Hello Goodbye Hello: A Circle of 101 Remarkable Meetings (40 page)

Alma is gregarious and flirtatious,
¹⁸²
Gustav withdrawn and ascetic. When they became engaged, Alma was interested in composing, but Gustav forbade her from pursuing it. ‘You must give yourself
unconditionally
, shape your future life, in every detail, entirely in accordance with my needs ... The role of composer falls to me – yours is that of loving companion.’

In July 1910, Gustav Mahler opens a letter wrongly addressed to himself.
¹⁸³
It is in fact for Alma, from her young paramour Walter Gropius, saying he can’t live without her, and urging her to leave her husband. Mahler confronts Alma, who shoves the blame back on him, telling him, ‘I had longed for his love year after year and that he, in his fanatical concentration on his own life, had simply overlooked me.’

Mahler promises to make amends; Alma agrees to stay. Having previously treated her with indifference, he develops a passionate jealousy of, in Alma’s words, ‘everything and everybody ... I often woke in the night and found him standing at my bedside in the darkness.’ But she cannot shake off Gropius, and is again forced to choose. She decides to stay with Mahler, but only on condition that he seeks analysis.

Mahler has long been wary of psychoanalysis. Three years ago, when a friend mentioned Sigmund Freud’s name, he snapped that psychoanalysis did not interest him, adding, ‘Freud, he tries to cure or solve everything from
a certain aspect
.’ The friend noted that ‘apparently he was reluctant, in the presence of his wife, to use the appropriate word’.

Towards the end of August, Mahler finally keeps his appointment. Freud takes a break from his holiday on the coast to catch a tram to Leiden. They set off on a long walk through the town, talking for four hours.
¹⁸⁴
They are both keen walkers. Freud likes to complete the entire circle of the 5.3 kilometres of Vienna’s Ringstrasse after lunch; Mahler walks in a very unusual manner, with irregular strides interrupted by an odd little stamp.
¹⁸⁵

Having listened to Mahler’s marital problems, Freud says the difference in the couple’s ages, of which Mahler is so afraid, is precisely what attracts Alma to him. ‘You loved your mother, and you look for her in every woman. She was careworn and ailing, and, unconsciously, you wish your wife to be the same,’ he adds.

When Gustav reports these conclusions to Alma, she thinks Freud has hit the nail on the head: ‘He was right in both cases. Gustav Mahler’s mother was called Marie. His first impulse was to change my name to Marie in spite of the difficulty he had in pronouncing “r”. And when he got to know me better he wanted my face to be more “stricken” – his very word. When he told my mother that it was a pity there had been so little sadness in my life, she replied, “Don’t worry – that will come.”’ Alma also agrees with Freud’s diagnosis of her father-fixation. ‘I always looked for a
small, slight man, who had wisdom and spiritual superiority, since this was what I had known and loved in my father.’

Freud is likewise impressed by Gustav Mahler; he has never met anyone who grasped psychoanalysis so quickly.

‘... Mahler suddenly said that now he understood why his music had always been prevented from achieving the highest rank through the noblest passages, those inspired by the most profound emotions, being spoilt by the intrusion of some commonplace melody. 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. It became quite unbearable to the boy, who rushed away from the house. At that moment, however, a hurdy-gurdy in the street was grinding out the popular Viennese air “Ach, du lieber Augustin.” 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.’
¹⁸⁶

Of course, this is what people admire in his music. It is what makes it innovative and modern. But it can be hard for artists to discriminate between their strengths and their weaknesses, as the two are so closely allied.

After they part, Gustav Mahler enters a state of elation. ‘Feeling cheerful. Interesting discussion,’ he wires Alma, and later, ‘I am living everything as if new.’ On the train back, he writes this verse about the meeting:

Night shades were dispelled by one powerful word
,

The tireless throb of torment ended.

At last united in one single chord

My timid thoughts and my tempestuous feelings blended.

On his return, he looks again at Alma’s compositions, and starts to sing them at the piano. ‘What have I done? These songs are good. They’re
excellent ... I shan’t rest until you start working again. God, I was narrow-minded in those days.’ Mahler dedicates his Eighth Symphony, which he unveiled on September 12th 1910, to her; he also has five of Alma’s
lieder
published, with premieres in Vienna and New York.

Nine months later, on May 18th 1911, he dies of bacterial endocarditis.
¹⁸⁷
Some months on, Freud suddenly realises he never sent an invoice for his consultation, so he writes one out, dating it ‘Vienna, October 24 1911’. He attaches two stamps and sends it to Mahler’s widow, Alma, ‘for services rendered’.

REFUSES TO KNEEL BEFORE

Rue de l’Université, Paris

April 23rd 1909

A group of Mahler’s admirers in Vienna has been persuaded by Alma Mahler’s stepfather, the painter Carl Moll, to commission the great Auguste Rodin to sculpt the composer’s head. At first, Rodin is indifferent. Only after being told that Mahler is a great composer, on the same level in music as he is in art, does Rodin agree to lower his regular price to 10,000 francs for a clay bust, with an additional charge for bronze casts.

Mahler is restless by nature, not the sort of man to agree to sit still for any length of time, so they appeal to his vanity, too, by telling him that the idea has come from Rodin himself, as Mahler’s head interests him so much. Flattered, Mahler agrees.

He arrives in Paris from America. He is suffering from rheumatic heart disease, and has been unable to hike in the mountains, so can no longer ‘wrest my ideas from Nature’. On April 22nd, their go-between Paul Clemenceau writes a letter to Rodin: ‘If you are free to do so, please come tomorrow, Friday, at 12.30 to have lunch with us at the Café de Paris. Mahler will be there. We could arrange everything while dining. Remember that Mahler is convinced that it is your wish to do his bust, or he would have refused to pose.’

The lunch goes well. Though the two men barely exchange a word – Mahler speaks French only falteringly, and Rodin doesn’t speak a word of German – Clemenceau is delighted by the way they get on. ‘The first encounter between these two men of genius was extremely impressive. They didn’t speak but only sized each other up, and yet they understood each other perfectly.’

Rodin gets down to work. Mahler has only a little time; he must leave for Vienna on May 1st. Each sitting lasts roughly an hour and a half. Rodin is a quick worker; he needs to be, because Mahler is such a fidget. In any
game of musical statues, he would always be the first to lose. ‘He couldn’t keep still, even for a minute,’ notes Alma.

Despite all this, sitter and sculptor strike up some sort of rapport. ‘Rodin fell in love with his model; he was really unhappy when we had to leave Paris, for he wanted to work on the bust much longer,’ observes Alma. ‘His method was unlike that of any other sculptor I have had the opportunity of watching. He first made flat surfaces in the rough lump, and then added little pellets of clay which he rolled between his fingers while he talked. He worked by adding to the lump instead of subtracting from it. As soon as we left he smoothed it all down and next day added more. I scarcely ever saw him with a tool in his hand. He said Mahler’s head was a mixture of Franklin’s, Frederick the Great’s and Mozart’s.’

At each session, the Mahlers notice that one of the sculptor’s mistresses is always lingering patiently in the next room while Rodin works away. ‘Some girl or other with scarlet lips invariably spent long and unrewarded hours there, for he took very little notice of her and did not speak to her even during the rests. His fascination must have been powerful to induce these girls – and they were girls in what is called “society” – to put up with such treatment ... Sometimes we were interrupted by a loud knocking on the door; it was
une amie
whom Rodin described as troublesome. She was obliged to wait for hours in the next room, and she kept on knocking, which made Rodin nervous and furious.’

Rodin works at a furious pace. ‘He would step forward, then retreat, look at the figure in a mirror, mutter and utter unintelligible sounds, make changes and corrections,’ writes Stefan Zweig, observing him at work.

Only once is there a clash between the two artists. It arises from a misunderstanding. Rodin needs to look at Mahler’s head from above in order ‘to gauge its volume and contour’, so asks him ‘perhaps rather brusquely’ to get down on his knees. But Mahler is notoriously touchy, and misinterprets the instruction. Why should he abase himself? ‘The musician thought it was to humiliate him that I asked him to kneel,’ Rodin realises later.

Instead of kneeling as requested, Mahler flushes red with anger and storms out of the studio. As a conductor, he is more used to bossing than being bossed. What he says goes: he once declared that he would use only his eyes to conduct were he not so short-sighted. But, despite the language
difficulties, the two men soon patch it up, and before Mahler sets off for Vienna, he has agreed to fit in some more sittings in October.

Rodin is thrilled by his own creation. ‘There is a suggestion not only of Eastern origin, but of something even more remote, of a race now lost to us – the Egyptians in the days of Rameses,’ he enthuses. He produces two busts of Mahler, one rougher and more expressionist, the other smoother and more naturalistic. On his fiftieth birthday, Mahler is presented with a book that has a photograph of his bust on its cover. Inside, there are tributes from his many admirers, including von Hofmannsthal and Zweig. Rodin himself writes the greeting, ‘Au Grand Musicien G. Mahler’.

After Mahler’s death, Rodin orders his assistant Aristide Roussaud to carve a marble version of the smoother bust. It can still be seen in the Musée Rodin. Bizarrely, it is labelled ‘Mozart’. Alma Mahler ascribes this to a custodial error, but others point the finger at Rodin himself. Does he wish to somehow include Mahler’s dying words, ‘Mozart ... Mozart!’ in his portrait? Or, ever conscious of commerce, does he think that the public will be more likely to come and see a sculpture of the most popular of all composers rather than the moody, difficult, modern composer whom cynics have sometimes chosen to nickname Herr Malheur?

YEARNS FOR

Rue de la Gaîté, Paris

1900

Just recently, the twenty-three-year-old Isadora Duncan has grown aware that her body is ‘something other than an instrument to express the sacred harmony of music’. Her bust, for a start, seems to be taking on a life of its own. ‘My breasts which until then had been hardly perceptible began to swell softly and astonish me with charming and embarrassing sensations. My hips, which had been like a boy’s, took on another undulation, and through my whole being I felt one great surging, longing, unmistakable urge, so that I could no longer sleep at night, but tossed and turned in feverish, painful unrest.’

So, having mesmerised London with her exuberant dancing, Isadora sets off for Paris with one aim in mind: to lose her virginity.

She proves as great a success in the French capital as she has already been in London. In her own eyes, she is ‘a little, uneducated American girl ... who in some mysterious manner had found the key to the hearts and minds of the intellectual and artistic elite’. With Maurice Ravel playing the piano, she dances to the music of Chopin at Madame de Saint-Marceaux’s Friday-night musical salons.

She is also taken up by an American lesbian in Paris, Winaretta Singer, heiress to the sewing-machine fortune. Winaretta’s first marriage, to the Prince de Scey-Montbéliard, got off to an uncertain start after she speared him with an umbrella on their wedding night, threatening to kill him if he came any closer. (Her current marriage is to another Prince, Edmond de Polignac, who is also, conveniently, homosexual.) Princess Winaretta arranges a series of subscription concerts for Isadora, to which Parisian high society flocks, and from which everyone else is barred: asked at one of these events why she has not invited Coco Chanel, the Princess replies, ‘I don’t entertain tradespeople.’ But Gabriel Fauré, Georges Clemenceau
and Octave Mirabeau all come, as does the fifty-nine-year-old Auguste Rodin, who is immediately taken with Isadora Duncan, as she is with him. Others, more snobbish than Isadora, find Rodin humdrum socially. When Vita Sackville-West first met him, he struck her as ‘a rather commonplace French bourgeois ... rather an unreal little fat man’. For her, it was only when Rodin began stroking his marble that this commonplace French bourgeois metamorphosed into a genius.

Rodin’s attraction to Isadora is instant; he is desperate to sculpt her. He often gets carried away like this. ‘Madame,’ he cries while working on the bust of Mrs Mary Hunter, the ravishing sister of the composer Dame Ethel Smyth, ‘your skin has the whiteness of turbot that one sees lying on the marble slabs of your amazing fishmongers! It looks as if it were bathed in milk! Ah, Madame!’ And with this, he kisses Mary’s hand, ‘a little too greedily’, according to her.

Isadora pursues the delighted Rodin to his studio in the rue de l’Université ‘like Psyche seeking the God Pan in his grotto, only I was not asking the way to Eros, but to Apollo’. He is only too happy to show her around. ‘Sometimes he murmured the names of his statues, but one felt that names meant little to him. He ran his hands over them and caressed them. I remember thinking that beneath his hands the marble seemed to flow like molten lead. Finally he took a small quantity of clay and pressed it between his palms. He breathed hard as he did so. The heat streamed from him like a radiant furnace. In a few moments he had formed a woman’s breast that palpitated beneath his fingers.’