Some three decades ago, as classical music editor of High Fidelity magazine, now defunct, I received a manuscript of a Mahler discography from a college professor: a bare catalog of recordings with a brief introduction. Though I recall little else of the introduction, I can still reconstruct its last three paragraphs almost verbatim:
“When the conductor Bruno Walter saw Mahler’s coffin lowered into a grave in Vienna, the sun broke through the clouds, and Walter wept. When I visited Mahler’s grave, the sun broke through the clouds, and I wept.
“That is why I have undertaken this task. It is the first installment of an impossible debt.
Mr. Lebrecht, bless him, stops a few paces short of that professor’s idolatry. And he turned his fixation, which he dates to 1974, to excellent use with an earlier book, “Mahler Remembered” (W. W. Norton & Company, 1987), consisting mostly of extended quotations from players in Mahler’s biography: fellow composers and conductors, singers, family members, acquaintances. But Mr. Lebrecht, too, has difficulty maintaining perspective and a tendency to inject himself into the story.
“Leaving home at 15 is a defining act,” he writes of Mahler in the new book. “I left at 16 to study in another country, a foreign language.”
“Like Mahler,” he adds, “I felt no homesickness, no regret at leaving tragedy and faith behind.”
Who, reading a biography of a historical personage, hasn’t occasionally identified in some way with the hero? But who does it out loud? A book about Mr. Lebrecht’s “search for Gustav Mahler,” as he calls his obsession, this is also a book about Mr. Lebrecht, a far less compelling subject.
In addition to the Mahler studies, Mr. Lebrecht has written a half-dozen books on music, including the gleefully apocalyptic “Who Killed Classical Music?” (Birch Lane Press, 1997). Despite the sensationalist title, there is enough life left in the classical music business (about the music itself, we needn’t worry) to keep Mr. Lebrecht busy documenting its further travails in “Slipped Disc,” his blog on artsjournal.com, and elsewhere. In “Why Mahler?” Mr. Lebrecht travels much of the same ground he trod in “Mahler Remembered.” Mahler’s biography, dispatched there in an introduction, is here heavily laced with snippets of quotations from “Remembered” and elsewhere, and spun out in a breathless historical present as the main body of the book. Although the heavy emphasis on gossip and scandal grows tiresome (however much grist Mahler’s wife, Alma, and others may have provided), Mr. Lebrecht writes with flair, at times, and shows a good command of source material.
But to reach the biography, you have to get past a scene-setting chapter, “Some Frequently Asked Questions,” which stopped me in my tracks repeatedly. One question is especially revealing: “Am I related to Mahler?”
He makes a case for why he might be. Then he abandons the topic abruptly. “Does this make my great-nephew a Mahler?” he asks. “Let’s stop this right here.”
But some of the other answers are what really take the breath away. Mr. Lebrecht notes that Leonard Bernstein conducted Mahler’s Second Symphony (“Resurrection”) after the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the Adagietto from the Fifth after that of Robert F. Kennedy. From this and little more, he concludes, “Along with Samuel Barber’s Adagio, itself a Mahlerian imitation, Mahler’s Second, Fifth and Ninth Symphonies were America’s music of lamentation.” No matter that Bernstein trotted out the “Resurrection” for almost any occasion, including his 1,000th concert with the New York Philharmonic, or that if many Americans know the Adagietto at all, it is probably from its use in the Visconti film “Death in Venice” rather than from any occasion of mourning. And the Ninth? Mr. Lebrecht is projecting his own proclivities here, as he reveals later: “In my occasional role as the Record Doctor on WNYC’s ‘Soundcheck’ show, I have prescribed the finale of the Ninth Symphony and the Adagietto of the Fifth for callers in situations of grief and loss.”
In his eagerness to establish irony as a defining quality of Mahler’s music, one that defines it in particular as being Jewish, Mr. Lebrecht, as he does so often, goes too far. “Music, before Mahler, had a lexicon of simple emotions: joy, sorrow, love, hate, uplift, downcast, beauty, ugliness and so on.” This discounts not only the Wagnerian leitmotif, a tool virtually made for irony, but also any number of poignant, bittersweet moments in Mozartean opera and so much other earlier music.
After flatly stating that Mahler, in his Third and Seventh Symphonies, “hinted at a future ecological disaster” and, in his Sixth, “warned of imminent world war,” Mr. Lebrecht backtracks. Some of the connections he makes “are open to debate,” he says with — for a change — considerable understatement.
“The opposite,” he adds, “as so often in Mahler, may also be true.”
What is important to Mr. Lebrecht, it seems, is to make a striking statement in the moment, even if it has to be canceled out a few pages later. In a chapter discussing recordings of Mahler’s music, he writes, “The first truth in Mahler interpretation is that there are no absolutes, no hard-and-fast rules.” Then, after blasting “conductors who obviate irony,” “those who deny emotion” and others, he adds: “There are many no-nos in Mahler: these are just a few of the worst.” Accordingly, he dismisses most Mahler recordings in a hard-and-fast word or two.
Mr. Lebrecht can turn a nice phrase at times, as when he speaks of Mahler’s plunging “into an oblivion of work.” And you never doubt, reading him, that he knows a lot, but he doesn’t know everything, as he would have you believe.
His chronic overstatement and striving for effect, a kind of forced informality (he calls Bernstein Lenny, Otto Klemperer Klemp) and a certain looseness in the handling of facts (in quick succession he implies a wrong year for the premiere of Mozart’s “Magic Flute” and gives a wrong year for an important dinner party) make it hard to put much faith in any particular pronouncement. Writing of Alma Mahler, he all but invites comparison with his own work: “Nothing she writes can be accepted without corroboration.”
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