The Marriage: The Mahlers in New York

Gustav and Alma Mahler arrived in New York City in 1907. He had been invited to lead the Metropolitan Opera; his glamorous wife accompanied him to the New World. His embattled American career places their legendary marriage in sharp relief. Nineteen years Gustav's junior, Alma was his constant companion and occasional soul-mate, sometimes his muse, always his caretaker, a woman otherwise restless and unfulfilled. Her husband's life was intensely interior, sporadically alert to others' needs and desires.Joseph Horowitz writes: "Every Mahler biography known to me is written through European eyes and recapitulates Mahler's own ignorance of the New World - of the teeming musical life of Manhattan and Brooklyn. The Marriage is partly conceived as a corrective. It is in fact the first book-length treatment of Mahler in New York ever written."Fortified by decades of scholarship, Horowitz's novel is set in a fin-de-si cle world music capital teeming with fabled personalities: Arturo Toscanini, whose Italian juggernaut displaced Mahler at the Met; Olive Fremstad, the Maria Callas of her day; James Gibbons Huneker, described by his prot g H. L. Mencken as a "veritable geyser of unfamiliar names, shocking epigrams in strange tongues, and unearthly philosophies"; the dapper Otto Kahn, an anomalous Jew among the Metropolitan Opera boxholders, who played cards with Enrico Caruso and pursued the company's most fetching sopranos.As The Marriage illuminates, there are things to be learned about Gustav and Alma that cannot as readily be observed in Vienna or Budapest as in Manhattan. Horowitz writes: "Mahler was a great personality and, when circumstances permitted, a great man. He arrived in America weakened and fatigued. His energy and idealism were aroused by the New World, but fitfully . . . he remained a chronic outsider. Gustav Mahler was not really cut out to be music director of an American orchestra, sensitive to the needs of a cultural community, its scribes, audiences, and benefactors. He had bigger things to do."