Sigmund Freud Meets Gustav Mahler
Grunfeld, Frederic V.
SIGMUND FREUD MEETS GUSTAV MAHLER it ^^^^^^ cholera epidemic had broken out in Italy that year, but Dr. Freud refused to lei it spoil his plans for spending several weeks in Rome and Sicily late...
...Freud was unperturbed...
...With Mahler it was just the reverse: an old piano, the gift of his maternal grandparents, provided him with a bastion against the world...
...Freud, at all events, was ideally prepared to provide the answers when Mahler came to find out where the "irreplaceable thing" was pressing him...
...It was by means of this multidimensional counterpoint that Mahler achieved the underlying purpose of his music...
...He never denied his Jewish origin...
...The Jewish race possesses, in my experience, an unconscious that can bear only a very limited comparison with an Aryan one...
...There were seven younger brothers and sisters, one of whom died in infancy: when Jakob Freud's small textile business failed, they went to live in an overcrowded apartment in Vienna while he struggled to find alternative ways of earning a living...
...the marital crisis that had brought Mahler to Freid was a fairly banal and conventional affair...
...Long before his encounter with Freud, Mahler had arrived at a Freudian explanation for his lifelong obsession with the sonic materials of his childhood...
...During the 1909-1910 season Mahler conducted a series of forty-six Philharmonic concerts, but the ensuing summer holiday was interrupted by the marital crisis that brought him to Freud for treatment...
...with it when he broke away from Freud's too-patriarchal influence in the years preceding World War I. Later, during the crisis of the Hitler years, when the Nazis burned Freud's books and mounted a campaign of vilification against him, Jung was conveniently at hand with the announcement that the time had come when "the difference between Teutonic and Jewish psychology must no longer be obscured...
...They had been married against her better judgment and were "as ill-matched as fire and water," as Mahler said...
...In The Interpretation of Dreams he noted that his dream-life revealed a chronic anxiety "about the future of my children who cannot be given a native country of their own, anxiety about bringing them up so that they may have the right of native citizens...
...In true polyphony the themes have to meet like this, from many different directions, and must be completely distinct in their rhythmic and melodic contours...
...Since Iglau was a garrison town his earliest musical impressions were of military band music and barrack-room ballads...
...Had we, I wondered, succeeded in imitating them...
...His father, Jakob Freud, was descended from a family of Jews who had moved to Moravia from Lithuania, via Galicia...
...He put together an ensemble of great singers who were taught to act as well as sing...
...In his case the patronymic appears to have functioned as a form of self-fulfilling prophecy in accordance with the maxim Nomcn est omen...
...I was handsomely dressed and wore a new fur cap...
...instead of "Mrs...
...Most of his symphonies have at least one full-blown march movement—a funeral cortege, a mock-triumphal procession or a march to the scaffold...
...One could see that it was a strain for him to speak with his artificial palate and one was almost apologetic for every word that he granted because articulation cost him exertion...
...Freud refused to lei it spoil his plans for spending several weeks in Rome and Sicily late in the summer of 1910...
...The climax of the last movement is reached when the contralto soloist intones the fervent prayer for which Mahler wrote his own words: O glaube, mein Herz, O glaube: es geht dir nichts verloren...
...In June 1938, thanks to the intervention of Marie Bonaparte (who paid the Nazis a ransom of 250,000 Austrian schillings), of W. C. Bullitt (then American ambassador to France) and of the British Home Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare, Freud and the members of his immediate family received permission to leave Vienna for London...
...In 1882 his professor, Ernst Brucke, advised him, in view of his discouraging financial prospects, to abandon his theoretical career...
...Life at the university had already taught him some unpleasant facts about Austrian antisemitism...
...Once, when the young Bruno Walter came for a visit and stopped to admire the mountain scenery, Mahler told him: "Don't bother to look—I've composed all this already...
...Despite his failing health he worked as unremittingly as ever...
...He was called to Prague, where he conducted his first command performance for the Austrian emperor...
...I don't believe there is any danger here," he wrote to his most influential supporter, Marie Bonaparte, a princess of Greece and Denmark, "and if it should come I am firmly resolved to await it here...
...they are so terribly sad...
...Freud was to become thoroughly familiar with the "Jewish reproach"—the ultimate in ad hominem arguments—which cropped up with such tiresome monotony in moments of stress...
...As a small boy he played his way through the local library's entire supply of piano music, from symphonic arrangements to salon pieces...
...Along comes a Christian, who knocks my cap into the mud with one blow and shouts, 'Jew, get off the sidewalk.' " "And what did you do...
...They numbered about ten men and all were armed with sticks and umbrellas...
...The Interpretation of Dreams is restrained...
...Has the mighty phenomenon of National Socialism, at which the whole world gazes in astonishment, taught them to know better...
...I would not leave the piano even to eat...
...During the same disastrous summer the older of his two small daughters died of diphtheria, and doctors discovered that Mahler himself was suffering from rheumatic heart disease...
...In 1930 he told the American ambassador to Berlin, W. C. Bullitt: "A nation that produced Goethe could not possibly go to the bad...
...In 1881, having left the conservatory without the hoped-for Beethoven Prize, he began supporting himself as a conductor in provincial theaters and opera houses...
...At first she had been content to live in his shadow while he devoted most of his energies to directing both the Vienna Opera and the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, But difficulties had arisen after the death of one of their daughters in 1907...
...When a young soprano showed up at his office with a royal letter of recommendation, Mahler tore it up before her eyes, folded his arms and snapped, "Now let's hear you sing...
...Growing up on the edge of a parade ground, Mahler developed a lasting love-hate relationship with the blare of brass bands and the monotonous cadence of the Austro-German military march...
...Even the most distinguished intellectual among his disciples, C. G. Jung, could not resist the temptation of belaboring him ^Freudian footnote: Lueger means "liar" in German...
...But although he could see the menace far more clearly than most, he refused to heed his friends' advice to seek safety in Switzerland or France...
...It was as if you would dig a single shaft through a mysterious building...
...But this official neglect was due to something more than indifference: even before 1933 Freud had become a politically controversial figure...
...I followed his advice, left the physiology laboratory and entered the General Hospital as an aspirant...
...There is a second I that works while we sleep," he decided...
...Augustine," writes Dr...
...As a result he called himself, rather bitterly, a Sommer-komponist, a summer composer, only one step removed from a Sunday painter...
...Beginning with a memorable Tristan und Isolde on New Year's Day 1908, Mahler conducted a series of "breathlessly intense" performances of German opera such as the Metropolitan had never known before...
...Those who were lucky enough to know him personally, like Stefan Zweig and Thomas Mann, came to consult him as a sort of Delphic oracle...
...Whenever he could not be found at home, it was certain that he had gone marching off with some regiment, or else he might be standing on a Kaffee-haus table, singing songs for a throng of customers...
...Sexuality, however, and especially infantile sexuality, was still a forbidden subject even in scientific circles...
...l^^^^^^^^y it was an easy time to be Jewish in Vienna, though the dance at the edge of the volcano was still moving at a leisurely waltz tempo...
...It was precisely this polyphony of moods as well as sounds that constituted Mahler's most fascinating contribution to the classical tradition, and which was at the core of this surrealist music designed, as he said, to sound like ein Strdhlenmeer von Tonen, a radiant sea of sounds...
...Stefan Zweig, who had moved to London four years earlier, writes of having visited Freud during these last months of his life: On his desk lay the large folio pages of his manuscripts which, at eighty-three, he wrote with the old legible rounded script, every day, as clear in his mind as in his best period and equally tireless...
...Afterwards he was satisfied that discrimination at the university had developed his sense of independence: "Because I was a Jew I found myself free of many prejudices which restrict others in the use of the intellect: as a Jew I was prepared to be in the opposition and to renounce agreement with the 'compact majority.' " One indirect result of institutional antisemitism was that he turned from physiology to psychiatry...
...The Jews have this peculiarity in common with women: since they are physically weaker, they have to aim for the gaps in the armor of their adversaries, and on account of this technique, forced on them by centuries of history, the Jews themselves are best protected where others are most vulnerable...
...We are very much attracted by the freshness, honesty and vigor of conditions here...
...In the Middle Ages they would have burnt me...
...Though the orchestra left something to be desired—"If only my musicians were a little better"—he was delighted by many aspects of life in America...
...Freud already then suffered greatly from the illness that was soon to take him from us...
...His orchestra, by turns "alarmed and fascinated," played better than it ever had before...
...But the Danube monarchy was held together by only the most tenuous of constitutional threads, and behind the storybook facade, Vienna was seething with ethnic animosities and class hatreds...
...By that time Freud had become something of an international culture hero...
...then to Leipzig, as co-conductor with the well-known Artur Nikisch, and in 1888 to Budapest where, as a "young firebrand" of twenty-eight, he became the youngest musical director of a major opera house anywhere in Europe...
...she was gentleness itself...
...The year of Mahler's appointment to the Vienna Opera, 1897, also witnessed the installation of Karl Lueger as mayor of the city.* Elected after a rabidly antisemi-tic campaign, he managed to remain in office, using the same propaganda line, until his death in 1910...
...In this way he once told me, in order to show into how much better times I had been born than he, the following: "While I was a young man, I was walking one Saturday on the street in the village where you were born...
...He gave him an account of his strange states of mind and his jn\ietics...
...It is not difficult to see where Mahler acquired his lifelong habit of neglecting everything but his work...
...Freud "had reason to believe" that his forebears had originally come from Cologne and had fled east to escape persecution during the fourteenth or fifteenth century...
...Many Jewish parents with similar concerns chose to have their children baptized, but Freud disliked the idea...
...Alma had developed a nagging sense that "he...
...The three years of systematic self-analysis that preceded it proved to be Freud's greatest adventure in his exploration of the unconscious...
...Once the kaiser himself suggested a major role for one of his proteges: Mahler sent word that if she were to appear he would run a special disclaimer beside her name in the program: "By special command of His Majesty the Emperor...
...Freud remembered many years later in a letter to the psychoanalyst Theodor Reik...
...Once, as we happened to walk past the Opera together, he said, 'To think that I rule here as its chief and monarch—it's just like a dream...
...One dream in particular took him back to a youthful experience which, as he noted, "still manifests its power in all these emotions and dreams": / may have been ten or twelve years old when my father began to take me with him on his walks, and to reveal to me his views about the things of this world in his conversation...
...I have often felt," he wrote to his fiancee, Martha Bernays, "as though I had inherited all the defiance and all the passions with which our ancestors defended their Temple...
...When he was questioned about some of them at the time, Vones once asked Freud whether, in fact, psychoanalysis was Jewish in the sense that only a Jew could have discovered it...
...It was at Stein-bach on the Attersee, a lake not far from Salzburg, that he wrote the great "nature" symphonies of his early years, whose movements bear such titles as "What the Flowers on the Meadows Tell Me" and "What the Animals of the Forest Tell Me...
...step by step, to a theory of human behavior whose significance went far beyond the boundaries of psychiatry in order to be (as Mahler would have said) "cosmic and inexhaustible like the world and life itself...
...At the same time, dozens of new works were introduced into the repertoire, including Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin, Charpentier's Louise and Puccini's La Boheme...
...In her recent biography of Jung, Barbara Hannah claims that nothing could have been further from Jung's mind...
...Freud was responsible for this insinuation...
...The year of his meeting with Mahler was also the year in which he published his psychoanalysis of Leonardo da Vinci, the artist whose constitutional reluctance to finish anything had attracted Freud's curiosity...
...He will have to struggle as a Jew, and you ought to develop in him all the energy he will need for that struggle...
...Freud complied, but added a sentence of his own in an advertising copywriter style that would have delighted Karl Kraus: Ich kann die Gestapo jedermann auf das beste empfehlen—"I can heartily recommend the Gestapo to anyone...
...He was obstinacy personified...
...Later, when their father had joined them, a small crowd formed on the shore and shouted more insults...
...Indeed, the solution to the riddle was already in his grasp...
...As a result, Mahler shifted his attention from the opera house to the concert hall to become director of the New York Philharmonic Society (which had not yet merged with its rival, the New York Symphony...
...After both parents died in 1889, and he had to go into debt to support his brothers and sisters, he felt more than ever weighed down by "this endless, complicated apparatus for making money...
...Unlike many Viennese, however, he was not very well versed in music: Dr...
...The Jew as a relative nomad has never created, and presumably will never create, a cultural form of his own, for all his instincts and talents are dependent on a more or less civilized host people...
...Copyright C Frederic V. Grunfeld 1979 ^^^^^^2^^^^^^^^^^^^^^© publishing The Interpretation of Dreams at the turn of the century, Freud had taken psychoanalysis even further into related worlds of language, poetry and the visual arts...
...and Freud apparently calmed him down," Indeed, the session in Leiden produced astonishingly quick results...
...Jung and Dr...
...In 1934, at a time when the work of Freud and his followers had been banned in Germany, Jung, though a Swiss, wrote an article for "Aryan" psychiatrists purporting to show that Freud's "Jewish psychology" had no relevance to the new German man: One cannot, of course, accept that Freud or Adler is a generally valid representative of European mankind...
...Even if the Jews created nothing but this, they would have had to be a magnificent people.—God doesn't want to bless me either...
...Age had only made him mellower, the trials he endured more forbearing...
...brought into the world a new definition of human fate, because he placed in the hands of man the means with which to alter impediments which were previously considered irremediable...
...When the war broke out he was certain that it would mean the end of Hitler, but when a speaker on the BBC declared that this was to be the last war, Freud said wearily, "Anyhow, it is my last war...
...He did not wish the lucidity of his mind lo be dulled for a single hour...
...it was plain that one's every word was fully comprehended by this magnificent, unprejudiced person whom no admission startled, no statement excited, and whose impulse to make others see and feel clearly had long since become an instinctive life impulse...
...Kardiner, moreover, understood Freud to say that the only opera he had ever heard in his life was Don Giovanni...
...Predictably, Freud was ostracized by the Viennese medical profession...
...You need not be a victim of your own past,' said Freud, 'or of your own environment.' " From Prophets Without Honour: A Background to Freud, Kafka...
...In the course of this journey into the self, Freud discovered among other things that his dreams often dealt with the dilemma, not to say Unbehagen, of being Jewish in an alien world...
...But he would not let one go...
...the composer merely orders and combines them so that they can sing and sound as a united whole...
...As they left, reports Prince Hubertus zu L6wenstein in his memoirs, Freud's daughter Anna noticed that her father was laughing aloud...
...Shortly after conducting a performance of Don Giovanni which the visiting Johannes Brahms declared to be the best he had ever heard, Mahler resigned his post and went on to northern Germany as director of the Hamburg Opera...
...The Bavarian general, von Perfall, who guided the destinies of the Munich Opera, declared after looking at Mahler's photograph that it was impossible to hire another Jewish-looking conductor since they already had Hermann Levi on the roster...
...The Aryan unconscious has a higher potential than the Jewish: that is both the advantage and disadvantage of a youthfulness not yet far removed from the barbaric...
...Work on his songs and symphonies had to be deferred to the summer months when the opera house was closed...
...his mother, Maria Hermann, was the daughter of a soapmaker in a nearby town...
...Believe, my heart, oh believe...
...Without quite knowing how or why, an obcure Viennese crank psychiatrist had become a major landmark on the twentieth-century horizon...
...He could never pass a church without going in...
...But he had been hired by the outgoing director, Heinrich Conried, and his presence was something of an embarrassment to the incoming regime of Giulio Gatti-Casazza, whose star conductor was Arturo Toscanini...
...When Freud heard about this from Kardiner he was much amused...
...the shadows of the night...
...This would have been a propitious time for a visit to Dr...
...Normally he cannot bear even to lie down with such a headache, but must walk up and down in order to cope with the pain...
...His newfound affluence allowed him to return to the Alps for his customary summer session of composing—both Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony were completed in the Tyrol...
...Frederic V. Grunfeld was born in Berlin in 1929, and educated in the United States...
...over a grave The household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved...
...Freud disliked interrupting his holidays on any pretext, but he could hardly refuse lo see Gustav Mahler, whose name was a household word in Vienna...
...Freud, for Mahler's neurosis had begun playing psychosomatic tricks on him...
...But it was only a matter of time before the anti-Mahler faction at court—including Franz Joseph's Pompadour, the actress Katherina Schratt—contrived to bring about the backstage crisis that led to his embittered resignation...
...his reaction was: "Why this ridiculous touchiness when anybody dares to say anything about the psychological difference between Jews and Christians...
...Though warned to avoid all physical strain, he signed a contract to conduct at the Metropolitan Opera the following season...
...Antisemitism had been gaining ground throughout the 1890s and, as Mahler wrote to a friend, "everywhere my Jewishness is a stone over which they stumble at the last minute when they want to make a contract with me...
...no one paid any attention to me, and the only thing that kept me going was a bit of defiance and the beginning of The Interpretation of Dreams...
...He was reading J. L. Motley's Rise of the Dutch Republic in order, as he wrote lo his Swiss friend and colleague, Carl Gustav Jung, "to discover how something incredibly small can become great through obstinacy and unswerving determination...
...I found myself wrestling with the whole of psychology...
...others of Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche and Freud, or of Bergson, Freud and Emstein...
...By 1936 things had reached the point where Viennese newspapers were forbidden to mention the fact that Freud was being honored on his eightieth birthday—by, among others, some two hundred writers and artists headed by Romain Rolland, H. G. Wells, Virginia Woolf and Thomas Mann, who came from Switzerland to deliver his birthday address in person...
...If they kill me—good...
...Yes, Resurrection...
...In the 1920s psychiatrists who had come all the way from America to study with the discoverer of psychoanalysis were surprised to be told by the Viennese, "Professor Freud...
...Right-wing Hungarian newspapers rarely missed an opportunity to assail his Jewishness along with his musical innovations...
...Yet the written record seems to say something quite different, and it should be allowed to speak for itself...
...But even if Mahler said something of the sort, he must have meant something quite different: certainly he was aware of the juxtaposition of the tragic and the frivolous, the magnificent and the bizarre, which is characteristic of much of his music, but these internal contradictions can hardly be said to "spoil" anything—on the contrary, they account for the interplay of tension and release that can hold an audience spellbound for two hours while listening to a Mahler symphony...
...Jung's remarks, at any rate, are indicative of the mental climate of the 1930s, and of the ease with which eminent men like Jung and Heidegger could align their thinking with this "mighty phenomenon" of Nazism...
...Freud's discoveries, writes his pupil Abraham Kardiner...
...All the more intense, therefore, was the creative life he led during his annual retreat to the Austrian Alps, where he would hide away in some peasant village with only his sister Justi and Natalie Bauer-Lechner to keep him company...
...No other piano was ever allowed in any of Freud's households for the rest of his life...
...If I may believe reports, I achieved much with him at that time...
...HB^^II^^^^^y then, dreams become the special province of Sigmund Freud, who had been hard at work unraveling the symbolism of his own and his patients' dream-language...
...In Weimar Germany, thanks to a magnificent prose style that is still held up as a model of its kind, Freud received the nation's most coveted literary award, the Goethe Prize of the city of Frankfurt...
...By the time the Munich management had changed its mind, Mahler had made other plans...
...not an unusual odyssey in the nineteenth century...
...In my earliest childhood in the woods of Iglau I was moved by these sounds and committed them to memory...
...It was only here in England that he could publish Moses and Monotheism, which had been banned by the censors even in pre-Hitler Austria...
...Reik noted that most members of his profession would shake their heads over the unorthodoxy of such a marathon analytic session, "but extraordinary situations and circumstances (as well as extraordinary personalities) demand extraordinary measures...
...His eldest son, Martin, writes in his memoirs of a characteristic confrontation between Freud and some antisemites that occurred in, of all places, Berchtesgaden (later the favorite summer resort of Hitler and his circle...
...Last winter," reported Natalie Bauer-Lechner, "he conducted his Second Symphony while suffering from a terrific migraine headache...
...In one respect, at least, Jung's remarks about his former friend were demonstrably correct: Freud did not know the Teutonic soul...
...she lived to be ninety-five and was remembered as a lady of immense vitality and impatience even in her nineties...
...With his conversion, Mahler had at last removed an insuperable obstacle to a public career in Hapsburg, Austria...
...Working with a lackluster company, he produced a brilliant first season that res-' cued the Budapest Opera from near bankruptcy...
...Ernest Jones comments that even that much progress was to prove illusory: ten years later they would have burned his body as well...
...Mahler, at fifty, was at the height of his powers as a composer and conductor...
...On other occasions when he conducted with a headache the pain would let up as long as he was absorbed in the tension of the performance, but this time the terrible migraine did not leave him for a single minute, so that he hardly dared move on the podium, and conducted with unusual calm...
...I had plenty of opportunity to admire the capability for psychological understanding of this man of genius...
...At the age of forty, he remembered in later years, "I had reached the peak of loneliness, and had lost all my old friends and hadn't acquired any new ones...
...And to suffer from it now—what a trick of fate, just at this longed-for hour of his life, when he could at last hear his work and perform it for others...
...Mahler, though Still unacquainted with Freud's theories, instantly understood that Alma's lover had addressed the letter to him as a way of asking him for her hand in marriage, Mahler was then in the midst of writing his Tenth Symphony, but these alarums brought his work to a standstill...
...Freud, at fifty-four, was at last achieving international recognition as the discoverer of a new humanist science...
...In New York he hoped to find "a fruitful soil for my works, and at the same time a spiritual home, which I have not been able to win in Europe, despite all the sensational publicity...
...his strong will had risen superior to everything, illness, age, exile, and for the first time the kindness of his being which had been dammed during long years of struggle flowed freely from him...
...Nor did he wish it forgotten...
...FREDERIC V. GRUNFELD On (he Tace of it...
...hence he was to be barred from conducting the Vienna Philharmonic charity concerts, which were sponsored by the municipal government...
...Freud was born in Freiberg, Moravia, in 1856: seventy-five years later he wrote that "deep within me, although overlaid, there continues to live the happy child from Freiberg, the firstborn son of a youthful mother...
...In his antipathy to things Jewish, Lueger went so far as to encourage the founding of an "Aryan Theatre of Vienna...
...Mahler makes this malaise the underlying theme of his most fascinating scores, including Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) and the Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Deaths of Children): no composer before or since has ever expressed himself more movingly on what Freud calls "the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instincts of life and the instincts of destruction, as it works itself out in the human species...
...Natalie Bauer-Lechner writes that he never got over the feeling that his appointment was part of a fairy tale...
...Mahler's earliest childhood reminiscences had a peculiarly poignant relevance to his music as well as his neurosis...
...Thomas Mann speaks of Schopenhauer, Ibsen and Freud...
...I could never understand why I ought to be ashamed of my ancestry, or as people were beginning to call it, my 'race.' As to the membership in the [German] ethnic folk-community that was denied me, I relinquished my claims to it without much regret...
...A great deal has been written in justification of Jung's statements in the Nazi-sponsored "medical" journal Zentralblatt fur Psychotherapie, and he has been defended against the "libelous" charge of antisemitism by persuasive writers...
...He realised that he had lived the life of a neurotic and suddenly decided to consult Sigmund Freud," Alma writes...
...After World War I (which wiped out his savings but added the death-instinct to his arsenal of impulses) his theories had taken the avant-garde by storm: with the Expressionists and Surrealists, Franz Kafa, Tristan Tzara, Max Ernst, Picasso et al., "Freudian" and "Freudianism" entered the vocabulary of art...
...It was as though that nameless longing resolved itself into an endless series of symphonies, whose content was often determined by forces which he did not fully understand...
...l^ll^^^^^^^flllll e went to to become a student at the Conservatory of Music...
...His antisemitism was conditional, however, and as a jovial "man of the people" he liked to make worthy exceptions: Wer ein Jud' ist...
...He told his most intimate friend, Natalie Bauer-Lechner, that "music must always contain a sense of longing, a longing that goes beyond the things of this world...
...In April 1911 he was taken to France in hopes that a specialist there could save his life...
...During a typical Hamburg season he conducted a total of 138 performances, an average of one every two days...
...his dying was no less a moral feat than his life...
...What progress we are making...
...I am going to America because I can't stand this rabble any more," he wrote to a friend in July 1907 after deciding to leave Vienna...
...Often when I am burning with the fire of enthusiasm and am trying to carry them along with me to greater intensity and style, I suddenly see their stupefied faces smiling at each other knowingly," he wrote to a Viennese friend...
...Since their culture is more than twice as ancient, they are far more conscious of human weaknesses and negative aspects [Schattenseiten] than we are, and hence in this respect far less vulnerable...
...she asked...
...Rather, he emphasized it...
...Once, on a Sunday afternoon in midsummer, he had taken some of his friends to a hilltop from which they could hear a melange of sounds coming from many directions at once: a male choir, some brass bands, organ grinders and carnival music, all happening simultaneously...
...I feel sorry for me that I had to write them," he once confessed, "and sorry for the world that someday will have to hear them...
...It is an Odyssey of far greater intensity than is recorded in the Confessions of S^t...
...Do not deprive him of that advantage...
...One after another my brothers and sisters were sent after me: Emma, Justi, Alois, 'Gustav you are to come and eat!' In the end my mother came, 'Oh Gustav, do come!' This did not work either, until finally my father's cane got me to the table...
...These were "hard times and not worth remembering," Freud said afterward, but he himself always managed to be first in his class at school...
...Sigmund Freud He had made the transition from neurology to psychoanalysis reluctantly and almost "against my will," but his researches into the etiology of hysteria had already led him to a momentous revelation, "the discovery of the source of the Nile of neuropathology"—namely that human sexuality begins at birth, and that hysteria and neurosis are caused by repressed impulses that have their origin in infancy...
...The book on dreams was published in 1899 but bore the date 1900, as if to signalize the dawn of a psychoanalytic century...
...M. H. G5r-ing, a cousin of Hermann GSring) would not have accorded Dr...
...The struggle of this strongest will, this most penetrating mind of our time against destruction became increasingly cruel...
...it is mainly, if not entirely, a matter of people wanting to believe a rumor...
...His escape had been enthusiastically reported in the British press, and he was besieged by well-wishers and autograph hunters: "For the first time and late in life I have experienced what it is to be famous...
...They were debating their prospects of continuing their career of petty burglary," writes Jones, who came to Freud's aid shortly after the incident, "when a frail and gaunt figure appeared in the doorway...
...He would have liked to escape from the operatic treadmill and spend his days outdoors, "roaming over mountains and through forests, and carrying off my day's bag of sketches in swift raids," but he seemed to have little choice except to go on conducting...
...Accordingly, he arranged to have himself baptized—a step already foreshadowed by the Second Symphony, with its great culminating cry of "Resurrection...
...only when he himself realized clearly—he...
...It wasn't that funny...
...If happiness, as Freud said, "is the satisfaction of a childhood wish," then Mahler came closest to happiness during his first years at the Vienna Opera, when his childhood fantasies seemed on the verge of being realized...
...For it is all the same whether the sounds take this form, or of birds singing, a thunderstorm, the splash of waves or the crackle of a fire...
...in his fanatical concentration on his own life, had simply overlooked me...
...Mahler was born in Kalischt, Bohemia, in I860, but his parents moved to Iglau in neighboring Moravia three months after his birth...
...At the end he was barely able to acknowledge the tumultuous, unending applause, and at home he sank to the sofa like a dead man...
...a Viennese music student nineteen years younger and a head taller than himself...
...What had begun modestly enough as a search for ways ofcuring the mentally ill had led him...
...Mahler was the eldest of the surviving children, and from all accounts he dreamed his way through childhood...
...Perhaps, if he had allowed himself the luxury of a nervous breakdown he might have lived to a riper age...
...For the first time in his life he was being well paid for his work, and enjoying the novelty of it: "The dollar doesn't rule here," he wrote to Alfred Roller...
...Though he held out for more than two years, these persistent attacks wore down his resistance...
...But the musical effect is utterly electrifying...
...One is beaten to the ground by clubs and then lifted to the heights on angel's wings...
...He was profoundly angered by "the imputation that I should regard myself as inferior and as not belonging to the people, just because I was a Jew...
...Despite his many years as a psychoanalyst, Freud still harbored misconceptions about the German psyche—if, indeed, there was such a thing...
...In Das Unbehagen in der Kultur of 1930 he had issued an ominous warning about the "aggressive cruelty" that was latent in mankind, merely lying in wait for some suitable provocation: "In circumstances that favor it, when those forces in the mind which ordinarily inhibit it cease to operate, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals men as savage beasts to whom the thought of sparing their own kind is alien...
...His very success as a conductor, however, came into conflict with his career as a composer: audiences wanted to hear him interpret Mozart and Wagner—not Gustav Mahler...
...He began his career as a music critic on WQXR, the radio station of the New York Times, and for many years was a roving editor o/Horizon...
...There was nothing inconsistent, then, in interrupting a "lofty" melody with a "trivial" tune—this ambivalence constitutes the very essence of Mahler's new harmonic principle: dissonance by collision...
...As he proposed half jokingly in a letter to a friend, perhaps one day there would be a marble tablet on the wall of the Bellevue Restaurant on the slopes of the Wienerwald, informing the world that: In this House on July 24,1895, the Secret of Dreams was revealed to Dr...
...Meanwhile he had to subsidize his own music: the concert at which he introduced his Resurrection Symphony to Berlin took in forty-eight marks at the box office, though it had cost him thousands...
...In reply to their belated offer he sent them a curt telegram: "Have agreed to another offer from those who think less of my nose than of my talent...
...Freud's mother came from Galicia...
...Fortunately there was no shortage of jobs for gifted operatic conductors...
...But he was not a man who ever deceived himself, and he knew that people...
...Civilized society is perpetually menaced with disintegration through this primary hostility of men towards one another...
...Zweig writes that a conversation with Freud constituted one of his greatest intellectual satisfactions: "While one learned, one marveled...
...No matter: during the performance people were moved to tears by "sounds such as no one had ever dreamed of...
...In this way the most precious secret of Teutonic man—the deep-rooted creative awareness of his soul [schopferisch ahnungsvollen Seelen-grund]—has been explained away as a banal, infantile sump, while my warning voice, over the decades, was suspected of antisemitism...
...a nationalist deputy denounced him in parliament for running the opera as a Jewish-bourgeois preserve...
...His "golden decade" as director of the company was a legendary epoch in the history of opera: Bruno Walter called it "a ten-year festival to which a great musician invited fellow artists and audiences...
...It was," Freud said...
...One of his sisters appeared to have musical talent and began playing the piano, but the sound of it distracted him so much that he insisted it be removed...
...In London, where he was soon settled in a comfortable house near Primrose Hill, he wrote to a friend that his feeling of triumph on being liberated was mitigated by sorrow, "for in spite of everything I still greatly loved the prison from which I have been released...
...or were they imitating us...
...This is polyphony, and that's where I get it from," he told them...
...It was my first experience of a true sage, exalted beyond himself, to whom neither pain nor death longer counted as a personal experience but as a super-personal matter of observation and contemplation...
...This was the last we saw of these unpleasant strangers...
...The aging emperor, Franz Joseph, and his heir apparent, Franz Ferdinand, were still in the habit of playing a game of musical chairs with their court opera...
...Yet for his own children, Freud chose all but total assimilation...
...The arts were not unrepresented at his deathbed...
...It was clear to him that he was close to death: "My world is again what it was before—a little island of pain floating in a sea of indifference," he wrote to Marie Bonaparte in the spring of 1939...
...At that moment, however, a hurdy-gurdy in the street was grinding out the popular Viennese air, O, du lieber Augustin...
...By then Sigmund Freud had been a medical student at the University of Vienna for two years, and was about to embark on his first major project of anatomy, a study of the gonadic structure of eels for the Zoological Experiment Station at Trieste...
...In the meantime, father, swinging his stick, charged the hostile crowd, which gave way before him and promptly dispersed, allowing him free passage...
...He would have liked to find another post, but his agent brought him the disconcerting news that some of the likelier cities "would be happy to have him if he were not Jewish...
...Mahler's original telegram, sent from the Tyrolean village where he was spending his holidays, was soon followed by another countermanding it, then by a second request and a second cancellation...
...Why did you laugh...
...bestimme ich (I'm the one who decides who's a Jew around here) was the most famous of his pithy sayings...
...Every child knows that differences exist...
...Either way, it meant that Freud was in no position to judge the importance of what Mahler told him about his work...
...For although he regarded himself as a "godless" and unbelieving Jew there was nothing apologetic in his attitude...
...One wonders how a psychologist capable of drawing such fine distinctions was also able to make such drastic generalizations...
...Finally...
...Though their mother's grandfather had been the chief rabbi of Hamburg, they were brought up in ign...
...Mahler thought he could recognize his syndrome in a biblical precedent: "What a wonderful image for the creative artist is Jacob, who wrestles with God until he blesses him...
...I dared not show it to Freud, because, clairvoyantly, Dali had already incorporated death in the picture...
...The future is everywhere...
...From September to June he led the marathon-running life that absorbed all of his energies in a relentless succession of rehearsals and performances...
...His impact on the small, tough, unimpressionable world of the European intellectuals was all the more profound because many of his readers understood instantly what he was driving at: far from making unexpected revelations, he was merely giving form and expression to something inchoate but already dimly perceived, which needed only a shift in perspective to be recognized...
...Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment His practice now, and his shabby clientele Who think they can be cured by killing And covering the gardens with ashes...
...Here, too, his "passion and elemental force" made an instant impression: the critics agreed that with his "demonic" powers and Mephistophelian gaze he could draw superb performances from singers who were ordinarily no better than second-rate...
...Jones reports that he went to the opera only on rare occasions, and then only to Mozart or Carmen...
...But at the same time he got his first real taste of organized antisemitism...
...Later, when Hitler came to power in neighboring Germany, Freud was regarded as a potential embarrassment by an Austrian government which was at pains to give the Nazis no cause for offense...
...Conducting Faust and Tannhauser in places like Laibach (Ljubljana), Olmfltz (Olomouc) and Kassel, he often felt "like a noble steed harnessed with oxen to a cart," since the local singers rarely shared his fanatical devotion to music...
...What always tortured nte as fright Is blown away by power of one word...
...His father was an irascible man who kept a tavern and ran a distillery...
...Before going south, however, he look his Iwo younger sons on a trip to Holland, and August found him al a seaside hotel at Noord-wijk on the Dutch coast...
...Once, on one of my last visits," Zweig writes, "I took Salvador Dali with me, in my opinion the most gifted painter of the younger generation, who revered Freud immensely and, while I talked with Freud, he worked at a sketch...
...The translation is Theodor Reik's: They meii...
...Since that time Hannibal has had a place in my phantasies...
...Indeed, four of Freud's aged sisters were afterward deported and killed in the Holocaust...
...Freud was obliged to remind Mahler that time was running short since he would soon be off to Italy...
...Father, without the slightest hesitation, jumped out of the boat and, keeping to the middle of the road, marched toward the hostile crowd...
...In Das Lied von der Erde, for example, when the contralto soloist sings of maidens plucking lotus blossoms in the sunlight, a squadron of winds and percussion suddenly bursts on the scene in a furious cavalry quickstep, provoked by nothing more martial than a reference in the text to "handsome lads on spirited horses...
...Seven years earlier, as a bachelor of forty-three, he had married Alma Schindler...
...Then my effervescent blood subsides for a time, and I would like to run away for good...
...On the train hack to Austria, Mahler already felt sufficiently reassured to «rite a poem telling his wife that all would be well...
...I found myself explaining something from the very heart of nature," he wrote to a friend...
...He had a way of frowning with blazing eyes that any Old Testament prophet might have envied, and the effect produced by this lowering mien completed the visitors' discomfiture...
...Einstein and Their World, to be published in October by Holt...
...Gdring's Gesellschaft jur Psychotherapie for seven years out of loyalty to his German colleagues, and "for the sake of suffering humanity, doctors, and—last but not least—science and civilization...
...The idea of the future," Mann said, "is the one I associate most instinctively with Freud's name...
...For Mahler, too, these were difficult years...
...Mahler, as always deeply absorbed in his composing, was finally confronted with the facts when Alma's impetuous lover accidentally addressed a love letter to "Mr...
...In 1934, however, every child also knew that the Nazis had begun persecuting and even killing people on account of these "differences," and some adults, at least, thought it unsporting of Jung to attack Freud with the "Jewish reproach" at a time when the Zentralblatt (coeditors...
...His mouth distorted by pain, he wrote at his desk until the last days, and even when pain tortured his sleep at night—the wonderfully sound, healthy sleep which had been the prime source of his strength for eighty years—he denied himself sleeping potions and any narcotic...
...nothing will be lost to you...
...I would scarcely have put down my spoon, before I would rush back to sit before the music until evening...
...and by the Catholic vision of paradise expressed in the folk poetry of the Third and Fourth symphonies...
...yet it ranks in intensity with the kind of inner self-encounter and honesty that must have preceded the creation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Einstein's general theory of relativity...
...Before his departure, the Gestapo forced him to sign a certificate declaring that he had been well treated by the authorities...
...It seems, for once, to have been a genuinely non-Freudian coincidence that his remark to W. C. Bullitt should sound like a paraphrase of W. C. Fields's famous dictum, "No man who hates dogs and children can be all bad...
...nowadays they are content with burning my books...
...As it was, he returned to New York to begin a still more arduous schedule: after the forty-seventh concert of the season he collapsed with a fever that the doctors diagnosed as incurable endocarditis...
...This symphony, Mahler said, was intended to sound "as though it were coming across to us from another world...
...it is a matter for the police...
...Martin recalled that the first time he entered a synagogue—on the occasion of his own wedding—his friends had to tell him "with some vehemence" to put his top hat back on his head...
...Mahler—the kind of Freudian slip whose mechanism 1 reud elucidates in his Psychopathology of Everyday Life...
...Tl^llllll^ resemblance and affinity between Mahler and Freud, beginning with the fact that both came from Jewish families who had settled in small towns of what has since become Czechoslovakia, and both took part in the great migration to Vienna that swelled the city's population to more than a million by 1880...
...In my view it has been a grave mistake of medical psychology to apply Jewish categories, which are not even valid for all Jews, to Christian Germans and Slavs...
...For that matter he had rarely known anyone whose sensitivities and capacities were so nearly a match for his own...
...Once, again in Berchtesgaden, they met the German Empress and three sons of Wilhelm II on a promenade—"dressed very much as we were dressed," writes Martin Freud, "the Empress included, all chatting and talking together very much as we chatted and talked...
...As soon as I came home from the library, I played over everything that I had brought, stringing the pieces together one after the other, beginning over again each day of the week so as to get the most out of those marvels," he remembered...
...The modern composer Karlheinz Stock-hausen has written that if a visitor from a distant star should wish to investigate the nature of the inhabitants of our earth, he would do well to address himself to this remarkable music: "In order to discover all that which is most characteristic of the earthling, to understand his entire range of passions, from the most angelic to the most animal, to know everything that binds him to the earth and lets him no more than dream of the other regions of the universe, there would be no richer source of information than Mahler...
...it was the pride of his spirit oj steel to manifest to his friends that his will remained more potent than vulgar bodily torments...
...You see," he said, "a prophet is never known in his own country...
...Eight of the fourteen children born to this hard-working couple died in childhood: the Kinder-totenlieder have been interpreted as a kind of belated memorial to his mother's grief...
...Kardiner, "and much more sincere and modest than those that are contained in the Confessions of Rousseau...
...It is one kind of death like another...
...To encourage him in his studies he was allotted a small closetlike room of his own, the only private room in the household...
...I've been a doctor for fifty years, but I never got 6,000 schillings for a visit to an old, sick man...
...to whom clarity always had been the highest quality of thinking—that he would not be able to continue to write, to function, like a Roman hero he permitted the doctor to end his pain...
...That did not seem heroic on the part of the big strong man, who was leading me, a little fellow, by the hand...
...Then a telegram arrived to disturb his well-earned rcsl—a request for an appointment from a distinguished fellow Viennese urgently in need of help...
...Saying they would call another day, they hastily took their departure...
...Mahler suffered from the folie de dome of his obsessional neurosis and repeated this performance three limes," reports Freud's pupil and biographer Ernest Jones...
...It grows and develops and brings forth that which on waking I searched for and desired in vain...
...As Freud remembered some years after their interview: His father, apparently a brutal person, treated his wife very badly, and when Mahler was a young boy there was a specially painful scene between them...
...They grew up outwardly indistinguishable from their Austrian neighbors: during the summer they wore lederhosen and the rest of the pseudo-peasant paraphernalia that is still considered modish in parts of Austria and Bavaria...
...Freud understood Mahler to say that, looking back on this experience, he now realized why his "noblest" musical passages—those inspired by the profoundest emotions—were always "spoiled" by the intrusion of commonplace tunes...
...Elsewhere, often in the most lyrical moments, he will launch into a savage parody of the old parade music, the drums lurching drunkenly, the brasses contorted into an agonized grimace...
...His seventieth birthday, in 1926, which brought him a spate of congratulations from around the world, was studiously ignored by the academic world of Vienna...
...Freud adds that not only the "Semitic" warrior, Hannibal, but also Napoleon's Jewish general, Marshal Massena, became his boyhood idols: they symbolized the militancy with which he reacted to antisemitism for the rest of his life...
...It is also thanks to their experience of ancient culture that it is possible for them to live in benevolent, amiable and tolerant acceptance of their own vices, while we are still too young [wir sind noch zu jung] to have no "illusions" about ourselves...
...It hud been, quite apart from its therapeutic results, a remarkably historic meeting of minds...
...What you theater people call your tradition," he told them, "is nothing but laziness and Schlamperei (sloppiness...
...He had wanted to devote himself to research in anatomy and physiology, but as a Jew his chances for an eventual professorship were negligible, and assistants' salaries were penurious...
...The women remained in the background, but cheered on their menfolk with shouts and gestures...
...There was, it seemed, only onetity that displayed not the slightest interest in Freud...
...I went in the street and picked up the cap," was the answer...
...ranee of even the most rudimentary Jewish religious customs...
...Shortly after his baptism, in 1897, he was called to the Vienna Court Opera (as it then was) for a triumphal homecoming...
...only in a terrible struggle for the creation of my work can I wrest a blessing from him...
...he loved the smell of incense and Gregorian chants...
...now the psychological blow to man's presumption of the supremacy of reason in his own soul...
...he remarked with a smile...
...When the critic Max Graf told him that he was debating whether to raise his son as a Christian, Freud's comment was: "If you do not let your son grow up as a Jew, you will deprive him of those sources of energy which cannot be replaced by anything else...
...Incidents of this sort made Freud all the more anxious to spare his children the indignities of second-class citizenship...
...Mahler, he decided, was a Jud' despite his professed Catholicism...
...They got together at last in Leiden on August 26 or 27, and spent the whole of the afternoon strolling through the old university town while Freud performed a sort of emergency psychoanalysis, condensed into a single one-day session...
...It was Zweig, and Ernest Jones, who spoke at the funeral, but the eulogy that was best remembered was W. H. Auden's tribute to this man who had changed the world "simply by looking back with no false regrets/ All that he did was to remember/ Like the old and be honest like children": .. . about him at the very end were still Those he had studied, the nervous and the nights, And shades that still waited to enter The bright circle of his recognition Turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he Was taken away from his old interest To go back to the earth in London, An important Jew who died in exile...
...First there had been the cosmological blow aimed at it by Copernicus...
...Never heard the name...
...For many years Mahler's great ambition had been to become director of the Vienna Opera, but it had been made abundantly clear to him that no non-Catholic would be appointed to such an important public post...
...fllfll^ the was forced by the knowledge that he himself was slowly dying of cancer of the mouth...
...Freud the right of rebuttal...
...During the summer of 1901 the twelve-year-old Martin and his ten-year-old brother Oliver were fishing from a boat in the lake when a group of men began abusing them for being Jewish...
...Shortly after the Anschluss of March 11, 1938—when the "nation that produced Goethe" annexed the nation that produced Mozart—Freud's home in the Berggasse was invaded by a gang of Storm Troopers who helped themselves to whatever money was in the house, including 6,000 Austrian schillings (then about $840) which belonged to the Psychoanalytic Association...
...Then, at the beginning of this troubled summer, her eyes had been "opened by the impetuous assaults of a youthful lover," and she decided that her life was "utterly unfulfilled...
...But as Freud points out, the search for the irreplaceable mother was bound to lead to endless difficulties of the sort that Mahler had encountered...
...Rinehart A Winston...
...I contrasted this situation, which did not please me, with another more in harmony with my feelings— the scene in which Hannibal's father, Hamilcar Barka, made his boy swear at the domestic altar to take vengeance on the Romans...
...The doctor himself also thinks in threes, but claims for himself an even older line of succession: his work, he writes, has delivered the third and most devastating blow to the ancient, narcissistic view of man as the center of the universe and the prime object of creation...
...Known throughout Germany as the foremost Wagnerian conductor of the day, he was nevertheless excluded from the Bayreuth Wagner Festival by the composer's widow, Cosima Wagner, who was determined not to hire Jews—though that did not prevent her from consulting Mahler on various artistic problems...
...Freud said after their meeting that he had never encountered anyone who understood the principles of psychoanalysis as quickly and intuitively as Mahler did...
...His most recent books are Berlin and The Hitler File...
...It became quite unbearable to the boy, who rushed away from the house...
...In Mahler's opinion the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was from then on inextricably fixed in his mind, and the one mood inevitably brought the other with it...
...When he was a two-year-old his nurse used to leave him in a barracks yard while she enjoyed the company of a soldier friend," reports Bruno Walter, and at the age of four he had learned some two hundred popular tunes by heart...
...Working together with the visionary stage designer Alfred Roller, he mounted productions of Don Giovanni, Die Walkure and Falstaff, among others, that demolished the wooden-Indian style of opera and launched a whole new way of looking at Mozart, Wagner and Verdi...
...Ernest Jones, who dedicated a lifetime to Freud and his work, was convinced that the undaunted courage which was "Freud's highest quality and his most precious gift" could have been derived only from "a supreme confidence in his mother's love...
...That put an end to further seignorial incursions at the opera house...
...that the analyst who could write so brilliantly on Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Goethe lacked the musical background for understanding the elements that made Mahler the greatest symphonist of his time...
...It is just easier to earn...
...It was the noble end of a noble life, a death memorable even among the hecatombs of that murderous time...
...Half an hour later the attack had passed...
...Most of Freud's colleagues reacted like Professor Wilhelm Weygandt who, when psychoanalysis was mentioned at a psychiatric congress, pounded the table with his fist and shouted, "This is not a topic for discussion at a scientific meeting...
...then the biological blow delivered by Darwin to man's notion of a gulf between himself, and the animal kingdom...
...would not forget he was a Jew because he was skeptical of the Jewish religion and baptized a Christian...
...In Berlin, meanwhile, Freud's books had been publicly burned on the Opernplatz "on account of their soul-destroying overemphasis of the sex-drive" (seelenzerfasernde Vberschatzung des Trieblebens) as the official speaker declared...
...Whatever else they understood about it is bloody little," was Mahler's wry comment, "but my temperament, that they understand, and it carries them along with the music...
...Freud himself had shown in another context that such "inconsistency" is merely a hobgoblin of the conscious mind: "We long ago discovered that a thing which in consciousness makes its appearance as two contraries is often in the unconscious a united whole...
...But probably that is only cheap boasting...
...Later he was moved to a Viennese sanatorium where, on May 18, he died during a thunderstorm, like Beethoven...
...In the creative arts," he told the critic Richard Specht, "virtually the only impressions that are fruitful and decisive in the long run are those that occur between the ages of four and eleven, before puberty...
...Outwardly at least the Hapsburg capital had not yet lost its romantic charm: people were accustomed to thinking of it, said the essayist Egon Friedell (originally Friedman), as "an enclave of that vanished beauty-in-life to which so many look back with nostalgia...
...He did not know the Teutonic soul, any more than his blind followers in Germany knew it...
...Freud replied that, on the one hand, it could be said that after all only a Jew actually did, but on the other hand, it might equally be said that there were countless millions of Jews who did not...
...In highly interesting expeditions through his life history, we discovered his personal conditions for love...
...A meeting was arranged, though only after several false starts...
...It was Freud, aroused by the disturbance...
...For although they were accustomed to working with very different aspects of the unexpressed and the inexpressible in human life, both were profoundly concerned with what Freud was to call Das Unbehagen in der Kultur—literally, the sense of discomfort or uneasiness induced by civilization, though his book was translated into English as Civilization and Its Discontents, which is hardly the same thing...
...Sad is Eros, builder of cities, And weeping anarchic Aphrodite...
...At the same time he was at work on "contributions to the psychology of love" that deal with certain kinds of neuroses arising from men's oedlpal need for love-objects that are "mother-surrogates...
...People here respect two things: ability and enthusiasm...
...In any case he had a strong leaning to Catholic mysticism," writes Alma Mahler in her memoirs, "whereas the Jewish ritual had never meant anything to him...
...After the war, Jung explained that he had gone on working for Dr...
Vol. 4 • July 1979 • No. 7
