Mozart and Mahlerian angst

LENOX - There is a famous story about the conductor Bruno Walter paying a visit to Gustav Mahler at his lakeside hut during a period when the great composer was at work on his Third Symphony. Walter arrived and was taking in the view of the awe-inspiring mountains when the composer quipped that his friend didn’t really have to bother looking. He had written it all into his symphony.

The anecdote, from Walter’s book on Mahler, may be exaggerated or invented outright but it captures something about the myth of this composer as transcriber of the natural sublime. But the correspondences between the external world and the interior workings of his symphonies were not always as direct. The Sixth for instance presents an enduring puzzle for commentators seeking easy links between life and art. The years of 1903 and 1904, when Mahler wrote this work, were perfectly happy years of family life with Alma and his children. His career was flourishing, all was sunshine. And yet the composer created a turbulent work of shadows, militant marches, violent collisions in sound, and even a series of colossal hammer blows in the final movement. Mahler did not need actual catastrophe in order to feel it deeply in his music.