Mahler in Vienna

The composer’s love affair with the Viennese was a case of great while it lasted.

Everyone knows Gustav Mahler was a musical revolutionary. However, it was for quite different reasons – though still to do with innovation – that the composer was known during his time in Vienna. Indeed, his music was scarcely heard in the Austrian capital, where he spent his working life from 1897 until his acrimonious resignation in 1907.

To the Viennese, Mahler was first and foremost a conductor who set new standards of excellence. Secondly, he was an opera administrator whose legacy of radical reform still resonates today. That he never fully succeeded in his role as Director of the Hofoper was due to complex factors, unsavoury antisemitism high among them, but an abrasive energy was also to blame. In short, he rubbed too many people up the wrong way.

By the turn of the century, Vienna boasted a population of two million people made up of native Viennese, Slavs, Germans, Hungarians, Spaniards, Italians, Frenchman, Flemings and Jews. Its preeminent place in musical history had been built over the previous century, attracting composers from all over Europe. By Mahler’s time, the pantheon of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms was well established. Curious and sensual, prosperous and decadent, Vienna was the epitome of elegance and culture. German cities by comparison were provincial and crude.

The Viennese were a curious mix, mad about music and theatre, yet conservative in their tastes. Artists in Vienna were more recognised and more famous than politicians. Audiences were incredibly well informed, able to spot errors or performances which did not come up to scratch. Yet people wanted that art to be recognisable, conformist, safe. Artists, on the other hand, tended towards the progressive, with regular clashes in the press when faced with the shock of the new. 

Mahler had visited Vienna as a 15-year-old boy from the provinces, but it was as a 36-year-old opera conductor with a burgeoning reputation that he arrived to take up a post in what was affectively the capital of German music.

By 1897 the 67-year-old Emperor Franz Joseph had ruled for nearly 50 years. His reign had seen the signing of freedom of religion into law, which effectively meant the emancipation of the Jews. In that respect, antisemitism was not something coming from the top. However, there were elements in Viennese society who were distinctly antisemitic and objected to Mahler’s appointment, which was essentially an Imperial decision.

The influential Neue Freie Presse, whose music critics included Wagner’s nemesis Eduard Hanslick and Julius Korngold, father of the composer, was owned and managed by Jews. Rival newspapers, such as the Deutsches Volksblatt and the Deutsche Zeitung, would consistently attack Mahler in ways that prefigured the Nazi propaganda of the following century.

The new Hofoper, which seated 2500 with 500 standing, had opened in 1869. With the exception of Mahler’s immediate predecessor Wilhelm Jahn, who enjoyed a 17-year intendency, managers tended to last three or four years at best. “Mahler, although Viennese by heart and by adoption, was by no means Viennese by temperament,” observes his biographer Henry Louis de La Grange. “His fanaticism was certain to clash with the deep-rooted Viennese instincts of hedonism, indolence, and devotion to tradition, which were to ‘eat into him like acid.’”

Mahler arrived initially to take up a role inauspiciously labelled as ‘fifth conductor’. Among others, he had to share podium duties with the 54-year-old Hans Richter – Mahler referred to him as “honest Hans” – who headed both the Opera and the Philharmonic. Richter had not been consulted on the new appointment, so Mahler took pains to butter him up. In with Bayreuth and the Wagnerites, but unusually for those rancorous times also friends with Brahms, Richter’s future would lie in England.

Mahler went into his new appointment with both eyes open and some degree of confidence. “It’s true I must be prepared to be led a dance, but I would like to call the tune myself,” he wrote before leaving Hamburg. “What gives me the greatest happiness is not the fact that I have secured a seemingly splendid post, but rather that at last I have found a home, that is if the gods will only guide me! For I must be prepared for a terrible struggle.”

Mahler before his arrival in Vienna (left) and in the year of his resignation (right)

The Viennese loved a hierarchy and the opera was no exception. At the top of the tree was Prince Rudolf Lichtenstein, Lord Chamberlain and effectively Vienna’s arts Tsar. His deputy was Prince Albert Montenuovo, a cold and reserved man, but one who respected Mahler for his artistic genius and moral character and would protect him to the end. Below them were a trio of administrators whose loyalties ebbed and flowed over time in a series of grubby power struggles.

Mahler made his conducting debut with Lohengrin, getting on at first with the musicians who had been warned of his potential for “tyranny” and “exorbitant demands.” The performance was a triumph and the players duly respectful. “Just as there are total works of art, Mahler is a total conductor,” gushed the Neue Musikalische Presse. “His concern is for the orchestra, the singers and the chorus alike. His glance, his will, his gestures command and unite the ensemble of performers. He thereby achieves not a sum of parts but a unified whole.”

Karl Kraus, a noted antisemite, managed to be both sardonic and prophetic. “Just recently, a Siegfried figure, in the person of a new conductor, has arrived at the Opera: one can tell from his face he is determined to get rid of the old, inefficient management,” he wrote in the Breslauer Zeitung. “There is a rumour he will soon be occupying the Director’s chair. Perhaps then the repertoire of the Hofoper will cease to consist entirely of Cavalleria Rusticana, indigenous composers will no longer have their manuscripts returned unread (they will be returned read) and deserving women singers will no longer be shown the door without reason. Apparently, the new conductor has given such good proof of his effectiveness that some people are already hard at intriguing against him.”

To get a sense of the man’s impact and energy, one only has to read the reaction of Austrian writer Hermann Bahr to Mahler’s arrival in a hotel lobby. “It was like a gust of wind forcing a window open, like water bursting from a pipe, like something elemental,” he wrote. When Mahler left a few moments later, “the wind suddenly dropped, the water was turned off.”

Bahr went on to compare Mahler with fellow composer Hugo Wolf: “Now here was Mahler, also a maverick and equally untamed. Both seemed branded with the same mark; perhaps the same curse has been put on them both. The typical creative musician in each of them was stronger than his personal characteristics: man, and music were inseparable, the man was the music, and the music was the man.”

Despite his uncompromising personality, it didn’t take Mahler long to climb the greasy pole of Viennese professional life. Less than a year after he had arrived, he was asked to replace the ailing Jahn as Director, leapfrogging his fellow conductors on the way. Aware of the need to keep the press onside, the first person Mahler set out to call on was Eduard Hanslick, now retired but still clearly a man with influence.

With the reins of power in his hands, Mahler was determined to revise everything, to bring to opera the kind of changes that were revolutionising contemporary theatrical productions. Old sets, old habits, traditional tempos, all were in his sights. And at first the critics were with him, spurred on by his transformative performances with the orchestra.

His reforming zeal also attempted to re-establish discipline after the sloppy, declining years of the Jahn regime. For example, after learning that many musicians were so badly paid, they could not afford to live in Vienna – something he discovered when a timpanist explained that he had to employ a sub towards the end of Das Rheingold in order to catch the last train home to the suburbs – Mahler set about negotiating them a raise.

Artistic innovation followed. In his first Ring Cycle, he gave Das Rheingold in one take without its then customary interval. Next, he removed the cuts in the final scene of Siegfried which he claimed made Brünnhilde look like a “harlot” who hopped into bed at the drop of a hat. Finally, he put the Waltraute scene back into Götterdämmerung (though a lack of singers meant he still couldn’t restore the Norns).

Singers were sometimes offered ultimatums, insisting they wholeheartedly endorse Mahler’s work ethic in writing before a contract would be signed. Others were cajoled into abandoning their pernicious habit of papering performances and steps were taken to curtail the activities of the claque, audience members who were paid to cheer for one or another star singer. Initial results were promising, but despite Mahler’s resorting to hiring detectives to patrol the house, he never fully succeeded in stamping out the practice altogether.

The audience were the next to be taken to task. Frustrated by interruptions to the music, latecomers were barred from tromping down the aisles during overtures and even forced to sit outside for entire acts in the case of Wagner’s operas. Ushers were threatened with the sack if they let – or were bribed to let – tardy patrons into the auditorium. Complimentary tickets were abolished, and newspapers were made to pay for a critic's seats.

If these reforms – all of them Mahler innovations – sound perfectly reasonable to modern ears, perhaps it is because we have had over a century to get used to them. At the time, however, they seemed alien and unnecessarily dictatorial. Nevertheless, when the press opined that Mahler’s demands were unduly harsh, the Emperor, lobbied by government appointees who were among the worst offenders when it came to punctuality before curtain up, chose not to intervene. Mahler’s famous quote at the time – “I am hitting my head against the wall, but the wall is giving way” – was less an outburst of frustration and more a mark of progress achieved.

But all was not well. “The intensity with which he worked struck the Viennese as strange, to say the least,” observes De La Grange. “Mahler himself obviously enjoyed his frantic activity; what to another might have seemed like hard labour or torture was to him the liberation of long-repressed energy… It was impossible for him to rest or spare himself. He was often exhausted but never relaxed.”

Nowadays we’d call Mahler a workaholic, but there were also occasions when his temper would get the better of him and he could come across as a hectoring bully. Unfounded rumours of tyrannical behaviour often circulated in polite salons, accusations which invariably went unrefuted thanks to Mahler’s stubborn refusal to mix with Viennese society. And that, as it would turn out, were the fatal flaws destined to bring him down.

Clive Paget

Clive Paget is well known to Australian music lovers. He is currently Editor at Large for Limelight and was formerly Editor. In these roles Clive has met and written about leading classical music artists around the world, and he has extensive knowledge of Mahler’s music. His professional background includes five years as Sir Nicholas Hytner’s music theatre consultant at London’s National Theatre.