Shtetljuden. I suppose this was based on levels of wealth. My extended family came to Vienna from Russia during and after Mahler’s time but although they all came from Kiev their official residences in Russia were all in shtetls since they were not allowed to own property in the major cities. Some were wealthy when they got to Vienna, others not, so perhaps they earned both titles.
Misha, from what you write, I can only assume that the difference was between Jewish immigration from the Czarist realms, which forced Jews to live in enclosed communities, some more religious than others, and those in Habsburg Austria, which included the names I mentioned above. People like Soma Morgenstern, Joseph Roth. Karol Rathaus and others came from educated “middle-class” Jewish families, and though towns such as Brody, Czernowitz or Ternopil may have had large Jewish populations, there was not the same social isolation as Jews arriving in Vienna from Russia. Even Mahler came from an integrated Moravian community and not a Shtetl. What I don’t know is how A) how many Jews fleeing Czarist pogroms came to Vienna; B) how many of the religious, Yiddish-speaking Jews arriving in Vienna came from other corners of the Habsburg realm. This differentiation may be interesting to find out since bright, well-spoken young Jews from middle-class families seemed to have felt obliged to over-compensate in order to differentiate themselves from the poor refugees arriving from Russia, or the opportunists arriving from poorer regions of Austria. There was also a huge influx of Austrians – Jews and non-Jews – after the break-up of the Habsburg Empire with many German-speaking citizens making their way to what was formerly called “German-Austria” – more or less representing the borders of today’s Austria. And of course, Vienna was a city that offered music instruction at a higher level than almost anywhere else, driving aspiring soloists and composers to the city regardless of their provenance.