Budapest: The Young Conductor Who Wanted to Revolutionise Opera (1888–1891)

CHAPTER 6 — BUDAPEST: THE YOUNG CONDUCTOR WHO WANTED TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE OPERA

1888–1891

When Gustav Mahler arrived in Budapest at the end of September 1888, he was twenty-eight years old and had just passed through one of the most intense periods of his youth. He had conducted in Prague and Leipzig, had completed Die drei Pintos, had written the First Symphony, had begun Todtenfeier and, although he was not yet a composer recognized by the public, his reputation as a conductor was growing rapidly. What he found in Budapest, however, was not simply a theatre more important than the ones he had known before, but an institution situated at the center of a much broader cultural and political conflict, because the Royal Hungarian Opera was not merely a place where musical works were performed: it was also a symbol of national identity, a stage on which language, politics, international prestige and Magyar self-assertion confronted one another.

Mahler entered this world with enormous ambition, convinced that he could transform the theatre from within and turn it into an institution of the highest European rank, but he soon discovered that artistic excellence could not be separated from the national tensions that permeated Hungarian public life. Fischer presents these years as a paradoxical period: Mahler achieved memorable triumphs, consolidated his authority as a conductor and produced some of the earliest great evidence of his theatrical conception, but at the same time he became trapped in a network of political interests, personal resentments, linguistic conflicts and family responsibilities that ultimately made his position impossible to sustain.

BUDAPEST: A CAPITAL THAT WANTED TO LOOK VIENNA IN THE EYE

The city that received Mahler already had around 400,000 inhabitants and was going through a period of extraordinary growth. Buda and Pest had been politically unified during the nineteenth century, but they still retained very different characters: Buda, older and more mountainous, stretched over the hills on the right bank of the Danube, while Pest, much flatter, concentrated the capital’s modern monumental architecture and new ambitions. Among those buildings stood the Opera House, inaugurated in 1884 and conceived to a considerable extent as a Hungarian response to the splendour of the Vienna Court Opera.

That rivalry with Vienna was not merely aesthetic, because behind it lay the entire political history of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the still vivid memory of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848–49. The Compromise of 1867 had granted broad autonomy to the Hungarian half of the Dual Monarchy, but many groups considered that settlement insufficient and aspired to a much more strongly defined national identity, especially through language.

Mahler therefore arrived in a world where the question “in what language should an opera be sung?” could immediately become a political issue.

A JEWISH, GERMAN-SPEAKING, BOHEMIAN DIRECTOR AT THE CENTER OF MAGYAR NATIONALISM

From the beginning, Mahler occupied a delicate position. He was a Jewish musician, German-speaking and born in Bohemia, which meant that for the more nationalist sectors of Budapest he hardly represented the ideal profile for directing an institution that many wished to transform into an emblem of Hungarian culture.

Fischer emphasizes that Mahler immediately understood the problem and reacted with considerable tactical skill. Before he had even begun conducting, he summoned representatives of the press and presented himself as a defender of the Hungarian national cause, announcing that his aim would be to turn the Opera into a truly national institution and even promising to learn Hungarian, a promise that he never seriously fulfilled.

That strategy initially allowed him to win important support, although it also contained a contradiction that his opponents would soon exploit: Mahler spoke of a truly Hungarian Opera without mastering the language of the country whose culture he claimed to want to defend.

30 SEPTEMBER 1888: THE ARRIVAL OF THE NEW DIRECTOR

Mahler’s appointment had been prepared with great discretion and surprised even people close to local musical life. Ludwig Karpath, who would later become one of Mahler’s best-known chroniclers, recalled seeing on 30 September 1888 a small, clean-shaven man moving at great speed through the Opera offices toward the director’s room, without initially imagining that this young man was in fact the institution’s new head.

The contract revealed the degree of confidence being placed in him: he was offered 10,000 florins a year for ten years, an extraordinary sum for a director who was still so young. The appointment had been promoted by figures such as Ferenc von Beniczky and Ödön von Mihalovich, who understood that the Opera needed profound renewal and had recognized in Mahler a personality capable of imposing it.

This was, without question, the greatest professional leap of his career up to that moment.

A MAGNIFICENT OPERA HOUSE ON THE OUTSIDE, BUT CHAOTIC WITHIN

The Opera House itself was splendid, but the artistic and administrative situation Mahler found left much to be desired. The institution had suffered from ineffective management, responsibilities were poorly defined and artistic discipline was insufficient.

Mahler reacted exactly as one might expect.

He did not try to adapt himself to the system.

He tried to change it.

In a speech delivered to the company on 10 October, he spoke of rigor, absolute commitment and the subordination of every participant to the work as a whole, concepts that might have sounded conventional when expressed verbally but took on a very different meaning when he began applying them with his customary intensity.

The musicians and singers quickly discovered that the young director expected those words to be taken literally.

THE WAR AGAINST ROUTINE BEGINS AGAIN

Mahler found his relationship with the orchestra especially difficult.

Many of its members were accustomed to a relatively comfortable way of working and did not welcome a director who demanded extreme concentration, rigorous rehearsal and constant revision of established habits.

Mahler, however, was unwilling to accept the idea that an important national institution could function routinely.

The struggle that had already begun in the small theatres now acquired an entirely different dimension, because in Budapest it was no longer simply a matter of getting a performance through, but of transforming an entire company.

Fischer emphasizes precisely this continuity: from Laibach to Vienna, Mahler would react again and again in the same way to institutional mediocrity, arriving with enthusiasm, imposing new demands, achieving exceptional results and ultimately finding himself surrounded by resistance.

LANGUAGE AS PART OF THE REFORM

Mahler understood that he could not sustain himself politically in Budapest if he merely imported Viennese or German models, so he decided to embrace a central demand of Magyar nationalism: performances should be given in Hungarian.

That decision created enormous difficulties, because part of the company did not master the language and some singers learned their roles more or less phonetically.

The contract also required the appointment of new Hungarian stage personnel who were expected to improve not only theatrical standards but also the linguistic quality of the performances.

Mahler was attempting something extraordinarily difficult: to perform the great European repertory according to international standards and, at the same time, to turn it into part of a genuinely Hungarian national operatic culture.

THE FIRST SETBACKS

The beginning was not easy.

The first new production under his general direction was Les Pêcheurs de perles by Georges Bizet, a composer Mahler admired deeply, but the production proved a failure.

Paradoxically, works he considered artistically less important were received more favorably, among them La Fille du régiment by Donizetti and Das Nachtlager von Granada by Konradin Kreutzer.

Those results must have irritated him deeply, because they suggested a considerable gap between his own artistic values and the tastes of part of the audience.

Yet rather than moderate himself, he responded with still greater determination.

“I SHALL NOT GIVE UP”

In December 1888, Mahler wrote to his former patron in Leipzig, Max Staegemann, complaining about the absurd difficulties he encountered in every direction, but immediately adding that he had no intention of giving up.

The phrase perfectly summarizes his attitude during those first months.

Mahler could feel besieged by the press, misunderstood by the musicians or trapped by a complicated bureaucracy, but once he became convinced that an artistic goal was possible, his response was to intensify the work still further.

The first great result of that stubbornness would arrive only a few weeks later.

26 AND 27 JANUARY 1889: THE RING IN HUNGARIAN

On 26 and 27 January 1889, Mahler presented Das Rheingold and Die Walküre in Budapest in Hungarian translation, using an essentially local company that had not previously performed those works.

The challenge was enormous.

Wagner required vocal stamina, orchestral precision, dramatic understanding and stage coordination far beyond that demanded by much of the normal repertory, and in addition everything had to be performed in Hungarian.

The result was a spectacular triumph.

MAHLER PROVES THAT EXCELLENCE DOES NOT DEPEND ON IMPORTING STARS

The success of the first two parts of the Ring had enormous political and artistic importance, because it demonstrated that a Hungarian company could confront one of the most difficult theatrical enterprises of the time without depending on an army of imported performers.

Ferenc von Beniczky publicly congratulated Mahler, emphasizing precisely that he had succeeded in proving two things at once: that rigorous work could transform the resources available and that a national company was capable of performing great European works in Hungarian at a high artistic level.

The press, both liberal and nationalist, agreed in praising the achievement, though each camp emphasized different aspects. Liberal newspapers celebrated the artistic quality of the performances, while nationalist papers stressed the fact that Wagner had been successfully performed in Hungarian by local artists.

For a time, Mahler had managed to turn a political difficulty into a personal victory.

ARABELLA SZILÁGYI AND THE GROWTH OF THE COMPANY

Among the outstanding figures in those productions was the soprano Arabella Szilágyi, who sang Brünnhilde and would become one of the company’s most beloved singers.

Mahler could be brutally demanding with performers, but his goal was not to replace them with more prestigious foreign artists, but to make them reach a higher level through work.

This would become one of the great constants of his career: faith in the possibility of transforming the performer, provided that the performer accepted the necessary discipline.

That is why his rehearsals could be exhausting, but could also produce results that surprised even those taking part in them.

THE CONDUCTOR AND THE STAGE DIRECTOR BEGIN TO BECOME ONE PERSON

In Budapest another fundamental characteristic of Mahler became even more evident: he did not conceive musical direction as an activity separate from the stage.

In the Wagnerian productions, he also assumed theatrical responsibilities, collaborating closely with the new stage personnel and seeking to make gesture, movement, music and dramatic action function as parts of a single whole.

The productions of Das Rheingold and Die Walküre still borrowed many elements from the original Bayreuth stagings of 1876, but the principle Mahler was learning was far more important than the specific details.

An opera could not be divided between a musical director concerned with the pit and a theatre functioning independently on stage.

The performance had to possess a single artistic will.

SUCCESS DID NOT MAKE HIS ENEMIES DISAPPEAR

The triumph of the Ring temporarily improved his position, but it did not eliminate the political tensions.

Some sectors of the press continued to distrust the foreign director who proclaimed himself a defender of national culture without speaking Hungarian.

In addition, the Erkel family retained enormous influence in local musical life. Ferenc Erkel, composer of the Hungarian national anthem and almost an institution in his own right, regarded Mahler’s presence with suspicion, while his son Sándor Erkel had lost prominence within the Opera after the arrival of the new director.

Professional and national rivalries were compounded by an antisemitism that was clearly visible in Hungarian public life. Fischer even recalls parliamentary interventions in 1889 in which certain politicians openly proclaimed their antisemitic views.

Mahler was beginning to discover that talent could triumph during a performance, but it could not make the political context in which he worked disappear.

1889 STRIKES HIM AT THE MOST PERSONAL LEVEL

While he was fighting to transform the Opera, Mahler’s family life entered a period of enormous suffering.

His father, Bernhard Mahler, died in Iglau on 18 February 1889 after a long illness.

The relationship between father and son had never been especially warm, but the father’s death inevitably altered the balance of the entire family.

What happened only a few months later would be still more painful.

THE DEATH OF HIS MOTHER AND HIS SISTER

In the autumn of 1889, Mahler suffered two losses in rapid succession.

His sister Leopoldine, only twenty-six years old, died in Vienna, apparently from a brain tumour, and only about two weeks later, on 11 October 1889, his mother, Marie Mahler, also died.

For Gustav, who was deeply attached emotionally to his mother, the blow must have been devastating, although Fischer points out that the surviving documentation does not allow us to reconstruct his intimate reaction in detail.

What we do know is that he had scarcely any time to stop.

Family responsibility immediately fell upon him.

MAHLER BECOMES HEAD OF THE FAMILY

After the death of his parents, Mahler had to assume responsibility for his siblings with an intensity that would influence his professional decisions for years.

His sister Justine, exhausted after caring for their parents during their final illnesses, had suffered a serious physical and emotional collapse. His brother Alois was living an unstable life, while Otto, still an adolescent and musically gifted, was beginning to display disturbing behavior. The youngest, Emma, was only fourteen.

Mahler, who had never enjoyed a particularly tranquil existence, now found himself running a complicated institution while at the same time trying to reorganize the life of his entire family.

Justine would eventually move to Budapest to live with him.

That responsibility explains part of the economic and professional anxiety that would accompany him even when his career seemed secure.

ILLNESS AND WORK WITHOUT RESPITE

Budapest was also the place where some of the recurring medical problems that Fischer traces throughout Mahler’s life began.

In July 1889, he had to undergo an operation in Munich for hemorrhoids, and for weeks afterward he continued to suffer severe pain, to the point of requiring morphine for relief.

What is significant is that these physical difficulties did not seem to reduce his professional activity for long.

Mahler continued to work with extreme intensity, as though any interruption of his daily rhythm threatened to destabilize everything he was trying to build.

20 NOVEMBER 1889: THE WORLD FINALLY HEARS THE FIRST SYMPHONY

In the midst of those difficulties came one of the most important events in his life as a composer: the première of the work we now know as the First Symphony.

The performance took place in Budapest on 20 November 1889, conducted by Mahler himself.

The work was not yet formally presented as “Symphony No. 1,” but as a “Symphonic Poem in Two Parts”, and it still contained five movements, including the one later given the title Blumine.

For Mahler it must have represented a decisive moment: for the first time, a major symphonic work of his reached the public.

The reaction, however, was far from what he had hoped.

A PUBLIC THAT DID NOT KNOW WHAT TO MAKE OF THAT MUSIC

The reviews were, at best, cool and, at worst, negative.

The work seemed strange to many listeners because it mixed elements that did not appear naturally to belong within the symphonic tradition: songs, grotesque marches, evocations of nature, popular materials and abrupt changes of character.

What we now immediately recognize as a Mahlerian voice was bewildering precisely because there was not yet any context through which to understand it.

Mahler was discovering a painful reality that would follow him for years: he could conquer audiences and critics as a conductor long before persuading them to accept his music as a composer.

THE CONDUCTOR TRIUMPHED WHILE THE COMPOSER WAS REJECTED

That contradiction would become one of the great dramas of his life.

In the opera pit, Mahler could obtain results that audiences recognized immediately.

In his own scores, by contrast, he met bewilderment and resistance.

The greater his success became as an interpreter of Mozart, Wagner or Beethoven, the more painful it must have been to discover that the same society that celebrated his interpretative genius did not yet know how to respond to what he regarded as his deepest vocation.

For Mahler never really doubted that his essential identity was that of a composer.

Conducting could provide him with prestige, money and authority.

Composition was what he believed he had been born to do.

THE PRICE OF RUNNING A GREAT OPERA HOUSE: HAVING NO TIME TO COMPOSE

Fischer points out that the Budapest years were, from a creative point of view, the least productive period of Mahler’s entire life.

The daily running of the Opera consumed him completely.

Although he wrote some songs and was able to première the First, he made scarcely any progress on the Second Symphony, whose opening movement, Todtenfeier, had already been essentially conceived before he settled in the Hungarian capital.

Here one of the great conflicts of his existence as an adult began to reveal itself.

In order to survive he needed to conduct.

In order to fulfil himself he needed to compose.

And the greater his responsibility in the theatre, the less time he had for what he considered his true mission.

MAHLER COULD ALSO BE WRONG

Fischer avoids turning him into an infallible hero and also points out his mistakes.

One of the clearest occurred in 1889, when Mahler made extensive cuts in Les Huguenots by Meyerbeer, going so far as to eliminate virtually the entire final act.

Mahler justified the decision by invoking stage practices common at the time, but Fischer considers that in this case the critic who protested was right and the conductor was wrong.

The episode is important because it shows that his interpretative radicalism was not always synonymous with insight.

His confidence could lead him to discover extraordinary possibilities, but it could also make him excessively categorical.

THE PROBLEM OF THE HUNGARIAN LANGUAGE RETURNS WITH FORCE

At the beginning of 1890, some Hungarian newspapers began demanding that Mahler fulfil the promises he had made on his arrival, especially regarding the promotion of national operas and the learning of the language.

The criticism contained an obvious nationalist component, but Fischer concedes that it was not entirely without foundation, because Mahler had made explicit promises that he had not kept.

His commitment to musical excellence was absolute.

His commitment to learning Hungarian, by contrast, was minimal.

The contradiction gave his opponents an argument that was difficult to disarm.

DON GIOVANNI: ONE OF THE GREAT TRIUMPHS OF BUDAPEST

Despite the tensions, Mahler continued to achieve important artistic successes, and among them his production of Don Giovanni, with which he opened the season in September 1890, stood out in particular.

Mozart already occupied a central place in his interpretative world, and the work offered precisely the kind of challenge that most attracted him: the union of musical precision, dramatic intensity and theatrical truth.

That Don Giovanni would become one of the high points of his Budapest period.

A few months later, one particular performance would also have an unexpectedly important consequence for his future.

LILLI LEHMANN: A GREAT SINGER RECOGNIZES MAHLER’S TALENT

During the winter of 1890–91, the great soprano Lilli Lehmann sang several times in Budapest and came to know the young director closely.

Lehmann would later recall his impetuous temperament, immense capacity for work and absolute artistic integrity, although she also noted that this force of will could turn into unfair pressure on those who were unable to keep pace with him.

Her judgment is particularly valuable because it combines admiration with lucidity.

Lehmann understood something essential: Mahler expected from others a stamina comparable to his own, without always accepting that not everyone could live at the same level of intensity.

16 DECEMBER 1890: BRAHMS HEARS MAHLER

On 16 December 1890, Lehmann sang Donna Anna in Don Giovanni under Mahler’s direction, while Johannes Brahms, who was in Budapest to perform his Second Piano Concerto the following day, attended the performance.

Brahms had agreed to go almost reluctantly, because he maintained that he preferred reading Mozart’s score to enduring a mediocre performance.

Mahler’s interpretation, however, won him over.

According to the surviving account, his enthusiasm increased to such an extent that by the end of the first act he was exclaiming his admiration and eventually went backstage to congratulate the conductor personally.

That encounter would have important consequences.

Years later, Brahms would support Mahler’s candidacy for the directorship of the Vienna Opera.

RECOGNITION WAS NOW COMING FROM OUTSIDE

The enthusiasm of Brahms and Lehmann demonstrated that Mahler had reached an interpretative level that could now be recognized by some of the most important musical personalities in Europe.

Barely six years earlier he had been conducting in Olmütz amid protests from exhausted choristers.

Now Brahms was emerging from a Mozart performance convinced that he had encountered an extraordinary conductor.

The rise had been vertiginous.

Yet just as his prestige was reaching a new level, his relationship with Budapest was beginning to deteriorate irreversibly.

FERENC VON BENICZKY: THE ALLY MAHLER COULD NOT AFFORD TO LOSE

Throughout his Budapest years, Ferenc von Beniczky had been one of his essential supporters.

He was a relatively cosmopolitan administrator, willing to tolerate Mahler’s difficult personality because he understood the magnitude of his talent and shared his desire to raise the institution’s standards.

When it became clear that Beniczky would leave his post, Mahler’s position immediately became more vulnerable.

His successor was to represent a very different political orientation.

GÉZA ZICHY: WHEN NATIONALISM TAKES CONTROL OF THE OPERA

The appointment of Count Géza Zichy was announced on 30 January 1891.

Zichy was a pianist, composer and member of one of Hungary’s great families, but, unlike Beniczky, he openly defended a nationalist orientation.

In his inaugural speech he declared that his aim was to create Hungarian art on a European level, initially with the help of foreigners but, in the future, through exclusively national resources.

For Mahler, foreign and German-speaking, the message was unmistakable.

His days in Budapest were numbered.

MAHLER HAD ALREADY PREPARED HIS EXIT

What Zichy probably did not know was that Mahler had begun preparing his next move much earlier.

Since October 1890, he had been conducting secret negotiations with Bernhard Pollini, director of the Hamburg Opera, and a week before Zichy formally took office Mahler had already signed a new contract as principal conductor there.

Once again he showed that, despite the image of an artist absorbed in higher ideals, he possessed considerable practical skill when his career was at stake.

He did not passively wait to be dismissed.

He prepared the next stage before abandoning the previous one.

25,000 FLORINS TO LEAVE

Zichy quickly restricted the director’s powers and transferred part of his administrative authority to the intendant, a decision Mahler interpreted as a deliberate provocation.

Rather than resist for years within a system that no longer offered him possibilities, he used the situation to his own advantage.

He reminded them that he possessed a ten-year contract of which he had fulfilled barely a quarter, and offered to leave early in exchange for compensation of 25,000 florins, equivalent to approximately two and a half years of salary.

Zichy agreed.

Mahler announced his resignation on 14 March 1891.

THE PUBLIC UNDERSTANDS TOO LATE WHAT IT IS LOSING

Two days after his resignation, during a performance of Lohengrin conducted by Sándor Erkel, part of the audience repeatedly began calling for Mahler.

The protests became so intense that agents had to intervene to restore order in the upper galleries.

There was something deeply ironic in the scene.

For years, Mahler had had to endure criticism, distrust and attacks for being a foreigner.

Now that he was leaving, part of the public understood what it was losing.

But it was already too late.

BUDAPEST WAS A TRIUMPH AND A FAILURE AT THE SAME TIME

The Budapest period cannot be summarized simply as either success or failure.

Mahler succeeded in transforming the level of the Opera, demonstrated that a local company could perform Wagner in Hungarian, produced memorable interpretations of Mozart and Wagner and won the recognition of figures such as Brahms and Lilli Lehmann.

At the same time, he failed to resolve the political contradiction inherent in his position, never learned Hungarian, generated intense conflicts within the institution and ultimately abandoned a contract originally conceived to last a decade.

Artistically, he had gained a great deal.

Institutionally, the reform remained incomplete.

THE GREAT PARADOX: THE CONDUCTOR GROWS WHILE THE COMPOSER RUNS OUT OF TIME

Perhaps the deepest contradiction of Budapest was this: Mahler became a much more powerful conductor there precisely at the cost of having less time to be a composer.

The First Symphony was premiered, but not understood.

The Second barely advanced.

The operation of the Opera consumed almost all his energy.

Mahler was beginning to experience painfully the conflict that would mark much of his adult life: the greater his success in the theatre, the greater the danger that his true creative vocation would be pushed aside.

This explains in part why the idea of moving to Hamburg, even into a formally less powerful position, could appear attractive.

He needed a better professional stage, but he also needed to recover space for himself.

BUDAPEST WAS THE FIRST GREAT REHEARSAL FOR THE REVOLUTION HE WOULD LATER CARRY OUT IN VIENNA

When Mahler left Budapest in March 1891, he had learned a lesson that would prove decisive for his future: transforming a theatre requires far more than conducting an orchestra well, because it means intervening in the staging, changing habits, demanding discipline, choosing repertory, training singers, confronting administrators, managing political tensions and ensuring that every element of a performance obeys a single artistic idea.

That is precisely what he would attempt to do, with far greater resources, when he later arrived at the Vienna Opera.

Budapest was, in a sense, the first great laboratory for that future revolution.

There he learned that excellence could be built, but also that every transformation generated enemies; he understood that a conductor could dominate a performance and yet fail to control the institution that made it possible; he discovered that politics could penetrate deeply into art and that nationality, language and origin could weigh as heavily as talent; and he realized that professional success could paradoxically become a threat to his life as a composer.

When he departed for Hamburg, Gustav Mahler was no longer simply a brilliant young conductor. He was a man who had directed a major national opera house, overcome formidable resistance, endured the public failure of his First Symphony, lost his parents, become responsible for his siblings and understood that his artistic life would be permanently marked by an impossible tension between two equally absolute vocations.

He needed to conduct in order to live.

But he needed to compose in order to be himself.