The Jewish 100: A Ranking of the Most Influential Jews of All Time (10 page)

W
hen my beloved conducting teacher, Carl Bamberger, was nine years old, he came home one day from school in Vienna to find his mother crying in the kitchen. Before her, spread out on the table, was the daily newspaper blaring the headline
MAHLER IST
TODT!
(“Mahler is dead!”). When Carl in his early eighties recounted this story to me, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, and Zubin Mehta was conducting the New York Philharmonic.

Of all the figures in this book, the most influential on me and on countless other musicians and listeners was Gustav Mahler, surely one of the greatest and most original composers in the history of music and a leading force in the explosive Jewish and Viennese artistic movement in the twenty years before the First World War.

Mahler’s large influence on Arnold Schoenberg will be recounted in that chapter. In addition to Schoenberg, Mahler exerted an immense force on composers Alban Berg, Anton von Webern, Kurt Weill, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, and Leonard Bernstein and conductors Bruno Walter, Willem Mengelberg, and Otto Klemperer. Although some musicologists would claim that twentieth-century music belongs to the disciples of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, it was Mahler who with his very different contemporary, the French impressionist Claude Debussy, let loose the furies of chaos and dissonance, neoclassicism, symbolism, and glaring nationalism, which have since dominated musical composition.

Mahler composed nine symphonies (a tenth was left incomplete at his death), large orchestral song cycles
(Songs of a Wayfarer, The Youth’s Magic Horn,
and
The Song of the Earth),
a cantata, and many individual art songs. He was also one of the best-known conductors and music directors of his era, working in opera houses in Budapest, Hamburg, Vienna, and New York as well as leading the Vienna and New York Philharmonic orchestras.

Mahler is the musical equivalent of Sigmund Freud. His symphonies use huge, complex orchestral forces to express often the most intimate, private thoughts. It is the music of an introvert expressed in a very public, almost naked manner. Fully aware of his musical heritage, Mahler used classical form as a beginning, then pushed, refined, and expanded musical shapes to satisfy his very personal, expressive desires. Unlike Debussy who employed impressions, repetitions, and symbols to express psychological states, Mahler’s approach was more immediate. Painfully uncovering, achingly searching for his deepest wants and wishes, in expressions of almost suffocating lyricism and wild agitation, Mahler developed an almost therapeutic style of writing. Demons were exposed, and more often than not, after a grand and tiresome struggle, Gustav, the hero, prevailed in radiant triumph.

Mahler’s background was humble, his father a small pub keeper of violent temperament. Five of his siblings died at young ages of diphtheria, another at twelve of heart disease; his elder brother Otto, a talented musician, jealous of Gustav’s greater success, shot himself, and his eldest sister Leopoldine succumbed to a brain tumor after a short, unhappy marriage. His brother Alois behaved like a fool, imagining himself the friend of the crown prince or a powerful dragoon, veteran of foreign campaigns. Mahler’s wife, Alma Schindler, would later remark that his brothers and sisters behaved in a way that could only be described as “Gustav Mahlerish.” Mahler’s music is often fantastical, exhibiting outlandish orchestral effects at the service of what sometimes seems an unconscious gone insane.

Raised in Bohemia, now a part of the Czech Republic, the young Mahler often heard local regimental marching bands whose instrumentation would play a strategic role in the style and content of his symphonies. He was also undoubtedly exposed to indigenous Bohemian folk songs and Jewish liturgy (his father was an active member of the local synagogue).

Mahler was not, like many of the great composers, a child prodigy. However, he showed a keen interest in chamber music, German Romantic poetry, and drama. Trained at the conservatory in Vienna, he shared lodgings with fellow student Hugo Wolf soon to be a preeminent song composer (before going mad and dying in an insane asylum at age forty-two), and became a disciple of the Austrian symphonist Anton Bruckner (who referred to Mahler—to his face—as “my little Jew”).

Mahler secured positions as a journeyman conductor in rapid succession and with increasing prominence, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as opera director of the Hofoper in Vienna, Europe’s leading theater. Anti-Semitic Viennese society would not permit a Jew to direct its most important theater. To secure the position, Mahler chose to renounce his Judaism and convert to Roman Catholicism. It was a decision that tormented him for the rest of his life.

Mahler’s years in Vienna coincided with the rise of the influential Secession art movement led by, among others, the painters Gustav Klimt and Carl Moll, architect Otto Wagner, and stage designer Alfred Roller. Mahler and Roller championed a series of productions of Mozart’s operas, which reestablished the composer’s reputation as the greatest musical dramatist, not the classic trifle many then thought him to be. Mozart was revealed by Mahler (as Mendelssohn had “rediscovered” Bach) as Shakespeare’s equal in unlocking the secrets of love, infidelity, sex, power, and the soul (fifty years later Leonard Bernstein would do the same for Mahler’s reputation, establishing him as a symphonist the equal of Mozart, Haydn, Beethoven, and Brahms). Mahler also developed the revolutionary concept of a repertory company of acting singers. He worked with the leading composers of the period, giving local first performances of works by Leoncavallo, Puccini, and Richard Strauss.

Viennese musical politics in Mahler’s day were treacherous (they remain so to this day), and he was forced out in 1907 after ten brilliant, innovative years. First, the Metropolitan Opera and then the New York Philharmonic offered him positions. He spent an unhappy four seasons in New York, ultimately losing out in a musical power struggle with a young musical tornado named Arturo Toscanini.

Mahler died in Vienna in 1911 of heart failure brought on by a streptococcal infection.

Apart from Mahler’s important contributions to musical practice and performance during his lifetime (and as did Toscanini, Mahler raised the standards of music making in his time to high levels of professionalism), his music challenges the listener, the instrumentalist, and the composer to dig deeper into their emotions, intellect, and subconscious for revelation. Audiences did not wholly understand Mahler’s works until quite recently. After his death, performances of his symphonies dwindled, kept mostly alive by his assistant, Bruno Walter. The Nazis banned his music (and murdered his niece in Auschwitz). Only after the Second World War in trailblazing performances by Jascha Horenstein and Bernstein did Mahler’s time come.

Bernstein once remarked that Mahler’s music anticipated and predicted the Holocaust. This melodramatic declaration has some truth to it, but one cannot fail to notice that Mahler always avoided artificial musical expression. He hid behind nothing. His music preserves the emotional quandaries of his era, when Austrian society, largely through its Jewish artists, reached an apex of civilized life before the mechanized slaughter by the National Socialists. More than any other composer, Mahler’s innermost feelings and thoughts are laid plain to us. We are urged to swim in a chasm of swirling feelings, madly rushing past danger, to. the refuge of a heavenly life.

From Moses to Moses, there was no one like Moses.

S
o reads the people’s epitaph to the greatest Jewish philosopher of all time, Rabbi Moses ben Maimon, known to pious Jews by the acronym Rambam and to the world by the Greek name Maimonides. Born in Cordoba, Spain, buried in Tiberius in the Holy Land, Maimonides experienced the turmoil of the Crusades; perils at sea; the noble court of Saladin, the dynamic ruler of all Arabia; challenges to rabbinical authority; and developing trends in medieval medicine.

Until their discovery in the late 1800s, hundreds of thousands of documents from the Middle Ages lay hidden in a storeroom attached to a synagogue in Fostat, a suburb of Cairo, preserved by the perfectly dry Egyptian climate. From this documentation we can recreate much of Maimonides’ life—often in his own words.

Maimonides lived a life of privilege sustained first by his family and then, in his late years, by the skill of his medical arts. The level of intellectual and political authority he achieved could only be reached in this time by someone of high birth, commercial wealth, and great scholarship. Many of Maimonides’ ancestors were famed rabbis. His younger brother, David, successfully supported the family as an international trader. But it was Maimonides’ encyclopedic mind and consummate understanding and memory of Jewish law that set him apart. In his teens and early twenties he wrote important religious treatises. Indeed, all through his life he exhibited the need to codify and explain, to guide the faithful to a rational understanding of the infinite.

Maimonides admired Aristotle above all ancient philosophers. The ancient Greek philosopher had written texts on logic as a means of understanding the world. With his unique knowledge of Jewish law and tradition, Maimonides applied Aristotelian logic to religious thought. Rambam asserted that one’s imagination could be used to lift the mind and spirit away from the restraints of thinking, ultimately toward divine prophecy. After his death, Maimonides’ philosophy influenced important Christian thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Albertus Magnus, and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (who also interpreted and synthesized Aristotelian logic for religious purposes) and remarkably the excommunicated Jew, Baruch de Spinoza. Although beloved by most Jews as their greatest philosopher, ironically Maimonides has had less effect on Jewish life than, for example, the French commentator Rashi or the Hasidic and mystical movements.

Maimonides represents one of the first great flowerings of human thought after the long drought of the Dark Ages. In his day the Arab world stretched from Babylonia through North Africa into Spain. Christian Europe did not provide the peace necessary for Jews to practice and develop their religion. Muslim rule, on the other hand, when not dominated by extremists, was more tolerant, permitting heathen Jews to be Jews, quietly. Maimonides fled Spain to escape the persecution of the Al-mohads who gave Jews the impossible choice of conversion to Islam or death. After dangerous voyages to Morocco and Palestine, Maimonides settled in Fostat. His brother, David, supported the scholarly Moses by developing a flourishing trading business. The trading range of the Jewish merchants was astounding, extending even as far as Malaysia and Sumatra. During the late 1100s, Saladin liberated Jerusalem from the marauding Crusaders, displaying a restraint not shown by the Christians years before. When the Crusaders in 1099 had freed the Holy City from those they considered infidels, the Christian soldiers herded all the Jewish inhabitants into a square and murdered them in cold blood.

When Maimonides was in his early forties, David was lost at sea, far away on a trading expedition. Maimonides was shattered. He never truly got over his brother’s death. For the rest of his life Rambam greatly mourned his separation from his Spanish home of Cordoba, the “Bride of Andalusia,” and David’s death. Maimonides’ early years had been spent in quiet contemplation, compiling important texts on Jewish law, codifying and analyzing divine instruction. His remaining days, however, were incredibly active. To support his family, the learned Maimonides began to practice the art of medicine, aided by his ability to retain scientific teachings and to empathize with people. After the ancient Greek physician Galen, Maimonides’ influence on medical practices would extend across centuries.

The influence of his brother’s death, greater public responsibilities, and increasing controversies over the meaning of holy law motivated Rambam to compose in elegant Arabic his great
Guide to the Perplexed.
The
Guide
was not intended for the average reader. Maimonides asserted that a simple understanding of Jewish law does not bring one closest to God without metaphysics or what we call today philosophy. Only if man is possessed by that higher knowledge will the age of the Messiah come. Maimonides was driven by the popular prophecy that during the early 1200s the misery of the Dark Ages would usher in the Messianic age. To prepare for that supreme moment, one had to have faith, and faith was only achievable through thinking. Knowing is more important than doing. Logic can fail us, as we are incapable of taking reason to its infinite resolution, but it is better for man’s being to be operative within its realm.

Maimonides was disturbed that Jewish tradition had no one system for teaching its laws and no real concern for classical philosophy. He therefore sought to filter Judaic thinking through Aristotle to assert that man’s soul is exactly equal to the sum of his knowledge. Our thinking is not a random thing but rather our existence. The sum total of our knowledge is our essential being. Our total knowledge, our inherent reason, brings us closer to holy perfection, to oneness with God. Faith can only be achieved through thought.