An enthralled Hollywood producer began searching for Mahler right after the premiere of the film Death in Venice (1971), which featured music from Mahler’s symphonies. Sadly, they missed each other by six decades. We spoke about the popularity of Mahler’s music in film with Jeremy Barham, Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Surrey, who has devoted his entire career to the composer’s work.
Barham first encountered Mahler’s music in a television advert for engine oil in the 1980s: “I had no idea what it was then, but it was the beginning of the second movement of the Seventh Symphony. The first time I properly got to know about Mahler was at school, where a very inspirational music teacher introduced me to his music. I did some Mahler projects for my bachelor’s degree, then I did a dissertation for a master’s degree, and I went on to do a PhD. I got into Mahler through various research projects. And I’ve continued to do that really for the whole of my career.”
Mahler won fame as an opera conductor. He got his start at provincial theatres in various European countries, then he worked in bigger cities like Prague, Leipzig, and Budapest. “He achieved the pinnacle of becoming director of the Vienna Opera, which was considered the most prestigious job at the time in opera”, Barham emphasises.
Although it was in the opera world that Mahler found success, he never wrote an opera of his own: “It think it’s probably because he was relentlessly conducting operas throughout his working life. In the summer months when he composed, he wanted to distance himself from that world. He probably also found it difficult to cope with the legacy of Wagner, the giant of operatic composition, who was his hero as a composer, so he probably couldn't contemplate trying in any way to match that.”
Mahler was clearly inspired by Wagner, including through his work in Bayreuth, where he banned latecomers, made the instrumentalists invisible in a deep orchestra pit, and dimmed the auditorium lighting in order to immerse the audience in the drama. “I suppose you could say it’s like going to a darkened cinema. In Vienna, Mahler went to great lengths to create this all-enveloping Wagnerian experience. He also banned the ‘clack’, paid supporters of famous singers who had to applaud rapturously at the end of an aria. That bothered him. He wanted to get rid of distractions and let the audience concentrate on the actual work.”
Like film, opera combines music, a visual component, acting, and other elements. “I think Mahler’s understanding and experience of how all these different art forms work together fed into his own music. I'm thinking of say the Second Symphony, which was the first of his symphonies to include sung texts, but also it includes off-stage ensembles, so he’s using this sense of dramatic space which comes right out of the world of opera and stage craft. A sense of drama underpins all of his symphonies whether they have sung texts or not. Mahler’s music is full of drama as well as very contemplative moments, and so there's such a range of immediate emotional communication”, says Barham, explaining Mahler’s popularity with film makers.
At the time when the brothers Auguste and Louis Lumière invented the cinematograph, Mahler was 35 years old. However, Barham’s remarks are likely to disappoint anyone fond of imagining Mahler’s music in early cinema: “I wish I could say that Mahler had experienced the birth of film because he could well have done both in Vienna and particularly in New York, but there's absolutely no evidence that he experienced film, unfortunately.”
Nevertheless, Mahler’s music first accompanied films as early as the silent era. For screenings, collections of well-known classical works were compiled. “Mahler appears just in one and it's a Viennese publication called the Vindobona Collection. It was published by Universal Edition, who happened also to be the publisher of Mahler’s music at the time, and this collection was an attempt to introduce the world of modernist classical music into the world of cinema.”
Compositions by Gustav Mahler have been heard in more than 200 films and series, which is no small number, but the instances of cinematic use of music by Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, or Wagner run into the thousands. “It think we associate Mahler with cinema because of the individual cases in which his music has been used so powerfully, like in the film Death in Venice, where the music seems to be the main focus for long stretches”, says Barham.
Luchino Visconti based his celebrated film on Thomas Mann’s novella of the same name, but he made several significant changes. The most important was transforming Gustav von Aschenbach from a writer into a composer. Moreover, von Aschenbach was played by Dirk Bogarde, whose appearance strongly resembled Mahler.
To briefly recall the story: von Aschenbach travels to Venice to recover after a heart attack and to seek inspiration for his future work. There, however, he becomes infatuated with Tadzio, a fourteen-year-old boy from a Polish family staying at the same hotel. When cholera breaks out in the city, von Aschenbach decides to stay and die rather than leave the boy. The end of the film is especially famous: the protagonist dies in a deck chair on the beach, unable to take his eyes off Tadzio, who is wrestling with a friend at the water’s edge. The nearly ten-minute wordless sequence is accompanied solely by the closing section of the Adagietto from Mahler’s Fifth Symphony.
The film was released in 1971 during the Mahler boom, which was launched in the 1960s by Leonard Bernstein with the first complete set of recordings of Mahler’s symphonies. Visconti thus rode the wave of renewed interest in the Viennese composer. The convergence of fortuitous timing, a resurgence of interpretive interest in Mahler’s works, and a compelling cinematic and musical aesthetic turned the film into a landmark cultural event. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the film, however. Mahler’s daughter Anna worried that the excessive similarity of the main character to Mahler would damage her father’s reputation. She even tried to dissuade Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II from attending the premiere, but to no avail.
From among the newer films that give Mahler’s music a prominent role, Jeremy Barham mentions Tár (2022), in which Cate Blanchett plays the part of a conductor. According to the British musicologist, “it’s about obsession, mental instability, and psychological torment. Again, the film taps in to some of the folklore surrounding Gustav Mahler as a conductor. I don't think he was anything like the character in Tár, but he certainly was an absolute perfectionist who weeded out slovenliness. And he had so many rehearsals, way more than previous conductors.”
A year later, another film was premiered with a conductor as the chief protagonist: Maestro. It tells the story of Leonard Bernstein. “I think Bradley Cooper’s performance in that film is probably the best example so far of an actor taking on the techniques of conducting. He spent a long time observing Bernstein’s movements, which weren’t very conventional, and even his facial gestures. There’s that wonderful scene in the film recreating a concert in Ely Cathedral. The end of the Second Symphony is monumental in scale and power, and Bernstein is almost ecstatic on the podium. So hats off to Bradley Cooper for that!”
Whether Mahler would approve of the use of his music in films remains an open question: “I think he might have approved of the royalty checks”, says Barham with a laugh. “Aesthetically, it’s such a difficult thing—who knows. I think it would depend on the film. If he felt the film did his music justice and used it in an aesthetically intelligent way and a sensitive way, he would perhaps approve of it. The big problem with film music is you most often just get tiny excerpts, and he probably wouldn’t have liked that, but the idea of separating out certain movements from a symphony was not unknown to Mahler, and he did do it himself.“
Mahler influenced the generation of composers of Hollywood’s golden age like Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Max Steiner, and Bernard Hermann. “His influence on contemporary film composers is also clear. That wonderful melody from Schindler’s List, for example, by John Williams, comes right out of the Mahlerian orchestral world. The musical themes from the Star Wars franchise are strongly indebted to Mahler. Hans Zimmer is a really interesting case because although he generally favours electronics, he still holds on to some traditional forms of orchestral scoring. The film that really demonstrates this best, I think, is Interstellar. Some of his string writing is closely influenced by Mahler's Tenth Symphony—in the last movement there’s this rising seventh which reappears in the Zimmer score”, says Barham.
Mahler’s music is not confined only to cult films or Hollywood blockbusters; it also appears in places where few would expect it. For example, in Season 22, Episode 15 of the animated series The Simpsons, Lisa invents a medicine that is given to Springfield’s seniors, and it causes feelings of intense happiness. They all go skipping through the fields and riding bicycles. But then the side effects set in. The patients’ eyes are rolling out of their sockets, left suspended as if on a string. And heard in the background is the lively melodic adaptation of Mahler's song 'I walked across the fields this morning' in the opening movement of his First Symphony…
One final curiosity. You may also notice echoes of Mahler’s music in Jeff Russo’s Herman’s Malt, heard in the second episode of the second season of Fargo. Can you spot the bars borrowed from Mahler’s Second Symphony?