Behind the Music: A Mahler Trivia Quiz
(Includes some little known and apocryphal information about the composer and his music.)
1. How many symphonies did Mahler write?
Nine, ten, and perhaps even eleven—depending on your point of view. Being superstitious and well aware of music history, Mahler was fearful that a ninth symphony would be his last. Beethoven had died after writing nine symphonies, and Bruckner never lived to complete his Ninth. After his Eighth Symphony, Mahler sat down to tackle his next major work, Das Lied von der Erde. This he thought of as a “song-symphony,” though he stopped short of attaching that label to the work. And so when he was about to begin what he actually called his Ninth Symphony, he believed he had tricked fate. Das Lied was of course a symphony, and this Ninth was a “ninth” in title only—actually, it was his tenth symphony! Fate had better things to do than play semantic games. Mahler commenced work on a Tenth Symphony (would he have called it Number Eleven?), but he died having finished only one movement. Based on sketches Mahler left, the Tenth has been completed, and several different “performing versions” exist. Mahlerians differ as to whether or not this Tenth Symphony should really be admitted into the canon. Purists will say that Mahler wrote nine symphonies. Other music lovers will say that he wrote ten. Based on his mood, Mahler himself might have told you that the last symphony he worked on was an eleventh.
2. Name three of Alma Mahler’s most famous lovers (besides Mahler himself).
No doubt about it, if you seated the men on Alma’s short list of lovers around the table at a Viennese coffee house, you would hear some interesting talk. In the chair next to Mahler is Walter Gropius, one of the twentieth century’s outstanding architects (Alma and Walter’s daughter, Manon, died at eighteen and was the “angel” to whose memory Berg dedicated his Violin Concerto). To the right of Gropius is novelist Franz Werfel, whose Song of Bernadette would be adapted for the Hollywood screen with the title role taken by Jennifer Jones, music by Alfred Newman. Next to Werfel sits scowling Oskar Kokoschka, the expressionist who dredged the psyche for unmentionable longings and gave them concrete form. He painted Alma many times, most notably in “The Tempest.” Across from Kokoschka: the composer Alexander Zemlinksy, whom Alma reduced to a wreck, one moment ridiculing him for his looks and the next hungering for his love. Alma was also friendly with such artists as Gustav Klimt (who made several portraits of her), Arnold Schoenberg, Enrico Caruso, and writer Gerhart Hauptmann. Alban Berg dedicated his opera Wozzeck to her.
3. What did Mahler request be engraved upon his headstone?
Two words: “Gustav Mahler.”
4. What great composer painted a picture depicting “The Funeral of Gustav Mahler”?
Arnold Schoenberg.
5. Alma Mahler tells us that her husband created a portrait of her in one of his symphonies. Which one?
Symphony No. 6, first movement.
6. According to Mahler, what was a symphony supposed to represent?
The world.
7. If you had taken Gustav Mahler to dinner, what kind of cuisine would he have been likely to favor?
Mahler was basically a vegetarian, though he indulged himself in some lapses.
8. Mahler never heard Das Lied von der Erde or the Ninth Symphony. They were given their world premieres by a Mahler disciple who went on to make memorable recordings of both works and who died in Beverly Hills in 1962. Who was he?
Bruno Walter (who conducted the SFS in Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 in 1951 and in the Fourth Symphony in 1953).
9. What work by Mahler did Michael Tilson Thomas conduct in his debut with the San Francisco Symphony in January 1974?
The Ninth Symphony.
10. In the finale of his Sixth Symphony (premiered in 1906), Mahler had initially included three “hammer-blows of fate” that signified assaults on the “hero” of this drama (the last blow, said Mahler, “fells him as a tree is felled”). The summer of 1907 brought Mahler three such blows. What were they?
The death at age 5 of his daughter Maria, the diagnosis of his own severe heart disease, and the bitter end of his directorship of the Vienna Court Opera. Some commentators believe that the reason Mahler eliminated the third hammer-blow in his final revision of the Symphony was that he was horrified at the accuracy with which he had “predicted” his own fate. That is likely a legend given currency by the composer’s widow.