Mahler: Champion and Disciple of Wagner
Presented to the Wagner Society of Washington DC, May 2000

by Henry-Louis de La Grange

On May 11, 2000, Prof. de La Grange articulated Gustav Mahler's love of Wagner's works. He discussed Mahler's considerable efforts in promoting the Wagner operas at the Vienna State Opera at the turn of the 20th Century, and particularly the well-remembered Alfred Roller productions.

He began by discussing how Mahler, from the very start of his musical life, was interested in Wagner's music. During his early youth in the 1870s Wagner's music was considered new and avant-garde, and attracted the attention of many young musicians. Mahler's early work, Das Klagende Lied, though certainly an original work, has some hints of Wagner's influence. During his student days in Vienna Mahler joined the city's Wagner-Verein, and upon his assumption of music directorships he constantly lobbied to perform Wagner when such a performance was practical, including a few times in Hungarian.

When he became director of the Vienna Philharmonic and Vienna Opera, he performed Wagner's works. Remember at this time, Wagner's music was considered avant-garde, and Vienese audiences were fairly conservative (though this did not prevent the emergence of revolutionary figures in philosophy, art, and music, including Mahler himself). Therefore the managment was not initially eager to introduce Wagner, and placed many restrictions on Mahler's performances, such as ordering cuts in the operas. Mahler gradually removed these cuts and by the middle period of his directorship was giving full festivals of Wagner's uncut works at the end of every season.

Of course, Mahler's greatest contribution to Wagnerian history beyond the performance of Wagner's complete works in Vienna was sponsoring the productions of a famous local artist, Alfred Roller. Roller's productions include a set of famous productions which first introduced electric lighting and electric coloration into Opera, as opposed to the earlier "naturalism" which was standard, for instance at Bayreuth. These experiments caputred a considerable amount of controversy (as some experiments in Wagnerian staging do today). Like the work of the famous theorist of Wagner stage, Adolphe Appia, Roller was interested in the possibilities of electric lighting and color. Among other things, he like to gradually bathe his scenes with a certain color which represented the mood of the scene. For instance, grey at the first act of Tristan und Isolde, representing the character's bleakness and unhappiness. Though the sets Professor De La Grange showed us were still still fairly realistic (unlike Appia' theories or Wieland Wagner's controvesial and groundbreaking Bayreuth productions), one got a good sense of Roller's use of lighting and of his ability at mise-en-scene. For many years Vienna was the only major opera house that was willing to innovate like this.

Professor De La Grange illustrated his talk with rare slides, including many of Roller's productions, from the collection of the Bibliothèque Musicale Gustav Mahler in Paris, which he directs. Henry-Louis de La Grange was born in 1924. He studied music at Yale, then in Paris with Yvonne Lefébure and Nadia Boulanger, and pursued a career in music criticism. He has contributed articles and reviews to Opera News, the New York Times, and Musical America and to the French publications Arts, La Revue Musicale, Le Nouvel Observateur, and Diapason. In the 1950s he became interested in Mahler. Over the next three decades he gathered a large archive of documents, autographs, and pictures which formed the nucleus of the Bibliothèque Musicale Gustav Mahler that he co-founded in 1986 in Paris.

Prof. de La Grange is also a broadcaster. He has organized two music festivals in Europe and has collaborated in the presentation of special Mahler events. He is the recipient of many honors, including the Chevalier of the Order of the Légion d'honneur. He wrote two-volume Vienne: Histoire Musicale and is author of a monumental Mahler biography, already published in French in the 1970s and 1980s. The third volume of the planned four-volume English edition is being published in May 2000 by the Oxford University Press under the title Gustav Mahler: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion (1904-1907). The Bibliothèque Musicale Gustav Mahler is a non-profit organization that exists to make its extensive collection of books, recordings, periodicals, and personal archives related to 19th and 20th century music available to anyone whose professional activities are linked to the world of music.
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