We are absolutely compelled and duty bound to recall the horrible antisemitism he faced as a taken-for-granted minion of the Hapsburg empire, yet of course he looms above all of those emperors and their apparatchiks fawning all over them.
The presence of the anti-semitism played during the lifetime of Gustav Mahler, and many other artists of Jewish descent was overpowering in both artistic and personal senses. Don't think for a minute that Hitler was the first European anti-semitic (although of course it goes without saying that he was the most demonic and most dangerous). Many may think that the rise of hatred against European Jews stemmed from the 1920s and the rise of Hitler's National Socialist Party, but it in fact back much further.
European Jews were on the verge of real emancipation from religious bigotry. Mahler and his family were a case in point.
He was born in 1860 in the town of Iglau in Moravia, close to the border with Bohemia, a military outpost in the defenses against Prussia. His father, Bernhard, a German-born Jew, was a successful tavern owner with a lot education and accumulated wealth.
During the 1700s a major split developed among European Jews: the Haskalah sect was composed of doctors, lawyers, philosophers and business people of all types, who "exhibited an ideal synthesis of loyalty to Judaism and involvement in general culture and society", and its purpose can be defined as 'to bring light to the dark night in which the people of Israel are immersed'.
These were the beliefs that Bernhard Mahler adopted in his early years. The Maskalim bitterly opposed Hasidism and its superstitions as the main obstacle in the way of improving the political, moral, and cultural situation of the Jews.
When Gustav Mahler left Iglau in 1875, nothing dramatic had yet occurred to dash the Jews' hopes of emancipation: he no doubt looked forward to attaining his full civil rights in the capital. Like Mozart a century before, in Vienna he found himself in a tolerant society in which the Jews had been integrated, even though the benefits of assimilation were reserved for the bourgeoisie and top intellectuals.
This religious tolerance was about to change beginning in the late 1870s and then far more dramatically from 1880 onwards, especially after the 1895 general election, which brought the Christian Socialists to power with an anti-semitic agenda to destroy every aspiration to assimilation for the Jews.
Biographer De La Grange wrote:
[Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler-A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911), (Oxford University Press, London, 2008)]:
"In any case, although Christian politics, Christian anti-Semitism and Christian social demagogy had effectively taken over Viennese politics, it was still Jewish brains, Jewish passion for learning, and Jewish artistic gifts which held sway in all branches of the City's intellectual life, with science, medicine, philosophy, sociology, and the law all largely in Jewish hands. Jewish talent reigned over Viennese culture, especially in literature, while the philanthropy of Jewish magnates sustained the visual arts and saved them from sinking into traditional Viennese conservatism. The majority of the press was also in Jewish hands, and had remained faithful to its former liberal ideals. But an important change had taken place: Vienna had become the major centre of European anti-Semitism."
Since he had acquired such renown in Hamburg and in Prague, Mahler was approached by the Vienna Court Opera to direct the Opera. Mahler was quoted as saying "The fact was that it was impossible to occupy an official post without being baptized." He became a nominal Catholic in 1896.
Biographer De La Grange:
"First there was his devotion to music and his positive sense of morality and justice. Then there was his unceasing life struggle to achieve the highest ethical standards, whether in a search for inner truths and eternal values or in his uncompromising sense of duty and solidarity with the rest of humanity. But, above all perhaps, at the core of his belief lay the commitment to be as true to himself as possible (often dangerously so), whether in his life or in his music. Mahler's imaginary folk music, his expressionistic excesses (the asperities and cruel irony of his late scherzos for instance), can be interpreted as a form of the Jewish 'ethical pursuit of truth, because in his music he strove to include everything human and thus sought to fulfill his ultimate desire-artistic integrity."
12 years after publishing his first symphony, in the summer of 1910, he was working on his 10th Symphony.
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