“Mahler wanted to live, that’s the whole point!”

Do you remember the first time you heard Mahler’s music?

Pappano: My first encounter with Mahler’s music was, of course, with the vocal music; the Rückert-Lieder – Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen [I am lost to the world] had a huge impact on me, but you know, strangely enough, the song that stays with me is Liebst du um Schönheit [If you love for beauty]. I know that song was originally not part of the group, but it’s so specifically Mahlerian. Mahler’s identity is absolutely unmistakable – in three notes. And this is what made such a huge impression on me; it couldn’t be anybody else.

It’s very popular to say that Mahler was influenced by this or that. He was a conductor, the greatest conductor of his generation, certainly for opera, and he had everything in his head, so of course his music can be a mishmash of all different things; but what you do with this mishmash, what you do with your influences and how you make them into something that is your own – he did that like nobody else.

[...]

Find the full interview in Gustav Mahler: The Conductors’ Interviews
Edited by Wolfgang Schaufler
ISBN: 978-3-7024-7162-0
ISMN: 979-0-008-08493-5
Order number: UE26311 (German Edition: UE26310)

We’ve just received the details about the forthcoming film Mahler on the Couch, directed by Percy Adlon and Felix Adlon.

MAHLER AUF DER COUCH

Release date Germany/Austria July 7th 2010
A new film by Percy Adlon and Felix Adlon
A genius composer, his wife, her lover … and Sigmund Freud

Barbara Romaner as Alma
Johannes Silberschneider as Gustav Mahler
Karl Markovics as Sigmund Freud
Friedrich Mücke as Walter Gropius
Eva Mattes as Anna Moll
Lena Stolze as Justine Mahler-Rosé
and
Nina Berten as Anna von Mildenburg

Esa-Pekka Salonen conducts the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra

Gustav Mahler snatched Alma under the noses of Vienna’s artistic elite, but ten years of marriage and the death of one child have exacerbated the strains caused by the 19 year gap in their ages, and Mahler’s refusal to allow Alma to write music (“I need a wife, not a colleague”). While staying at a spa resort, Alma falls in love with Walter Gropius, five years her junior. Tormented, Mahler seeks advice from Sigmund Freud. The encounter of the two giants of music and psychoanalysis is bumpy, temperamental, and not without humor.