Esther van Zyl as Alma Mahler in my play “The Marriage,” as performed at Colorado Mahlerfest two weeks ago.
By 1849, when he fled Germany, Richard Wagner knew he had to end his marriage. His consequent letters to and about Minna are heart-breaking. “I soon saw that only silence and the repression of my true nature could enable us to live together without daily scenes of the most violent nature,” he told a confidante on April 15, 1850.
“I no longer feel equal to the task of conducting the most unprofitable daily arguments with the one woman who ought to be closest to me, and yet whom I shall never be able to convince. . . . After all that my wife has endured and suffered during our long years of marriage together, I have only one duty towards her: — to make her happy. . . . I now feel that I cannot do so living under the same roof with her: it is not simply that I am worn out by it all, — she, too, suffers as a result, since – being a woman of honor –she does not want a superficial kind of love, but rather one that is basic, i.e. one which involves a basic change in my whole nature.”
In short: Wagner had married the wrong person. Did Gustav Mahler?
Wagner’s second marriage was to Liszt’s daughter Cosima. She was all Minna could never be. This famous alliance must have been on Gustav’s mind when he wed Alma Schindler in 1902. The 20-page letter he wrote to her, setting his terms, stipulated that she would have to give up composing and embrace Mahler’s music “as her own.” Her profession was to be that of making her husband happy. She would surrender herself unconditionally and in return receive an entirety of love. As I have the critic Henry Krehbiel observe in my novel The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York:
“Mahler may be reckoned a Wagner epigone. He modeled himself after his great predecessor, who both composed and conducted, and who additionally directed an operatic enterprise dedicated to radical innovation. Even Mahler’s marriage was emulative. Wagner coupled with Cosima von Bülow when he was fifty years old and she only twenty-six; her sole role was to serve his genius. Mahler married Alma Schindler when he was forty-one and she only twenty-two, and his expectation, obvious to all around him, was that he would be wholly honored and supported by a reverent spouse. There the analogy ends. Both Wagner and Cosima were experienced in life and previously wed; she already had a pair of daughters. Mahler by contrast was unworldly and Alma unready. When Wagner died, Cosima mourned for nearly half a century. Mahler, by contrast, prolonged Alma’s reputation as a collector of exceptional male specimens. The oddness of this couple remains an inscrutable topic.”
Now that I have turned my novel into a play — now that I have in fact enacted the role of Mahler opposite a gifted actress, Esther van Zyl, playing Alma – the pertinence of Krehbiel’s observation seems to me redoubled.
In my novel, in my play, Alma is someone who does not know herself. She nurses Gustav’s terminal illness, she packs 40 bags of luggage, she pays the final bill at New York’s Hotel Savoy. and reflects: “It has been only three and one-half years since we first arrived in this ‘New World,’ embarking on a fresh chapter in our embattled lives. How is it possible that I yet remain so hollow and indistinct? “
Wagner was both worldly and other-worldly, sociable and solitary. Mahler lived inside his own head – chronically. My favorite passage, in book and play both, has Gustav pondering the Atlantic Ocean at night, solitary on a ship’s railing:
“He was leaning on the railing, facing sky and water. The great ship was asleep. The enveloping blackness signified the hidden presence both of stars and clouds – and also no doubt of an impregnating deity. Left behind was the concrete of the city, its rackets of noise and miniature facsimiles of lake and forest. Soon he would return to the wooded seclusion of his composing hut the thought of which caused him to sink far into himself, a narcotic sensation laced with the sublime privacies of creative introspection. Lost to the world.”
JH as Gustav Mahler
In my play, Alma (as in real life) meets “Natalie Curtis, an amazing creature.”
“She visits the Indians’ homelands and records their music with an Edison machine – and has already published two books of Indian melodies. Now she intends to extend her research to include the plantation songs of the American south. Her mission in life is settled. It is also independent. And I in comparison am contingent, subordinate to a musical genius for whom composition is a lonely necessity. It is his way of communing with himself, and now more than ever. In Toblach last summer he declared he was no longer fit for hiking or swimming or cycling – there was nothing else for him to do but to compose his Song of the Earth, in which I hear his mourning voice consecrating the memory of our departed daughter. Though he swears that he needs me, when he creates – what he feels set upon the earth to do – he is the epitome of self-sufficiency. His very being teems with as much activity as he can tolerate. He bans conversation at dinner. He insists on separate bedrooms. But I require the stimulus of human contact: people.”
The keynote of Gustav’s notorious 20-page letter, it seems to me, is less its tactlessness than its honesty. It ends: “I beg you – be truthful!” I have Alma say:
“Would I therefore have to become subordinate? Nothing had remotely prepared me for this moment of decision. Notwithstanding my youth and inexperience — the qualities Mahler italicized as limitations – I could glean his indomitable strength of candor and of his self-involvement, equally indomitable; his capacity to love and empathize on his own terms, the singularity of which he proudly appreciated but whose impact he could not gauge. In any event, the juggernaut was upon me; my need for purpose was great and indistinct; there was no turning back.”
Here are three glimpses of Cosima and Richard: During their courtship, Wagner tossed himself into a wheelbarrow which Cosima drove down the street. One day at mealtime, with the family seated, Wagner began to pick his nose, delighting the children, and purposely provoking his wife, by describing the “stalagmites and stalactites” he discovered with his probing finger; Cosima left the room. When Richard died, Cosima would not leave his body for a full day; when he was buried, she threw herself into the grave.
Alma commandeered no wheelbarrows. Gustav forbade conversation at meals. When he died, Alma resumed her passionate liaison with Walter Gropius.
And yet I feel quite confident that my novel and my play denigrate neither Gustav nor Alma. They both coped as best they could with an imperfect match – and with the opportunities and travails of a drastically new environment whose challenges newly disclosed who they were to themselves and to one another.
Thanks to Kenneth Kiesler and Mark Clague, “The Marriage” premiered in Ann Arbor, at the University of Michigan, on April 17. The clips above are from the second performance, at the Colorado Mahlerfest on May 14. Jack Tamburri was the terrific director. Esther and (especially) I were on book. The absence of costumes and scenery, however, was purposeful – a staged reading is what I had in mind from the start. The play incorporates brief recorded musical excerpts. I am now working on a one-hour version of the play with live orchestra, in which the music totals half an hour.
My gratitude to Kenneth Woods, Ethan Hecht, and others at Colorado Mahlerfest is boundless. For more on Mahlerfest, click here.
