Mahler: The Man and His Music

Narrative Matters: Gustav Mahler – music as a source of meaning and healing in the face of adversity and inequality

“…As a child, death was ever‐present. Of his 13 siblings only 6 survived infancy (Gartenberg, 1978, pp. 18–19).…”

“…Returning to Mahler's childhood, he threw himself, heart and soul, into his music and soon was considered a wunderkind in his town, performing in public at the age of 10 (de La Grange, 1976, p. 23). In spite of his undisputable and precocious musical ability, his academic reports were not always good, and he was described as a poor student (Gartenberg, 1978, p. 7).…”

“…In his consultation with Freud in 1910, Mahler recalled a distressing childhood memory, when his parents were having a violent quarrel. He fled to the street outside, where a barrel organ was playing ‘Ach, du Lieber Augustin’, something to which he apparently attributed the intrusion of popular, even banal elements into his music, even at moments of heightened tension (Gartenberg, 1978, p. 173). As a teenager trying to come to terms with the death of his beloved brother Ernst, he started work on an opera, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben as a memorial to him; neither music nor the libretto have survived (Gartenberg, 1978 p. 6, p. 220).…”

“…He fled to the street outside, where a barrel organ was playing ‘Ach, du Lieber Augustin’, something to which he apparently attributed the intrusion of popular, even banal elements into his music, even at moments of heightened tension (Gartenberg, 1978, p. 173). As a teenager trying to come to terms with the death of his beloved brother Ernst, he started work on an opera, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben as a memorial to him; neither music nor the libretto have survived (Gartenberg, 1978 p. 6, p. 220). We do, however, have his cantata, Das klagende Lied , finished in 1880, and which tells the tale of a man who murders his brother and whose treachery is revealed when he plays a flute, fashioned from the bones of the slain brother, which sings the truth.…”