The phrase ‘annus horribilis’ might easily have been invented to describe the string of spirit-weakening events that struck Gustav Mahler in the year 1907. First, his ten-year tenure as director of the Court Opera in Vienna ended, crippled by ongoing disputes with management and performers and by a virulently anti-Semitic campaign against him in the press. Then, in July, his four-year-old daughter Maria died of diphtheria. Shortly afterwards, Mahler was diagnosed with a heart defect, heaping further anxiety on both himself and his wife Alma.
These hammer blows of fate might easily have felled the 47-year-old composer and conductor. But Mahler, a famously combative and dynamic individual, was by no means ready to capitulate. Anticipating his ousting from the Court Opera, on 21 June 1907 he had signed a lucrative contract with the Metropolitan Opera in New York, earning over twice his Vienna salary for a third of the work. On 12 December, Mahler and Alma set sail from Cherbourg, arriving in Manhattan nine days later.
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‘Many rooms... two grand pianos, of course! So we felt at home’
The couple’s first impressions of New York were mainly positive. The Met’s management, keen to impress its illustrious new recruit, had installed the Mahlers in a lavishly appointed suite at the Hotel Majestic, with views over Central Park. ‘Many rooms, two grand pianos, of course!’ enthused Alma. ‘So we felt at home.’ When he went to the opera house itself, however, Gustav was somewhat less enthusiastic.
Minutes into his first rehearsal of Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde, he stopped the players, distracted by the chorus rehearsing close by in the lobby. ‘All other rehearsals in this theatre must be stopped,’ he declared. ‘I can’t hear my orchestra.’
He was also unimpressed with those who ran The Met on a day-to-day basis. These ‘managers, producers, stage managers etc.’ were, he fumed, guilty of ‘absolute incompetence and fraudulent activities’, making the outlook for the Opera ‘bleak’.
‘A performance remarkable in many respects’
The performance of Tristan und Isolde which took place on 1 January 1908, just 11 days after Mahler arrived in New York, was an entirely different proposition. The Met had chosen wisely in giving Mahler Tristan for his house debut: his 1903 staging in Vienna, with modernistic designs by Alfred Roller, had been sensationally successful, redefining the art of Wagner interpretation. Roller had not accompanied Mahler to Manhattan, but the musical power and expressivity of Mahler’s interpretation still swept all before it.
‘A performance remarkable in many respects,’ was the New York Times’s verdict. Absent, the review continued, was the heavy, portentous style of conducting which weighed down many Wagner productions ‘with lead’. Mahler’s tempos were, by contrast, ‘somewhat more rapid’, while remaining ‘elastic and full of subtle variations’. Strikingly, Mahler also ensured the singers’ voices emerged with exceptional clarity, though orchestral climaxes were still ‘superbly effectual’.
Mahler led the New York Phil to 'new pinnacles of achievement’
The audience supplied a standing ovation, and the path seemed clear for a long, mutually beneficial relationship to develop between the Metropolitan Opera and its newest star conductor. In the event, Mahler stayed just two years with the company, his initial positivity sapped by the lower artistic standards he encountered compared to Vienna, and by the arrival of Arturo Toscanini on the Met’s conducting roster.
But Mahler was by no means finished with the Big Apple. In February 1909 he became principal conductor of the New York Philharmonic, leading a resurgent orchestra to ‘new pinnacles of achievement’. A Carnegie Hall concert with the ensemble on 21 February 1911 was the last he conducted. Just three months later he died of endocarditis in Vienna, aged 50, leaving his Tenth Symphony incomplete.
What else happened in January 1908?
January 13 1908: One hundred-and-seventy-one people are killed when fire breaks out at the Rhoads Opera House in Boyertown, Pennsylvania. Caused when a kerosene lamp used for stage lighting is knocked over, setting light to gases emitted from malfunctioning theatre equipment, the blaze is not taken seriously at first by many, with fatal consequences.
January 21 1908: The Sullivan Ordinance, a municipal law banning women from smoking at public venues, is passed in New York City. The next day, Katie Mulcahey is fined $5 for breaking the ordinance then arrested when she refuses to pay up. She will prove to be the only person charged under the law, which is vetoed two weeks later by mayor George B McClellan Jr.
January 23 1908: American composer Edward MacDowell dies in New York City, aged 47. After beginning his career in Germany and meeting with the approval of Liszt, MacDowell returned in 1888 to the US, where his notable works included two piano concertos and four symphonic poems. His later years were blighted by psychiatric problems, possibly caused by being hit by a Hansom cab in 1904.
January 24 1908: The first instalment of Robert Baden-Powell’s Scouting for Boys: A handbook for instruction in good citizenship is published, with the next five parts appearing fortnightly thereafter. As well as offering advice on practical skills like tracking and woodcraft, it covers subjects such as self-improvement, citizens’ duty and the British Empire.
January 26 1908: Sergei Rachmaninov conducts the premiere of his Second Symphony at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg. Though the first performance of the composer’s First Symphony proved a disaster in 1897, his fortunes have since been restored by the triumph of his Second Piano Concerto – the new symphony follows suit, being warmly applauded and going on to win a Glinka Prize.