Narrative Matters: Gustav Mahler – music as a source of meaning and healing in the face of adversity and inequality

There is growing evidence for the value of music in helping those experiencing hardship to flourish and its role in the promotion of resilience (Gerber et al., 2014; Viola et al., 2023). Conversely, social inequality itself deprives lower-income communities of the multiple benefits associated with active music participation (Francisco Reyes, 2019; Hughes, 2023). In this paper, we will consider the significant adversity in the life of the composer Gustav Mahler and the protective role of his music. Mahler's music is inextricably bound up with his life, his beliefs and feelings. Mahler's attribution of meaning to his music acted as a sustaining and cathartic agent, enabling him to express, process, resolve and transform the suffering and loss faced from a very young age into sublime songs and symphonies.

With limited space, we can only touch the surface of the ideas and complex music under discussion. But, as we will show below, Mahler is an excellent example to illustrate the healing and transformative power of music: through the subjects of his compositions, and through the act of creation itself. A great composer, like Mahler, demonstrates this process more clearly, but it is relevant to everyone, regardless of their talent or expertise.

As an adult, Mahler had many losses and was afflicted by terrible grief: the death of his closest brother Ernst at the age of 13; his sister Leopoldine at the age of 26; and the suicide of his brother Otto at the age of 22. Mahler himself had serious health problems, sometimes life-threatening, throughout his life. However, perhaps most tragic of all, was the loss of his elder daughter Maria at the age of 4, in the summer of 1907.

This last event, along with the discovery of his own serious heart condition that same summer hung heavily over the remaining 4 years of the composer's life, and the last two symphonies, and what is arguably Mahler's masterpiece, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) are permeated by thoughts and images of death. He had a turbulent relationship with his wife Alma, which included her infidelity, and his last, unfinished Tenth Symphony, is as much about Mahler's reaction to and sublimation of the traumatic discovery of her affair with the architect Walter Gropius in 1910, as it is about death. This last work is a vital piece of evidence in understanding Mahler, the relationship of art to life, and the statements made at the start of this article.

The manuscript, in its unfinished state, preserves written comments, outbursts and messages which clearly relate the events of that summer to the music being composed, and the fact that the sketch was almost certainly composed during a narrow window of less than 8 weeks or so between July and September 1910, means we can relate the music to events in Mahler's life quite closely. The written exclamations, for example ‘Erbarmen!’ (‘Have mercy!’), ‘für dich leben! für dich sterben!’ (‘to live for you! to die for you!’), are found in different drafts of the same passage, over the same musical idea – not simply random outpourings, but more like labels attached to the music – giving us insight into the musical ideas' significance for the composer. This window into the creative process allows us to extrapolate the relationship of art to life to the rest of Mahler's oeuvre, given the fact that his compositional process, musical philosophy and subject matter were remarkably consistent throughout his life.

But his story of hardship and sorrow started as a young child. Mahler was born to a lower-class family of humble origins (his grandmother had been a street pedlar) in the village of Kalischt (Kaliště), in Bohemia, in 1860. When he was a few months old, they moved to the city of Iglau (Jihlava), in Moravia, described as ‘an oasis of German culture in Czech-speaking Moravia’ (de La Grange, 1976, p. 9) belonging to a German-speaking minority among Bohemians; but they were Jewish which triggered, early on, a constant feeling of exile, ‘always an intruder, never welcomed’ (Mahler, 1946, p.98). Young Gustav had to fight against his cultural and religious background; antisemitism was a constant in his life, even when he achieved success; he converted to Catholicism to secure his post as director of the Hofoper in Vienna in 1897.

As a child, death was ever-present. Of his 13 siblings only 6 survived infancy (Gartenberg, 1978, pp. 18–19). When Gustav was 14 years of age he lost his brother Ernst after a long illness. This was particularly hard for him. One wonders how Mahler could have coped with so much tragedy and adversity, with a brutal father and an always pregnant and grieving mother.

Music, which he discovered from a very early age, opened wide the door to resilience and meaning for him and was armour against desolation and despair throughout his life. He found a ‘toy’ piano in his grandfather's attic and at the age of three he was able to play, from memory, tunes he had heard (de La Grange, 1976 pp. 14–15). Music became not only his ‘world’ to escape from emotional and psychological pain but also an avenue to express it and transcend it. He sought refuge in his own music as well as absorbing the music he heard in the streets: folk songs, popular music and marches from the local military band, whose impact on Mahler the child is evident in as they keep appearing in his mature compositions.

If the symphonies, with these characteristic features, seem to deal mostly with the ‘big’ questions – life and death, the hierarchy of nature, redemption – they do so drawing for much of their material on Mahler's own songs (indeed discussing the complex relationship between Mahler's songs and their reprocessing or repurposing in the symphonies is a subject in itself). And the songs very often deal with outwardly simple subjects or stories: with young lovers, naughty children (and how to make them well-behaved!), and with a fairytale world of talking animals – and with the darker side so often seen in ostensibly ‘children's’ literature.

It is very telling that someone for whom philosophy, poetry and novels were of the utmost importance does not set the works of ‘great’ writers (with the exception of the second part of his Eighth Symphony which sets the final scene of Goethe's Faust) but went to a collection of folk poetry, Des Knaben Wunderhorn (From the Youth's Magic Horn) for the majority of his songs. We believe that Mahler in his adulthood brought back the child he once was through the often-simple, sometimes dark world of the Wunderhorn poems. The other major source of texts was the poet Friedrich Rückert, notably for the Kindertotenlieder (Songs of the Death of Children), which Mahler composed after his first child's birth, which had clearly triggered in him memories of all those childhood deaths he had experienced.

Returning to Mahler's childhood, he threw himself, heart and soul, into his music and soon was considered a wunderkind in his town, performing in public at the age of 10 (de La Grange, 1976, p. 23). In spite of his undisputable and precocious musical ability, his academic reports were not always good, and he was described as a poor student (Gartenberg, 1978, p. 7).

The following delightful childhood anecdote clearly shows how vitally important music was for Mahler. It makes us smile as it shows such fierce determination and intolerance of bad music in such a small boy (something he retained into adulthood) as well as a lack of social awareness and pecking order and a possible heightened sensitivity to noise: When Mahler made one of his first visits to the synagogue ‘hidden in his mother's skirts’, he emerged to shout ‘Be quiet! Be quiet! It's horrible!’ over the community's singing Having silenced everyone, little Mahler proceeded to launch into one of his favourite folk songs (de La Grange, 1976, p. 15).

In his consultation with Freud in 1910, Mahler recalled a distressing childhood memory, when his parents were having a violent quarrel. He fled to the street outside, where a barrel organ was playing ‘Ach, du Lieber Augustin’, something to which he apparently attributed the intrusion of popular, even banal elements into his music, even at moments of heightened tension (Gartenberg, 1978, p. 173). As a teenager trying to come to terms with the death of his beloved brother Ernst, he started work on an opera, Herzog Ernst von Schwaben as a memorial to him; neither music nor the libretto have survived (Gartenberg, 1978 p. 6, p. 220). We do, however, have his cantata, Das klagende Lied, finished in 1880, and which tells the tale of a man who murders his brother and whose treachery is revealed when he plays a flute, fashioned from the bones of the slain brother, which sings the truth. Music revealing truth; a survivor's guilt about a dead sibling.

Mahler's need to express his life experiences – especially the most painful and difficult ones – through his music is explicitly stated in his letters which have a high literary value, as this extract illustrates: ‘My need to express myself musically, symphonically, begins only in the realm of obscure feelings, at the gate leading to the “other world”, where things are no longer destroyed by time and space’ (de La Grange, 1976, p. 357). This need started very early on for him. Music was a clear outlet for Mahler's feelings from the start, an avenue for expressing and processing childhood trauma.

In his final work, the Tenth Symphony, referred to above, the music and even the manuscript bare evidence as to how music, especially the creation of music, allowed Mahler to reach a resolution of the trauma he had experienced in the time preceding its composition, reaching it its final bars a profound sense of peace.

Mahler experienced grief and social exclusion as a result of his heritage, economically precarious background and religion. Many great artists and thinkers, spiritual figures and mystics, have used the distress and angst experienced in their times of severe darkness in a cathartic way, processing the pain and stirring up their creativity or radically altering their theories (Durà-Vilà, 2017). We can take this further and say that ensuring access to musical education and creative opportunities for less privileged and traumatised children could help them process adversity as Mahler did.