Mahler makes his hotly anticipated New York debut
Gustav Mahler found himself top of the list in New York
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 ouster 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.
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 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’.
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
