“I ‘devour’ books!”
Mahler as a bookworm “I ‘devour’ books!” Mahler as a bookworm

Literature was central to Mahler’s inner life, and thus also to his music. Books offered him far more than education or entertainment: they were companions, sources of intellectual nourishment and mirrors of personal experience. Writers from Goethe to Rückert shaped his thinking as a composer, not least in the Third Symphony.

Mahler was a notorious glutton when it came to reading. “I’m ‘devouring’ more and more books,” he wrote to his friend Fritz Löhr during the winter of 1894/95. “They’re the only friends that I take with me wherever I go! And what friends! God, if I didn’t have them!” His reading matter ranged from ancient thinkers to Alfred Edmund Brehm’s Life of Animals, all thirteen volumes of which he owned. He is said to have been a very quick reader. But Mahler did not just “devour” his books, he must also have internalized them so well that he could recall their essential elements and, in some cases, quote them by heart. This last point is attested by the music critic Ernst Décsey, who visited Mahler in 1909. As dusk was falling, Décsey read to his host from Goethe’s Faust and noticed that Mahler was mouthing the words from memory. And he suddenly had the impression that in the half-light Mahler’s silhouette had started to look like Goethe’s.

From his childhood onwards Mahler felt a deep need to read and it pained him that his parents sought to “curb my appetite and even tried to wean me off this nourishment, which was so necessary to me as my spiritual sustenance.” He was fifteen when he left his hometown of Iglau (now Jihlava) in order to study in Vienna, where he and a handful of friends founded a literary club. Like Robert Schumann, Mahler initially hesitated between a career as a musician and that of a writer. For his earliest attempts at composition – his fairytale opera Rübezahl and his symphonic cantata Das klagende Lied – he wrote his own librettos. And his famous Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen of 1883/84 were for the most part settings of lines that he himself had drafted. But this marked the end of Mahler’s career as a poet. “I now need to focus on composition,” he felt and from now on merely made minor adjustments to the texts that he set to music.

Mahler’s poetic world

The texts of the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen could easily be mistaken for poems from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, the famous collection of folk poetry assembled by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano between 1806 and 1808. Mahler loved these volumes deeply. For him, the Wunderhorn poems contained an entire emotional universe: lament, hope, irony and despair. Born in 1860, Mahler belonged to a Europe shaped by industrialisation and faith in progress. Yet those same forces also produced anxiety and a longing for a lost natural world. Against this backdrop, the Wunderhorn poems appeared to preserve a sense of immediacy and closeness to nature. Or, as Mahler himself put it, they were “poetry at first hand”.

Mahler set no fewer than twenty-four Wunderhorn poems — almost half his entire output as a composer of songs. Only later did another poet assume comparable importance for him: Friedrich Rückert, renowned in his time both as a poet and as a translator of Eastern literature. Mahler set nine of Rückert’s poems, among them the devastating Kindertotenlieder, written after the deaths of two of Rückert’s children. Mahler himself would suffer a similar loss when his elder daughter Maria died in 1907. When he composed the Rückert settings between 1901 and 1904, he could of course have had no idea what lay ahead, although his wife Alma later claimed to have exclaimed: “For heaven’s sake, don’t tempt Providence!” Mahler would later describe his works as “lived music” — music grounded in personal experience — and he clearly identified deeply with Rückert’s poetry. Referring to “Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen”, he is said to have told his confidante Natalie Bauer-Lechner: “That’s me.”

Mahler’s literary loyalties

However highly Mahler valued him, Friedrich Rückert never achieved the stature in German literature of Eichendorff or Heine. By the time Mahler discovered his work, he had long since fallen out of fashion. But Mahler, whose literary tastes were shaped less by fashion than by enduring personal affinities, remained largely indifferent to changing trends. The same can be said of his admiration for Jean Paul, whose reputation had already begun to fade by the 1830s. Mahler’s Hamburg assistant, the conductor Bruno Walter, recalled that his favourite novel was Jean Paul’s Siebenkäs. For a time Mahler even considered calling his autobiographical First Symphony Titan, after Jean Paul’s novel of the same name. The connection was deeply personal: for both Mahler and Jean Paul, humour, nature, philosophy and emotional intensity lay at the centre of artistic experience. And both works are concerned with figures marked as much by vulnerability and defeat as by heroic aspiration — anti-heroes who nevertheless continue to confront the world in a spirit of defiance.

No writer occupied a more central place in Mahler’s imagination than Goethe. Mahler admired everything from Wilhelm Meister and the conversations with Eckermann to Goethe’s correspondence and both parts of Faust. It was hardly accidental that he chose the closing scene of Faust II for his Eighth Symphony. Shakespeare, too, ranked among his literary touchstones: Mahler once described him as “the greatest of all poets and almost of all people”. The Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky was another of his favourite authors. He advised his admirer Arnold Schoenberg: “Encourage your students to read Dostoyevsky — he is more important than counterpoint.” Contemporary writers, by contrast, left him largely unmoved. Ibsen, for example, represented “all analysis, negation, fruitlessness”, while Mahler reportedly urged his fiancée Alma Schindler to throw Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray straight into the fire.

Schopenhauer instead of Nietzsche

Among philosophers, Mahler probably felt closest to Arthur Schopenhauer. His attitude towards Friedrich Nietzsche was more ambivalent: he admired him more as a poet than as a thinker. In the fourth movement of the Third Symphony, Mahler quotes from Also sprach Zarathustra, a work he believed to have been “born entirely from the spirit of music”. Yet he rejected Nietzsche’s nihilism and had even less sympathy for the idea of the “superman”. When he discovered an edition of Nietzsche’s writings on Alma Schindler’s bookshelf, he reportedly told her to throw it immediately into the fire.

Mahler briefly considered calling his Third Symphony The Gay Science after Nietzsche’s book of that name, although the attraction seems to have lain less in its philosophical content than in its title. A more direct literary parallel to the symphony can be found in Siegfried Lipiner’s poem Genesis, whose structure closely resembles Mahler’s conception. In both works, the creation of the world unfolds through comparable stages of development. Today, however, Siegfried Lipiner is largely forgotten.