by Andy Conway
Rusmanis, K. (Director). (1997). Mahler (Great Composers series) [DVD]. United Kingdom: BBC and NVC Arts.
Lesowsky, W. (Director). (1987). Gustav Mahler: To Live, I Will Die [DVD]. Canada: Forum Film.
Russell, K. (Director). (1974). Mahler [Motion picture]. United Kingdon: Fremantle Media.
Adlon, P., & Adlon, F. (Directors). (2016). Mahler auf der couch [Motion picture]. Germany: ArtHaus.
AND THE FOLLOWING YOUTUBE video was the initial inspiration for bringing Mahler into the Touchstone universe: Mahler: From the Grave: Finale Symphony 10 version Rudolf Barshai [Video file]. (2012, July 9). Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uRr4LqR5qBc&t=65s
Historical Notes
TREFIWEN is loosely based on the hamlet of Tresinwen in Pembrokeshire, Wales.
Flatiron building. The New York Tribune called the new building “A stingy piece of pie ... the greatest inanimate troublemaker in New York,” while the Municipal Art Society said that it was “Unfit to be in the Center of the City.” The New York Times called it a “monstrosity.” Built by the Fuller Company, who originally took the 19th floor for its headquarters. The retail space in the building’s “cowcatcher” at the “prow” was leased by United Cigar Stores, and the building’s vast cellar was occupied by the Flatiron Restaurant, which could seat 1,500 patrons and was open from breakfast through late supper for those taking in a performance at one of the many theatres which lined Broadway.
Boy Jones. Common Victorian slang for blackmailer, after Edward Jones, the British teenager who became notorious for breaking into Buckingham Palace multiple times between 1838 and 1841.
The Bride of the Wind (Die Windsbraut) is a painting by Oskar Kokoschka. It depicts the artist lying alongside his lover Alma Mahler. Their brief affair was conducted a year after Gustav Mahler’s death.
Dr Joseph Fraenkel was the Mahlers’ house doctor. An eccentric but talented physician, more intuitive than scientific, and fascinated by the supernatural. He was said to be able to make an instant diagnosis without examination and, in fact, considered operations ‘criminal’. [DLG, 99]
Otto Kahn was a German-born American investment banker, collector, philanthropist, and patron of the arts. Kahn was president and chairman of the board of directors of the Metropolitan Opera.
Giulio Gatti-Casazza was general manager of the Metropolitan Opera from 1908 to 1935.
Arturo Toscanini was an Italian conductor, renowned for his intensity, his perfectionism, his ear for orchestral detail and sonority, and his eidetic memory.
No one would for fifty years after his death. Mahler himself predicted his place in history, once commenting: “Would that I could perform my symphonies for the first time 50 years after my death!” [DLG, 170]
A woman’s pale blue handwriting. This is a little joke I couldn’t resist making, being the title of a famous novel by Franz Werfel, Alma’s third husband.
Selig Silverstein, also known as Selig Cohen, was a Russian-born member of the Anarchist Federation of America. On March 29, 1908, six weeks after the events of this novel, he attended a gathering of 7,000 protestors in Union Square and attempted to throw a bomb at a policeman. Instead, it exploded in his hands, blowing his face and fingers off. He died in Bellevue Hospital two days later. (Ephemeral New York blog, August 17, 2015)
Walter Gropius. Alma’s second husband following the death of Gustav Mahler in 1911. She met him while in rehab at a sanatorium in Tobelbad, Austria in 1910 (two years after the events of this novel) and their brief affair came to Gustav’s knowledge when Gropius penned a letter to Mahler.
Eight, 68th Street. While Otto Kahn’s family home was in Morristown, New Jersey, and this house was merely his New York bolthole, it is described as harbouring ‘an impressive art collection, especially strong in Italian masters.” Seeing as Addie was the art collector, I’ve surmised that this house was more than Otto’s work flat and that they might have entertained guests there.
Dinner party menu. This lavish menu is borrowed from the nearest one I could find to the date and location of my novel. The Dutchess County Society’s Twelfth Annual Banquet was held at the Plaza Hotel, New York on January 18th, 1908. A facsimile of the menu is stored at the New York Public Library Digital Collections.
Dr Fraenkel was indeed, in love with Alma Mahler. As soon as Gustav died, he proposed to her and she accepted, though almost immediately changed her mind and married Walter Gropius.
Heinrich Conried, director of the Met, brought Caruso to New York. Of Jewish origin, he came in as an innovator but became a greedy, irascible tyrant, largely concerned with building his own fortune. He made all artists sign contracts with him, not the Met, so he could have them appear, for free, in concerts that profited him. He was paralysed following a stroke in 1906.
Mary Seney Shelden was the first female president of the New York Philharmonic. She is credited with reorganizing the orchestra into a modern institution in 1909. One of her major contributions was the hiring of Gustav Mahler.
Natalie Curtis, regarded as something of a maverick genius by the Manhattan socialites, gave up a promising career as a concert pianist to obsessively research the Hopi Indians. She worked tirelessly to preserve their traditions, clothes, customs and songs before they were lost, and widened this research to other Native American cultures, directly influencing President Roosevelt to relax the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs’ hostile policies on Native American culture. Around 1910, she broadened her research to include transcription and collection of African American music, and in 1912 helped sponsor the first concert featuring black musicians at Carnegie Hall, a concert that featured the Clef Club orchestra, directed by James Reese Europe. Alma Mahler actually first encountered Natalie Curtis at a dinner of the Philharmonic Ladies’ Committee in 1909. Impressed with how this odd woman was received: dressed in an ‘ill-made coat and skirt, untidy and very much the worse for wear’, she was greeted with acclamation. “Thus I got to know and to love the truly democratic America. Wealth bowed its head to a poverty which everybody respected because it clothed a creative, highly gifted personality.” [DLG, 333]
The Tenderloin. The Main Street of the ‘Tenderloin’ district was Broadway between 23rd and 42nd Streets, which was known as “The Line”. In the mid-1890s, after the advent of electric lighting, the stretch of Broadway from 23rd Street to 34th Street came to be called “The Great White Way” because of the numerous illuminated advertising signs there.
James Reese Europe. American ragtime and early jazz bandleader, arranger, and composer. He was the leading figure on the African-American music scene of New York City in the 1910s. Eubie Blake called him the “Martin Luther King of music”. In 1910 Europe organized the Clef Club, a society for African Americans in the music industry.
Marshall’s Hotel, 127-129 West 53rd Street, was a black-owned establishment that staged hot jazz in the heart of the Tenderloin district. It attracted throngs of fashionable New Yorkers, black-and-white, and was an important gathering place for New York’s black cultural elite.
https://www.gothamcenter.org/blog/the-mashall-hotel
Irving Berlin ‘plugged’ songs at Tony Pastor‘s Music Hall in Union Square and in 1906, when he was 18, got a job as a singing waiter at the Pelham Cafe in Chinatown. He sang popular songs with sometimes ‘blue’ lyrics. In 1908 he took a new job at a saloon named Jimmy Kelly’s in the Union Square neighbourhood and at about this time he was working on a new song: Alexander’s Ragtime Band.
Charles Becker was a corrupt lieutenant in the New York City Police Department between the 1890s and 1910s. He was executed in 1915 for colluding in the murder of a Manhattan gambler, Herman Rosenthal, who was gunned down by members of the Lennox Avenue gang, including Gyp the Blood and Big Jack Zelig.
‘Big’ Jack Zelig was one of the last leaders of the Eastman Gang. Zelig became leader of the Eastman Gang after ‘Kid Twist’ (Max Zwerbach)’s death in 1908.
Gyp the Blood (aka Harry Horowitz) was a leader of the Len
ox Avenue Gang. He was executed for his part in the Rosenthal murder along with Lieutenant Charles Becker.
Cyclone Louie (aka Vach Lewis) was an early New York gangster and member of the Eastman Gang under Max ‘Kid Twist’ Zwerbach. Lewis was an ex-wrestler, strongman, and bodyguard before joining the Eastman Gang.
Mock Duck was leader of the Hip Sing Tong, the dominant Chinese-American Tong in Manhattan Chinatown in the early 1900s. He was described as ‘strutting around on Pell Street, covered in diamonds... his sinister image bolstered by his long, lethal-looking fingernails, which signal he is too grand to do the dirty work he assigns to others.”
Sing Dock. Named as high in command in Mock Duck’s Hip Sing Tong in Organizing Crime in Chinatown: Race and Racketeering in New York City, 1890–1910 by Jeffrey Scott McIllwain.
Nickelodeon. Ben Singer writes in his analysis of Manhattan nickelodeons that they consistently appeared in the densest areas of the city in terms of residential concentration and the amount of pedestrian traffic — Union Square, Herald Square, 23rd Street, and 125th Street—neighborhood nickelodeons were almost always located in neighborhoods with high residential densities and spread over a substantial number of blocks.
Murder, Inc. (Murder Incorporated) was the name given to the notorious organized crime syndicate of the 1930s-40s. That they were one of the original residents of the Flatiron building is a myth due to an erroneous mention on Wikipedia that does not actually appear in the book cited (Alexiou, 1951). This prompted me to create a fantasy proto-version of Murder, Inc based out of the Flatiron building, which I have dubbed the Saratoga Trunk Company.
Max Siegel. Father of notorious 1920s gangster Benjamin ‘Bugsy’ Siegel. Though the real Max Siegel worked his entire life for ‘meager wages’, here I create a fantasy that Max in fact set up the first incarnation of Murder, Inc. which his son would eventually inherit.
Alma Mahler’s alcoholism. This is catalogued in DLG [458, 863, 869]. Alma took spa treatments for her alcoholism in June 1909 at Levico and in Tobelbad in the fateful summer of 1910, where she began her affair with Walter Gropius.
Chinatown and the Jewish quarter. The Mahlers did make a famous visit to Chinatown to witness an opium den in the company of music publisher Rudolf Schirmer. The account is in Alma’s memoirs. On the same night they also witnessed the Jewish quarter. It is Alma who writes:
I asked Mahler softly in his own words, “Are these our brothers?” He shook his head in despair.
With a sigh of relief we at last turned a corner and found ourselves in a well-lighted street among our own sort of people. Can it be that there are only class and not race distinctions?
Mahler’s racism. Mahler’s racist view of ‘savage’ Negro music and its influence on American classical music is noted in DLG, 1142-3 where his views are expressed at length from an interview published in The Etude, May 1911.
Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’ Ellington was an American composer, pianist, and leader of a jazz orchestra, which he led from 1923 until his death over a career spanning more than fifty years. Much of the particular detail of the young Duke comes from his autobiography Music Is My Mistress. New York: Da Capo, 1976.
The fireman’s funeral that gave the initial inspiration for Mahler’s Tenth Symphony took place on 16 Feb. 1908. High-ranking Deputy Chief fireman, Charles W. Kruger, who died at 217 Canal Street, a mirror and picture-frame factory. The funeral procession went from St Thomas’s church at 53rd Street to 71st Street, where a ceremony was performed outside the Majestic Hotel. The single drum stroke apparently so affected Mahler that Alma noted he was weeping. In the score of the unfinished Tenth Symphony, next to the muffled drumbeat, he scribbled the words “You alone know what it means.” [DLG, 94-96].
Amadán. Irish dialect for fool, loony, idiot.
Ludder. Another Irish slang, this time the typical insult for a good-natured rural bar-fly.
Speakeasy. Though largely associated with the Prohibition era of the 1920s, the word was in general use prior to that. The evils of the speakeasy are railed against in a pamphlet from 1902. (Pamphlets on the Liquor Problem, Volume 3. Original from the University of California), and there is an 1899 reference from Weekly Notes of Cases Argued and Determined in the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania, the County Courts of Philadelphia, and the United States District and Circuit Courts for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Volume 43 (Kay and brother, 1899).
Sarah Strauss and Harry Arshawsky. This tentative romance is that of the parents of future big band leader, Artie Shaw. He was born in 1910 on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. Sarah was a dressmaker from Austria, Harry a Russian photographer. It has always struck me as ironic that the Jewish immigrants Mahler regarded as sub-human in 1908 might easily have been the Arshawsky family, the parents of the future jazz legend.
Matta ne hatta. The Five Points area of Manhattan was originally occupied by bands of Lenape (or Delaware Indian) natives and this translates as ‘not I have’ (from Memoirs of the private and public life of William Penn: who settled the state of Pennsylvania, and founded the city of Philadelphia, Thomas Clarkson, M.A., Dover MH, Samuel C. Stevens - Washington Street. 1827. p146.)
Thirteen black men burned at the stake. Following the ‘New York Conspiracy’ of 1741, 17 black men, two white men, and two white women were hanged at the gibbet next to the Powderhouse in the area known as the Five Points. Thirteen were burned at the stake a little east on Magazine Street. (New York Times: COLONIAL NEW-YORK CITY; Burning of Negroes Amid the Hills of Five Points. GRIM RESULTS OF AN ALLEGED PLOT The Gibbet on Powder House Island Bore Strange Fruit for Many Months in the Year 1741.
https://www.nytimes.com/1895/11/24/archives/colonial-newyork-city-burning-of-negroes-amid-the-hills-of-five.html
Somewhere in time. This is, of course, the film title of the movie adaptation of Richard Matheson’s classic time travel romance, Bid Time Return. Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony features strongly in the story. For the movie they changed the music to Rachmaninov, but composer John Barry took his cue from the story and echoed Mahler’s Tenth in his score for the film.
One more river to cross. One More Ribber (sic) to Cross is an acapella recording by James Reese Europe and his orchestra, credited to Europe’s Four Harmony Kings. It is catalogued under Pathé N67673, and dated 05/07/1919.
Miss Lizzie Turner. The Mahlers’ governess is listed in a ship’s manifest as travelling with them in November 1908, nine months after the events of this novel. There is no record that she was employed by the Mahlers before that date, which has allowed me to invent Miss Costello as the villain of this fiction.
Mahler resigned from the Met and assumed the conductorship of the New York Philharmonic for the 1908-09 season. In an interview, he laid out his goals: “It will be my aim to educate the public... and that education will be made gradually and in a manner which will enable those who may not have a taste for the best to appreciate it.”
Mahler’s composition of the Tenth Symphony. Mahler composed the Tenth in a rush of activity during the months of July to September in 1910. While classed as ‘Unfinished’, the score was in fact complete, but only two of the five movements were orchestrated in full. There were numerous attempts to produce a performing version of the full symphony, but the first to gain Alma Mahler’s blessing was British musicologist Deryck Cooke’s performing version in 1960.
Se vuol ballare is an aria from Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, and translates literally as ‘If you want to dance’. It contains the lines I’ll know, I’ll know, I’ll know, I’ll know, I’ll know, but slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly, slowly; Soon every dark secret by dissembling I shall uncover. Beethoven wrote a set of variations on the aria for violin and piano, which he dedicated to his beloved, Eleanore von Bruening.
Mozartl (with an L, not an exclamation). Mahler’s last words are often reported to have been a dramatic cry of ‘Mozart!” but this is largely down to a typesetting error in Alma Mahler’s Memories and Letters. It is mor
e reliably reported that before he drifted off into a long coma, he was humming a tune and conducting with his finger. He whispered the word ‘Mozartl’ twice, using the diminutive affectionate Little Mozart. In the days before the end, he was also reported to have cried out ‘My Almschi!’ many times.
Mahler’s death. Mahler died in the Loew sanatorium, Vienna, having taken the long journey from America, via a stay in Paris with André Chantemasse, a leading bacteriologist attached to the Institut Pasteur. Once it was certain that treatment of his encarditis was futile, the move to Vienna was an admission of the inevitability of death. He expressed a desire to be buried with or next to his daughter Maria (Putzi). It was an oppressively hot spring, temperatures reaching 40c, but at the moment of his death a great thunderstorm raged over Vienna.
I must march unto death... From the song Revelge (‘Reveille’), in the Mahler song cycle, Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
with no snuff nor a farthing in my pocket. From the song Ich weiss nicht, wie mir ist (‘Self-Esteem’), in the Mahler song cycle, Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
My love awakens the songs. The songs awaken my love. From the song Erinnerung (‘Remembrance’) composed for a soloist with piano accompaniment during Mahler’s tenure in Budapest in 1889. The text is by Richard von Volkmann-Lenader.
That day I first saw her on shady Maximilian Strasse. Mahler, in fact, first met Alma at a dinner party at the Zuckerlandls’ house, but I have invented this imaginary first encounter as perhaps the first time he saw her without them actually meeting. Maximilian Strasse was the street east of the Vienna State opera house, where Gustav Mahler was director from 1897 to 1907. The street was renamed Mahler Strasse in 1946.
(My need to express myself musically and symphonically begins only there) where the dark sentiments reign. At the gate which leads into another world. The world in which things do not fall apart by time and place. Mahler in a letter to Berlin music critic, Max von Marschalk. 26 March 1896
