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Gustav Mahler--Richard Strauss: Correspondence 1888-1911

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Herta Blaukopf presents here the story of one of the oddest "couples" in music history: Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.
Through her own commentary, using nearly all the known letters exchanged between Mahler and Strauss, Blaukopf helps readers come to a better understanding of what kept these two giants of music together--and what kept them apart.

Over a major span of their productive years, they maintained a correspondence, and frequently got together with friends and family, discussing music and how to further each other's careers. Yet these two titans never seemed to really understand each other.

Strauss, the genius of tone poems and sound painting, seemed never to run out of new ideas of music that would "sell." Strauss wrote because he COULD! (and he could make a lot of money at it!)

Mahler had a boundless reservoir of passion for Nature, and a depth of desire to understand the causes and reasons for human suffering. Mahler wrote, because he HAD TO! He was puzzled by those who could not understand the depth of suffering in his music.

After just such a moment of bewilderment, Mahler asks himself, "Are people made of different stuff than I?" Upon reading this, Strauss answers Mahler's heart-wrenching question, with a single word: "Yes."

Many good books have been written about Mahler and Strauss. This one lets you read their own thoughts in their own words, and it also includes the words of their family and associates to let readers judge for themselves.

I knew very little about the relationship between Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, and this book helped bring both composers to life in a very satisfying way. The pictures I walked away with of both composers and their relationship with music during their lives will certainly impact the way I listen to their music in the future -- and I mean that in a very positive sense.

I am certainly more of a Mahlerite than a Straussian in terms of love for the composers' music. To me, Mahler almost always has a searching quality that involves real psychological and spiritual pain, and the search for its release. Strauss, on the other hand, seems like a fine craftsman capable of looking at composition as work -- like a very good construction contractor who can promise and more or less deliver a product on time and on budget. Capable of occasional strokes of genius and invention, certainly, but hardly a pained visionary.

The correspondence between these two giants of turn-of-the-century Germanic composition, as well as the excellent essay at the end of the book by editor Herta Blaukopf, basically confirmed this sense for me. On a personal level, it certainly seems it would have been easier to get along with the relatively easy-going Strauss. Mahler comes across as a difficult person -- conductors performing his works today should certainly be glad he is no longer around, as he seems to have had a strong need to control every aspect surrounding performances of his works.

Mahler also comes across as disappointingly Janus-like in some places -- and I say that as a polite euphemism for "two-faced". On more than one occasion, we see the face he put on for Strauss in person or in correspondence actually did not reflect what he really thought or believed. These occasional bouts of dishonesty were apparently the result of his insecurities -- or perhaps more fundamentally, the fact that he was by nature a tortured artistic soul. Or maybe it was the influence of his wife Alma Mahler, who also had a penchant for stretching the truth when it suited her sense of drama (as I had already learned in her gossipy diaries, also available on Amazon). At any rate, Mahler seems to have been a much more difficult person to get along with.

I approached the Blaukopf essay at the end of the book with some hesitation -- I had just read the original correspondence between Strauss and Mahler, so why would I need to read an analysis of it? But Blaukopf does much more than re-hash what we have just read. She brings in many other sources, including letters written to other people, to provide a much more three-dimensional picture of the relationship between Mahler and Strauss than can be gained from the letters alone.

My views on the music have not changed, and I do still lean toward Mahler, although my respect for and appreciation of Strauss also grew with this reading. I particularly look forward to listening to works by both composers in the near future in light of the insights gained from this great little volume.

An excellent work, and an indispensible one to both Mahlerites, and those few of us who still consider Strauss his equal. This relatively slim volume offers an extraordinary, privileged look at the relationship of the two great composers, their professional careers as major conductors, and their travails as avant garde composers. Strauss comes across very handsomely in this work, and his remarkable personal success is a running leitmotif set against Mahler's endless struggle for recognition. The letters are marvelously amplified and filled out by Herta Blaukopf's model essay - a long full historical overview of the correspondence, complete with gossipy wives and Mahler's insecurities and deep-seated neuroses.
It is impossible not to be reminded, when reading of Mahler and Alma, of an earlier musical couple, Clara and Robert Schumann. Both couples were highly critical of another major competing musical figure, with the Schumanns it was Liszt. The Mahlers kept their thoughts largely to themselves, and they seem constantly unable to resist the bait to their egos of Strauss' public glory. It eats at them and they let themselves fall prey to petty annoyances and imagined slights. Yet both Liszt and Strauss proved fair-minded, and in the case of Liszt, really quite magnanimous. Both couples also seem touched with too much zealotry, a sort of missionary calling of the right way, their way, and I find that most disquieting. In the case of the Mahlers the condition shows readily enough in these letters and the story documented by the attached essay. One comes away with a higher regard for Strauss the man, and certain private doubts about Mahler and especially Alma largely confirmed.