Mahler and Me

I have never been a huge fan of composer Gustav Mahler, whose work instinctively comes across to me as overdone, bombastic and self-important. Judged by his music, he seems a thoroughly disagreeable fellow. Apparently this is a fairly good approximation of the truth.

In her book Bohemians: The Glamorous Outcasts, Elizabeth Wilson devotes quite some space to the interesting question of why female artists in the century from about 1850 to 1950 never attained anything like the recognition of their male counterparts. The book lacks social theory or particular psychological insight, largely contenting itself with colorful stories. But let’s see what we can do with that.

In painting and sculpture there are a few figures to which (patriarchal) criticism has ascribed minor note, in music none at all. Clara Schumann probably comes closest, but she was to write “I once believed that I possessed creative talent, but I have given up this idea; a woman must not desire to compose — there has never yet been one able to do it“. Alma Mahler, née Schindler, Mahler’s wife until he died at the age of 51, was a socialite in fin-de-siecle Vienna and had also been a promising composer in her youth. When she became engaged to Gustav, who was at that time director of the Viennese opera, however, “he sent me a long letter with the demand that I instantly give up my music and live for him alone“. She had her personal reasons for her decision, but apparently they did not include an admiration of his art: as it does for me, she confided that “his art leaves me cold, so dreadfully cold. In plain words, I don’t believe in him as a composer“.

One of the reasons Alma accepted Gustav’s to my mind outrageous preconditions seems to have been the hope of salvation in married life from a deep sense of shame about her youthful impulses. Wilson reports her as writing in her diaries that “He wants me different, completely different… And that’s what I want as well“. Gustav accused her of having been “seduced by the false and detestable antimoralism of Nietzsche’s Ubermensch“, a claim I can only take as direct testimony to her moral qualities…

I have the good fortune to be partnered with a female artist and it seems to me that men have a responsibility not simply not to stand in the way of women’s épanouissement, but to be aware that women themselves are as much prisoners of symbolic domination as men (and make no mistake, most men are prisoners of it too; they may, as may women, be its unwitting agents, but they are far from being its architects). This means that they do not only often lack self-confidence or face a skeptical world, but they themselves lack the symbolic constructs needed to imagine themselves differently(*). You cannot simply take a woman’s self-limiting beliefs (and a fortiori sexual attitudes) and accept them in the name of “respect”; this is all too easy and scarcely disturbs a typical man’s patriarchal smugness. You have to work alongside her to help her discover herself without any consideration of self-interest (such a consideration could only be a miscalculation in any case, it seems to me). This also means loving confrontation.

It takes, inevitably, a great spirit of self-awareness and vulnerability to play this role in a way which escapes the pitfalls of being a new form of domination. And I am not saying, of course, that I succeed in that consistently (or at all). However, Mahler’s manipulation of Alma into the role of muse (and even this she did not get to play – with him anyway) is patent to modern eyes, as is the skepticism with which we are forced to assess both Alma’s and Clara Schumann’s self-analysis.

Alma and Clara were the victims of symbolic domination, with or without male agency (it seems that Robert Schumann was a good deal more enlightened and supportive than Gustav Mahler – but what could he do against a whole social system?). This generation and the next of women artists, musicians, poets, doctors, stateswomen and business leaders should not be. And that is our shared duty as it is indubitably a path also of male liberation.

Notes

(*) As Bourdieu puts it, “Les dominés appliquent des catégories construites du point de vue des dominants aux relations de domination, les faisant apparaitre ainsi comme naturelles. Ce qui peut conduire a une sorte d’auto-depréciation, voir d’auto-dénigrement systématiques… La violence symbolique s’institue par l’intermédiaire de l’adhésion que le dominé ne peut pas ne pas accorder au dominant (donc a la domination) lorsqu’il ne dispose, pour le penser et pour se penser… que d’instruments de connaissance qu’il a en commun avec lui” – Pierre Bourdieu, La Domination Masculine, Paris: Seuil 2002, p.55