Why Mahler? by Norman Lebrecht

Author:Norman Lebrecht [Norman Lebrecht]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780571260805
Publisher: Faber & Faber
Published: 2010-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

The critics are bowled over. ‘Comparable to the best that New York has known,’ writes Richard Aldrich in the Times. ‘Mr Mahler did honour to himself, Wagner’s music and the New York public,’ agrees the Tribune’s Henry Krehbiel. The Sun reports a full house, ‘as large as it might have been on a Caruso night’. After the prejudice and egotism of Vienna, the astuteness and objectivity of the New York critics seem heaven-sent. There are about twenty daily newspapers in New York, of which seven cover the arts. The Big Five critics, ‘the most unmerciful in the world’,10 are Krehbiel, Aldrich, Henry Theophilus Finck (Post) and William James Henderson and James Gibbons Huneker on the Sun. Krehbiel, the doyen, is built like a football player with the looks of a film star. Tetchy, opinionated and dedicated to improving public taste, he is revered by readers and ignored in the opera boardroom. The balance between press and power is altogether healthier than in Vienna.

Which is not to say that New York’s press is any the less combative than Vienna’s. It scrabbles for wisps of dinner-party rumour and, days after Mahler’s debut, reports that he is to be Conried’s successor. The story is not altogether without substance. The board have told Conried his time is up and a stockholder is on his way to Milan to hire La Scala manager Giulio Gatti-Casazza with his conductor, Arturo Toscanini. Fearing Italian dominance, the incoming chairman, Otto H. Kahn, proposes that Mahler should control the repertoire. Kahn, German-born and a British citizen, is everything J.P.Morgan fears and loathes – a polyglot Jew, with links to European banks. A Jew cannot buy or even rent a box in the Met’s Diamond Horseshoe. Kahn, however, has paid off the company’s $450,000 deficit and is in a position to call the tune. He asks Mahler to run the next season. ‘I quite decisively refused,’ reports Mahler.11

‘Anxious to work away from the German atmosphere and the Jew (Mahler is a J.)’,12 the rest of the board endorse Toscanini’s appointment and Mahler begins to fear he will be pushed out. His application intensifies. After five Tristans in New York and two more in Philadelphia and Boston, he devotes fifteen rehearsals to Don Giovanni, in which Fyodor Chaliapin sings his first Leporello, Antonio Scotti is the Don and the women are Emma Eames, Marcella Sembrich and Johanna Gadski. The singing, he finds, is ‘almost unsurpassable’.13 Rehearsing Die Walküre, he addresses his attention to chorus morale. ‘Ladies,’ he begins, ‘never before have I heard such voices assembled for the Valkyries, not even in Vienna.’ A twitter of delight shivers through the ranks. ‘And now, ladies,’ he continues, ‘finding that you are possessed of such wonderful voices, I must ask you to use them.’14 Their triple forte almost disturbs trading on Wall Street.

Fremstad, strained in Walküre, shines in Siegfried, and he closes with Fidelio – Berta Morena, Karl Burrian and Anton von Rooy – inserting the Leonore No. 3 overture after the dungeon scene to heighten dramatic tension.

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