The Haunting of Mahler
1994
A production by Philip Martin, diligent and definitive. It was the last he was ever to do for BBC - he was half out of the door as he did it; and it was to prove my last work for Radio 3.
Gustav Mahler and his daughter Anna, around the time of the composition of his Ninth Symphony.
1911. Mahler, dying too young, is on his last agonizing journey home from New York to Vienna. With him is his wife Alma - and a third character, Death, a mocking sergeant-figure audible to Mahler alone. Lying bed-ridden in the New York hotel, and even while he is borne on a stretcher to the taxi to the dock, Mahler is toiling to complete his Tenth Symphony, struggling one last time to achieve the blazing final consummating harmony that has all his life eluded him. (Musically, this is technically true: but it is the psychological struggle that counts.) With sarcasm and mockery, Sergeant Death is trying to prevent him, scattering the drafts and sketches, subverting his efforts, weakening his failing powers. No composer lives after his Ninth Symphony. But Mahler is refusing to die, until his triumph is achieved. It is a physical and moral struggle between the two.
From his beginning, Mahler has been near-paralyzed by a morbid fixation on death. With each symphony, he wins through, and asserts the power of love and life - in the music; but each time, in the life, again comes Death with more negatives to bring him down. Sexual difficulties that threaten his marriage. Public assaults on his self-esteem. Guilt as a ‘survivor’, after almost all his brothers and sisters have died in infancy. The death of a child of his own. The loss of his wife’s loyalty. Now, at the last, his failing heart, and the ugly limp in its beat, the remorseless tread of his own approaching death...