Alma Mahler is best known these days for the bejewelled profligacy
of her marriages and relationships: after Gustav, who stole her from
the arms of Zemlinsky, she bestowed her considerable charms on Klimt,
Kokoschka, Gropius and Werfel. But for all her social prominence she
lived in an age where women were supposed to swallow their pride for
their husband’s greater glory – not much had changed, then, in the half-century
since Clara Schumann suppressed her own creative instincts in favour
of her procreative duties. It took a crisis in the Mahlers’ marriage,
in 1910, for Gustav to wonder what damage he might have wrought in insisting
that his wife-to-be abandon composition; since this concert, one of
the earliest promotions of the recently founded Gustav Mahler Society
UK, was said to be celebrating the centenary of their wedding, it was
an apposite, if belated, time to make amends. And it was, apparently,
the first time that all of Alma Mahler’s sixteen surviving songs have
been performed in public in the UK.
The upshot of the concert was to establish Alma as – if not a neglected
genius, and perhaps not even a figure of pronounced individuality –
at the very least a capable composer, whose psychological insights into
her texts reveals a perceptive intelligence at work, a Viennese mirror
of her heady times. And if you wondered if she might have been writing
under the shadow of her all-consuming husband, put the thought aside:
Alma was her own woman.
The songs were presented chronologically. The chromatic language of
the Fünf Lieder (1901–2) serves texts which deal largely
with the unstable world of dream and imagined bliss: tonality is liquid,
fugitive, presaging the idiom of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, the Wunderkind
who was soon to amaze Vienna –but who was only four when these songs
were written. The simplicity of the first of the following Zwei Lieder
was therefore all the more surprising – perhaps the folksy refrains
of Rilke’s ‘Leise weht ein erstes Blühn’, with their insistence
on blossoming, awoke memories of Schubert’s ‘Röslein’; perhaps
Alma’s allusions were deliberate.
By the time of the Vier Lieder of 1911 the language is darker
even than in the first set of Lieder, the tonality so unstable
that the harmony sometimes doesn’t even resolve at all: here Alma is
closer to Berg than to any other composer.
The last five songs, written some time before 1924, show a sudden simplicity
– sudden, at least, as far as we can plot Alma’s development, which
isn’t very. The lushness of the earlier songs is gone, the tonality
more secure, the psychological perceptiveness giving way to an almost
hymnic quality.
As a husband Mahler had put Alma in her place; now he did it again
as a composer, with the Rückert-Lieder interpolated to open
the second half of the concert. It showed up the distance between a
capable composer and an outstanding one: Alma achieved her ends by complexity,
Gustav by economy of means. And less was much more.
The singer for this voyage of discovery was the Paris-based Hungarian
mezzo Klara Csordas, once a student of György Kurtág.
Hers is a voice of remarkable amplitude and character, dark and rich,
and one sensed even at climaxes that she had volumes in reserve and
the power to fill a much larger hall. She also paid particular attention
to the words, an important consideration in these image-laden songs;
a German-speaker without the texts could virtually have lip-read what
she was singing. Above all, she believed in the music. And what she
could do with music two notches higher she showed with the Rückert-Lieder:
the closing pages were met with the kind of silence that you hear only
when an audience is moved beyond motion. The pianist was Richard
Black, attentive, unemphatically supportive, unfussily seeing to
the detail of his part. Black – accompanist, répétiteur,
coach, recording engineer and more – is the kind of figure who, largely
unseen by a wider public, provides the glue in London’s musical life,
so it was good to see him getting some applause full in the face. Spoken
introductions were provided from the stage by Roderick Swanston, as
eloquent as ever, setting the songs in context and helpfully directing
his audience’s ears to what they might look out for.
The Gustav Mahler Society UK was founded only in September 2001, and
this was its most ambitious presentation to date. They can reasonably
feel pleased with themselves. You can contact them at admin@gmsuk.org
or at PO Box 33341, London NW11 8XA; the website is at www.gmsuk.org.
Martin Anderson
Return to:
Music on the Web