No concert on Sunday, May 29, 2011.

The use of cameras or recording equipment during the

performance is not allowed. Please be sure that cell phones,

pagers, and other electronic devices are turned off'.

Please note that late entry or reentry ofthe

West Building after 6:30 pm is not permitted.

Music Department

National Gallery ofArt

Sixth Street and Constitution Avenue nw

Washington, DC

www.nga.gov

The Sixty-ninth Season of

The William Nelson Cromwell and F. Lammot Belin

Concerts

National Gallery ofArt

2,843rd Concert

Alexandria Symphony Orchestra

Kim Allen Kluge, music director

May 22, 2011

Sunday, 6:30 pm

West Building, West Garden Court

Admissionfree
Program

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911)

Symphony no. 1 in D (“Titan”)

Langsam. Schleppend. Wie ein Naturlaut.

Im Anfang sehr gemachlich

(Dragging slowly; like a sound of nature; at the outset very leisurely)

Kraftig bewegt, doch nicht zu schnell 

(Strongly moving, but not too fast)

Feierlich und gemessen, ohne zu schleppen

(Solemn and measured, without dragging)

Stiirmisch bewegt-Energisch

(With stormy movement-energetic)

The Musicians

ALEXANDRIA SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA

Northern Virginia’s premiere fully professional orchestra, the Alexandria

Symphony Orchestra was founded in 1954 and has established a reputation

for thematic and multi-disciplinary programming that features a mix of classical and contemporary music. Under the baton ofmusic director Kim Allen

Kluge, the symphony has distinguished itselfthrough powerful performances 

marked by poetry and vision. This is the third time that Maestro Kluge and 

the ensemble have brought a special symphonic program to the National

Gallery. In 2007 the orchestra played music of Beethoven in honor ofthe

exhibition J. M. W. Turner, and in 2009 it performed the Four Last Songs of

Richard Strauss with soprano Alessandra Marc.

KIM ALLEN KLUGE

Recognized throughout the region as an orchestra builder, conductor Kim

Allen Kluge celebrates twenty-four years as music director ofthe Alexandria

Symphony Orchestra. Noting his accomplishments in this regard, the 

Washington Post wrote: “Kluge has fashioned an ensemble with tremendous

musical responsiveness.” He has also made his mark as an arranger, chamber 

musician, chorus director, composer, concertmaster, concerto soloist, organist,

orchestral keyboardist, recitalist, singer, vocal coach, and wind player. A

graduate ofthe Oberlin College Conservatory of Music, where he served as

concertmaster ofthe Oberlin Chamber Orchestra and received the coveted

Arthur Dann Award for Outstanding Pianist and the Pi Kappa Lambda

Scholarship for musical excellence, Kluge pursued graduate studies in piano 

and conducting at the University of Maryland and received a conducting

diploma from the Accademia Musicale Chigiana in Siena, Italy. Dedicated

to ongoing development ofhis skills, he has participated in the conducting

program ofthe Tanglewood Music Center, where he studied with Roger

Norrington, Seiji Ozawa, and Simon Rattle. Kluge has guest-conducted the 

Baltimore Lyric Opera, Boston Pops, and Mannheim Chamber orchestras as

well as the Sinfonietta de Paris and Les Solistes Parisiens.

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www.nga.gov/programs/film
Cover

Auguste Rodin, Gustav Mahler, 1909, bronze, National Gallery of Art,

Washington, Gift of Lotte Walter Lindt in memory of her father, Bruno Walter

3

Gustav Mahler (1860-1911):

A Tribute in Art, Music, and Film

David Gariff

National Gallery of Art
4 David Gariff

"We cannot see how any of his music can long survive

him."

— Henry Krehbiel, New York Tribune, May 21, 1911

"My time will come... ”

— Gustav Mahler

Interest in the life, times, and music of Gustav Mahler

(1860-1911) has been a dominant and persistent theme in modern cultural history at least since the decade of the 1960s. His

status is due, in part, to the championing of his music by American conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein (1918-1990).

Last year (2010) was the 150th anniversary of Mahler’s birth;

this year (2011), we commemorate the 100th anniversary of

his death on May 18. The study of Mahler —the man and his

music —confronts us not only with the unique qualities of his

artistic vision and accomplishments but also with one of the

most fertile and creative periods and places in Western cultural

history: fin-de-siecle Vienna. Mahler’s life and times close the

door on the nineteenth century. His death prior to the outbreak

of the First World War is fitting, for his music anticipates the

end of the old European order destroyed by the war and summons us to a new beginning in what can best be described as

a twentieth-century age of anxiety —an anxiety prophetically

revealed in Mahler’s symphonies and songs.

Mahler was at the heart of the revitalization of the

arts in late nineteenth-century Vienna. His path crossed with

the most important and seminal personalities in Austrian

arts, letters, philosophy, and science, including Sigmund

Freud (1856-1939), Hugo Wolf (1860-1903), Gustav Klimt

(1862-1918), Hugo von Hofmannsthal (1874-1929), Arnold

Schoenberg (1874-1951), Oskar Kokoschka (1886-1980),

5 Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): A Tribute in Art, Music, and Film

and Egon Schiele (1890-1918), to name only a few. As composer,

conductor, and opera director Mahler overcame innumerable

personal and professional obstacles to achieve a formidable

reputation and prestige throughout Europe and America. He 

would go on to encourage and support a new generation of

Austrian composers, the so-called Second Viennese School that

included, in addition to Schoenberg, Alban Berg (1885-1935)

and Anton Webern (1883-1945).

Today Mahler assumes almost mythic proportions fueled not only by the rediscovery and frequent performances

(along with in-depth analysis) of his music but also by his emergence as a cult figure in popular culture. His life, music, image,

myth, legend, and, most especially, his tempestuous relationship with his wife Alma, continue to find their way overtly or

covertly into film, fiction, theater, performance art, comics, and

caricature. However distorted and historically suspect these

portrayals may be, they nonetheless attest to the continuing

hold that Mahler has on our contemporary psyche.

Mahler and Fin-de-Siecle Vienna

I

"/ have to admit I’m Viennese to the core."

— Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler was born in Kaliste in eastern Bohemia

(Czech Republic) on July 7,1860. Shortly after his birth the

family moved to Jihlava, where his father produced and sold

hard liquor and ultimately opened a tavern. The young Mahler

displayed an early talent for music and appeared publicly as a

pianist by the age of ten. In 1871, his father sent him to Prague

to further his academic studies. In 1875, he entered the Vienna
6 David Gariff

Conservatory. He graduated in 1878, and during his final two

years at the conservatory, Mahler turned his attention to composition and conducting.

Mahler went on to study at Vienna University. He 

displayed far-ranging interests in art history, philology, and

German literature while continuing to pursue a career in music.

Leaving the university in 1879, Mahler accepted his first conducting job in Bad Hall, near Linz, in 1880. Thus began a long

period of musical apprenticeships in small opera houses and

theaters throughout Austria, Germany, and Eastern Europe.

Mahler’s sights, however, were always on Vienna and a position at the prestigious Vienna Opera House. In February 1897,

he converted from Judaism to Catholicism, necessary for the

realization of that goal. Shortly after his change of faith, in 

April 1897, Mahler became a staff conductor in Vienna. By October 1897, he was principal conductor and director of the Vienna

Opera. This period, from 1897 until his resignation in 1907,

placed Mahler at the heart of Viennese art and culture.

His time as both opera director and conductor of the

Vienna Philharmonic was tumultuous. His standards were high,

his rehearsal practices demanding, and his interpretations of

the works of such revered composers as Beethoven controversial. His own compositions were equally challenging to musicians, critics, and the public. In this regard, Mahler was very

much part of the artistic ferment represented in the visual arts

by the Vienna Secession led by Gustav Klimt. Mahler’s arrival in 

Vienna in 1897 coincided with Klimt's modernist revolt against

the conservative strictures of the Kunstlerhaus-Genossenschaft,

at that time the oldest surviving artists’ society in Austria.

In 1902, Klimt and the artists of the secession dedicated

the entire space of the Fourteenth Secession Exhibition to

Beethoven. The inspiration for this tribute was the remarkable

7 Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): A Tribute in Art, Music, and Film

Gustav Klimt, Baby (Cradle), 1917/1918, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art,

Washington, Gift of Otto and Franciska Kallir with the help of the Carol and

Edwin Gaines Fullinwider Fund
8 David Gariff

statue Beethoven (1902) by Max Klinger (1857-1920), the sculptor from Leipzig. The statue was to be the exhibition’s centerpiece. Klimt contributed his great Beethoven Frieze, a vast cycle

of paintings on dry plaster inlaid with various materials running

along three walls of the exhibition hall. Mahler conducted a special condensed version of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony that he

himself had arranged and revised. Architectural and installation

designs by Josef Hoffmann completed the decor. As such, this

was a true Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk: a total art experience

in painting, sculpture, architecture, design, and music celebrating the greatest hero of German art and culture: Beethoven.

The Fourteenth Secession Exhibition opened in April

1902, a month after Mahler married Alma Maria Schindler

(1879-1964). Alma was the daughter of the landscape painter

Emil Jakob Schindler (1842-1892) and the stepdaughter of

another painter, Carl Moll (1861-1945), who founded the Vienna

Secession along with Klimt. Klimt had known Alma since her

childhood, and Mahler first met her in November 1901. Alma,

along with her family and friends, enhanced Mahler’s lifelong

interest in and knowledge of the visual arts.

Mahler’s participation in the Fourteenth Secession

Exhibition led to a scandal. While the public celebrated the

performance, the critics hurled hostile accusations. Mahler’s

arrangement was deemed over-orchestrated, too painterly,

an aberration, representing a kind of revisionist barbarism.

He was attacked for his “modernist" interpretation, deemed

to be more Mahler than Beethoven.

Neither Klimt in his wall paintings nor Klinger in his

monumental polychrome sculpture addressed Beethoven’s

music. Hoffmann’s temple-like setting reinforced Klinger’s portrayal of Beethoven as a Zeus-like enthroned god. Klimt produced a series of more personal and ambiguous images that

9 Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): A Tribute in Art, Music, and Film

evoked universal themes of good versus evil, the longing for

happiness, the role of the hero, and the solace of poetry and

the arts. All of this embedded in a sensual portrayal of embracing naked figures, opulent visual details, and rhythmic linear

patterns —similar to a symphony unfolding in three movements

across the three walls. A closer examination of Klimt’s knighthero in the “Longing for Happiness” section revealed what

most people recognized as a portrait of a modern-day hero:

Gustav Mahler. With this image, Klimt established a creative

lineage from Beethoven (the artist-godhead) to Mahler and

himself (the heroic artist-warriors).

Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D Major

"Only when I experience something do I compose, and

| only when composing do I experience anything."

— Gustav Mahler

Gustav Mahler expressed himself primarily through

the musical form of the symphony. Building on the tradition of

Beethoven, he drew upon the vision of symphonic form embodied in Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, the “Choral” symphony. He 

expanded both the formal and programmatic aspects of the

art, taking the symphony into new realms of emotion, meaning,

and sound. For Mahler “a symphony must be like the world, it

must embrace everything." By “symphony” he meant “creating a

world with all the technical means available.” The opening measures of the First Symphony— as if emerging from some primordial void —seem to announce this new world. The music charts

an ambitious journey for the listener and expands the possibilities

of the symphony in modern times. Ironically, Mahler’s vision is
10 David Gariff

also an elegiac farewell to the symphony. That musical form

never again embodied the significance it held for Mahler; only

Anton Bruckner (1824-1896), Jean Sibelius (1865-1957) and

later, Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), approach the composer’s symphonic ambition. Mahler and Sibelius had an opportunity

to discuss their views of the symphony during a conducting tour

Mahler made to Finland in 1907. It was during this encounter that

Mahler defined the symphony as “like the world,” an opinion contradicted by Sibelius’ more organic approach to the art form.

Mahler’s nine symphonies (along with the unfinished

tenth) are comparable to the greatest works of Western literature, art, and architecture in their formal and creative ambition. The relationship to architecture is most apt, as the three

basic elements that define architecture are evident throughout

Mahler’s symphonies: function, structure, and beauty. Mahler’s

music is architectonic in the truest sense of the word: it exists

in both space and time. It is both synchronic (existing in the

moment with no reference to the past) and diachronic (aware

of the continuum of musical language and its shifting nature

through time). Few composers of symphonic music build with

the complexity of Mahler. The abrupt starts and stops, exaggerated effects of orchestral color and dynamics, dissonant

chords, jarring contrasts in mood, humorous asides, and ironic

statements can disorient even the most dedicated listener. Like

a great architect, however, who knows the stresses and strains

that his materials can withstand, Mahler ultimately reconciles

all conflicting forces to achieve a unified, freestanding structure of sound and meaning. Especially powerful is the sense

of controlled propulsion, a lesson learned from Beethoven but

used by Mahler with an uncanny skill. He builds, dismantles, and

rebuilds the music even as we listen.

Mahler’s scores brim with atypical and personal markn Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): A Tribute in Art, Music, and Film

ings instructing conductor and musicians to pace themselves,

not to arrive too quickly at a given musical moment, to take

a step forward, a step back, two steps forward but now with

more urgency. The slow, methodical building of musical tensions and climaxes, as well as the almost painful disintegrations

of sound (as at the end of the Ninth Symphony) evoke both

Mahler the knight-hero as depicted in Klimt’s Beethoven Frieze,

but also Mahler the prophet of death and herald of the end of

the old order. Writing about Mahler as “musical prophet," Leonard Bernstein remarks in The Unanswered Question (1976):

What was it that Mahler saw? Three kinds of death. First, his own imminent death of which he was acutely aware. (The opening bars of this

Ninth Symphony are an imitation of the arrhythmia of his failing heartbeat.) And second, the death of tonality, which for him meant the death

of music itself, music as he knew it and loved it...and finally, his third

and most important vision: the death of society, of our Faustian culture.

Mahler’s First Symphony begins this long journey of

personal discovery. Each Mahler symphony seems to ask basic

existential questions, and to seek meaning and answers in 

a different place: nature, God, childhood, the hero, art, love,

death. Mahler was twenty-seven when he completed the First

Symphony, written between 1884 and 1888. He conducted the

premiere in Budapest on November 20,1889. As with most

Mahler symphonies, the ideas for the work extend far back into

the composer’s earlier years, and the symphony was revised

numerous times later on.

As mentioned above, the opening of the symphony

seems to echo the idea of creation itself—a long, sustained

“A” introduced by the strings. The note is both eerie and ethereal, a cosmic sound emerging from the void. From this rather
12 David Gariff

ominous opening, the symphony explores motifs drawn from

earlier Mahler songs (Songs of a Wayfarer); Austrian folk dance,

specifically the Landler, the nursery tune “Frere Jacques, dormez-vous” (written as a funeral march); to the fourth movement,

introduced by a cymbal crash, which Mahler described as the

ascent from hell to heaven.

The First Symphony premiered in the United States on

December 16,1909, in Carnegie Hall. The Philharmonic Society

of New York performed under the direction of Mahler himself,

who was at the time music director of the orchestra.

Mahler in Fiction and Film

"... [Mahler’s] consumingly intense personality made the

strongest impression upon me."

— Thomas Mann

Gustav Mahler has lived in fiction and film from the moment of his actual death in 1911 until today. Author Thomas Mann

(1875-1955) met him in 1910. He remarked that Mahler was the

first truly great man he had ever met in person. After hearing a

performance of the Eighth Symphony, Mann wrote to the composer praising him as "the man who, as I believe, expresses the

art of our time in its profoundest and most sacred form.”

Much of the world was aware of Mahler’s failing heart

and desire to return from America to Europe in April 1911. Newspapers kept a deathwatch on the composer as he landed in

Paris and traveled on to Vienna. On May 18,1911, while vacationing on the island of Brioni in the Adriatic, Mann received news of

Mahler’s death. It seemed to many that a great man had just departed the earth. Several days later, on the Lido in Venice, Mann

13 Gustav Mahler (1860-1911): A Tribute in Art, Music, and Film

began to write Death in Venice. In describing his protagonist,

Gustav von Aschenbach, Mann had Mahler’s features in mind;

Gustav von Aschenbach was of a somewhat less than medium height,

dark, and clean-shaven. The head seemed a bit too large for the

almost dainty physique. The hair brushed back, was thin at the crown

but very thick and gray at the temples and framed a high, rugged,

scarred-looking forehead. The gold frame of the rimless spectacles

cut into the root of a strong, nobly aquiline nose: The mouth was

large —now slack, now suddenly narrow and tight —the cheeks sunken

and furrowed, the well-shaped chin slightly cleft.

The weight of Mahler’s death resonates in Mann’s final

line from Death in Venice: “And before nightfall a shocked and

respectful world received the news of his decease.”

The film version of Death in Venice by the Italian director Luchino Visconti (1906-1976) opened in 1971. Visconti took

many liberties with the original Mann novella in his adapted

screenplay. Among the most important was to change Aschenbach from a writer to a composer, strengthening the ties to

Mahler. Visconti wove Mahler’s music, the Adagietto from the

Fifth Symphony and excerpts from the Third Symphony, into

the soundtrack. Visconti’s use of the Adagietto helped create a

new audience for Mahler’s music in the later twentieth century.

Shortly after the appearance of Visconti’s Death in

Venice, the British director Ken Russell brought Mahler to the

screen as well. In Mahler (1974), Russell tells Mahler’s story

through a combination of poignant scenes that ring true,

coupled with hallucinatory fantasies that range from the bizarre,

to the humorous, to the crass. This film, perhaps more than any

other vehicle, may be responsible for popularizing Mahler’s

image for many who had never heard a note of his music.
14 David Gariff

More recently is Bruce Beresford’s Bride of the Wind

(2001). Taking its title from the painting by Oskar Kokoschka depicting his tortured relationship with Alma after her husband’s

death, Beresford’s film is less about Mahler and more an exploration of the many famous loves of Alma —from Gustav Klimt to

Alexander Zemlinsky (1871-1942) to Mahler, Kokoschka, Walter

Gropius (1883-1969) and, finally, Franz Werfel (1890-1945).

Released last year is Mahler auf der Couch (Mahler on

the Couch) (2010), a German/Austrian coproduction directed

by Percy Adlon. The film chronicles the historic encounter in 

1910 between Mahler and Sigmund Freud when the composer,

learning of his wife’s affair with Walter Gropius, sought counseling. For a more documentary-like film biography there is

Sterben werd' ich, um zu leben (Gustav Mahler: To Live, I Will

Die) (1987) —a German film directed by Wolfgang Lesowsky.

Fin-de-siecle Vienna has also figured prominently in such films

as Klimt (2006) directed by Raoul Ruiz.

The composer’s legend continues to grow, as his music

sustains us in yet another century. Mahler’s love of irony is well

served by the fact that for all his ruminations on death and the

end of things, his music instills in all who discover it a sense of

hope and new beginnings.