Mahler (9&10)
Recent reviews of recordings of Gustav Mahler’s Symphonies,in particular the Ninth and the Tenth performing version,inevitably catalogue the personal events experience by Gustav Mahler.

Without doubt he had personal and emotional issues to live through.All through his life so many of his family perished including a beloved brother.

In the late 18 hundreds and until the discovery of potent medicines were developed 50 years later early death was unfortunately a commonplace in those earlier times.

Mahler was a highly intelligent and well read man,and in my view not the neurotic that had been the goto description in earlier days of comments and critiques of the Mahler cannon…and continue still in some quarters.
Any reading of any of the reputable books on his life will detail his intelligence.
Until his fatal infection took hold he was busy conducting and making plans for the next season in New York accruing the much needed fees that the performances would bring ,possibly enabling him to compose full time.
All of this is on the record.

The many descriptions of Mahler near to prostrate with grief over the death four years earlier of his daughter Marie,also the duplicitous behavior of his wife Alma nearly unhinged him.

Being able to isolate himself in his small composing hut and commit his ideas/impressions into printed music using his extraordinary mind to transform the situation with groundbreaking musical forms does not suggest to me a man crippled into a sort of catatonia.
Mahler found ways to transfer his ideas into the music that we have today,in particular the two symphonies mentioned above.
The superscription’s of emotion written in the scores I feel are a release for him as he found or was driven to create new musical forms that were possibly inspired by or influenced by the musical turmoil of the times and to illuminate and comment on his situation.
Only a clear mind operating in the discipline of musical structures could have composed such extraordinary sounds,forms and music

Once again….This does not suggest a person unable to function.

His last unfinished symphony promised to be as extraordinary and complex as all of his previous compositions.

What we do have as assembled by Deryck Cooke into a performing version adds so much to our knowledge of Mahler’s way of thinking …and it is now unthinkable that we might never have had “The Tenth”with the beauty and superb orchestrations to listen to and absorb.
Bruno Walter in particular and Alma for a long time resisted many calls to assemble the various parts for performance.
No doubt many will have other thoughts on this subject I have detailed in this post.
Ian Peake