On a transatlantic voyage, Gustav Mahler looks back on his turbulent life.
Frail and sickly, wrapped in blankets, the celebrated conductor-composer tries to warm himself on the deck of the ocean liner Amerika, bound for Europe. An attentive cabin boy brings him hot tea and tries to raise his spirits. It’s the spring of 1910, and Mahler—not yet 50, but nearing the end of his days—is brooding about the past. Physical infirmities have dogged him from the start; born in Bohemia, he was one of 14 children, six dying in infancy. Yet he worked tirelessly and achieved great acclaim, initially as director of the Vienna Opera, though politics and antisemitism clouded his tenure. Further success would come in the U.S., at the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. All along, he was composing, often in feverish outbursts. Many of Mahler’s remembrances revolve around his obsessive love for his wife Alma, “the most beautiful woman in Vienna.” They had two daughters, but lost the older to diphtheria. Alma, eventually bristling in her role as Mahler’s caretaker, begins an affair with the young architect Walter Gropius—and Mahler concludes she’s stayed with her husband only because his death is imminent. Numerous biographers have scrutinized Mahler, but in this slender, fictionalized account, Austrian author Seethaler seems mostly interested in the composer’s emotional path and creative impulses: In one passage, he vividly describes Mahler patterning a composition on a bird call. The composer isn’t idealized here, his tyrannical side apparent in the mildly amusing scene where he reluctantly poses for the sculptor Rodin. The book does neglect Alma’s professional achievements (she was a well-regarded composer in her own right); and the ending, focused on the cabin boy, seems forced. But the lyrical prose throughout more than makes up for any narrative flaws.
A luminous imagining of a great musician’s inner struggles.
