“Closer to Mahler and his wife Alma than any other author I have read”

The most recent review of my new novel, The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York, is by Clive Paget in Musical America(July 18). Paget writes:

“With his unparalleled knowledge of fin-de-siècle classical music in America, Joseph Horowitz has brought us closer to Mahler and his wife Alma than any other author I have read. . . . At times, your heart breaks for them both. . . . In Gustav and Alma Mahler, Horowitz has created two of classical music’s most convincing fictional portraits.”

Paget also finds that my “realization” of Alma Mahler “makes her a far more complex and sympathetic figure than the usual trophy hunter on the lookout for the next husband.” This is now a governing motif of the book’s reception – and illuminating for me because (as I’ve previously written in this space) I made no conscious effort to rehabilitate Alma. Rather, I endeavored to experience events as she herself did. It is a novelist’s task – and demonstrates (as I argue in the book’s Preface) that historical fiction can be an indispensable tool for the cultural historian.

I must add that Paget’s flattering comparison of my portraiture of turn-of-the-century New York society to the “vibrant brushstrokes of John Singer Sargent” captures precisely the intent of the  “deliciously opulent” prose style I have consciously attempted.

The full review is appended.

By Clive Paget, Musical America

LONDON — How to fathom the unknowable? Gustav Mahler is one of history’s most complex and contradictory personalities, a man disarmingly naïve, intellectually profound, blunt to the point of rudeness, dictatorial, preoccupied—and frequently all at the same time. Literary biographers struggle to pin him down, swayed by all sorts of predispositions. With his unparalleled knowledge of fin-de-siècle classical music in America, Joseph Horowitz could easily have joined them, writing a U.S.-centric polemic on Mahler’s four-year career as a conductor in New York. Instead, he’s written his first novel, and in the process brought us closer to Mahler and his wife Alma than any other author I have read. 

The Marriage traces Mahler’s annual American sojourns, from his heralded first arrival in December 1907 to take up the conducting reins at the Metropolitan Opera, to his final departure in April 1911, a broken man in the full knowledge that he was going home to die. Imagined through the eyes of the composer himself, his emotionally conflicted wife, and other historical figures, the author offers a glimpse into the Machiavellian goings on of the wealthy socialites and artistic personalities who saw Mahler as a means to their own ends. 

Horowitz does have an agenda. He’s not unreasonably concerned that all previous writings on the composer—including the fourth volume of Henri Le Grange’s magisterial biography—have been way too Eurocentric. As such, he has issues he wants to address, laid out here in a preface and substantial afterword. Mahler was entirely unsuited to America, he opines. Far from it being the case that his fatal illness cut short a promising middle-period career as a conductor, the Austrian composer’s controversial artistic choices and unbending personality made him as many enemies in the U.S. as he’d left behind in Vienna. 

Not a happy time 

On the one hand, he was compromised by a typically European snobbishness that left him unable to appreciate the high level of performances that American audiences had enjoyed for decades under his short-lived predecessor—and golden boy of Bayreuth—Anton Seidl. On the other, his typically unbending way with the press, and in particular his handling of the doyen of critics Henry Krehbiel, at The New York Tribune, merely hastened his downfall. Ultimately, his time at the helm of the newly constituted New York Philharmonic was a dismal failure. 

It’s a credit to Horowitz that he resists riding these hobby horses in the novel (or if he does, it’s always aimed at deepening our understanding of the personalities involved). Drawing on firsthand newspaper accounts, Gustav and Alma’s letters, and his own awareness of the seething, Byzantine American music milieu into which Mr. and Mrs. Mahler found themselves precipitated, he conjures a vivid portrait of New York society and life in the teeming city at the turn of the century. An assured portraitist, he brings his cast to life with the vibrant brushstrokes of a John Singer Sargent. 

Mahler emerges here as a reasonably astute operator, but much given to introspection, the result of the death of his elder daughter in 1907. At first, he’s optimistic he might discover a New World audience for his own music free from the twin biases of old-world Antisemitism and artistic conservatism. Alas, he’s no match for the society ladies—and ultimately the shackles of their artistic committee—while failing to appreciate the pool of local talent successfully tapped into by his noted compatriot Anton Dvorák. When he discovers his wife’s infidelity with young architect Walter Gropius, his reaction is blinkered and hopelessly innocent. 

Even more compelling is Horowitz’s realization of Alma. History has not been kind to Alma Schindler Mahler Gropius Werfel, 20 years her husband’s junior, but Horowitz makes her a far more complex and sympathetic figure than the usual trophy hunter on the lookout for the next husband. To do this he’s simply taken her letters at face value—not a bad place to start—and what 

emerges is a woman desperate to find herself but tragically shackled to the least likely man to help her do so. At times, your heart breaks for them both. 

Their New York world 

Horowitz surrounds them with a supporting cast of fully three-dimensional characters. There’s society doctor Joseph Fraenkel whose physical examinations of Alma invariably “took the form of a surrogate exercise in mutual sensual arousal”; there’s the pert, functional, and determined Mary Sheldon who brings Mahler to the Philharmonic and bit by bit ties his hands; and there’s Krehbiel, a brilliant polyglot yet ponderous pedant, who considers himself snubbed by Mahler and, like the worst kind of critics, lives on memories of cozy relationships with Seidl and Dvorák. 

Along the way you learn about various people who pass through Mahler’s orbit,
from the chronically unwell Met Opera impresario Heinrich Conreid to the sexually ambiguous Wagnerian soprano Olive Fremstad. There’s a lovely cameo for Feruccio Busoni, an ethereal cloaked figure flitting from Mahler’s sickbed and gliding out the door. Throughout, Horowitz’s stylish prose is interrogating, illuminating, and often deliciously opulent. 

Historical novel and musical treatise, The Marriage is for anybody who enjoys a good read, but especially for people wanting to know more about who Mahler really was. I may not always believe every single word he writes, but in Gustav and Alma Mahler, Horowitz has created two of classical music’s most convincing fictional portraits.