Well, actually, there is — and this man, more than most, should know it. For Mengelberg has lost his orchestra in retribution for his apparent collaboration with the engineers of that most horrendous human tragedy, the Holocaust. And it is this ironic tension, between the sublime aspirations and the base actions of a great artist and a flawed man, that forms the dramatic and emotional core of Daniel Klein’s new one-man play, “Mengelberg and Mahler.’’
Robert Lohbauer, longtime weapons master at Shakespeare & Company, plays Mengelberg with passionate commitment in the company’s handsome premiere, directed by Dutch filmmaker Emile Fallaux. Klein and Fallaux had originally written the story as a screenplay, which never sold; Klein then decided to remake it as a solo piece for Lohbauer to perform onstage.
This format allows us inside the self-justifying, sometimes claustrophobic interior world of the conductor, but it also produces too many “conversations’’ with the other key character, the composer Gustav Mahler. “What’s that, Gustav?’’ Mengelberg says to the air, then launches into a new diatribe.
Certainly the two men have much to argue about: Mengelberg had been an early champion of Mahler’s work, which the Nazis then banned because the composer was Jewish, so if Mahler had lived to see Mengelberg agreeing to the removal of Jewish musicians from his orchestra, he surely would have protested. As a dramatic device, however, the repeated invocation of a deceased and invisible sparring partner grows tedious.
As Klein presents him, too, Mengelberg is a sometimes tiresome companion for a 90-minute play. His self-pity and self-absorption make it difficult to engage fully in the arguments that lie at the heart of the drama; if we don’t trust the debater, it’s harder to ponder the questions he raises, of moral action in an immoral world and of the competing claims of art and survival.
