Tragic Absurdity in the Music of Gustav Mahler

At six years of age and at his mother's request, Gustav Mahler presented her with his first written composition. It was a spirited polka to which he then added a funeral march as introduction. At six Mahler was already Mahler; this juxtaposition of the serious and the frivolous as a stylistic device occurs throughout his work. An explanation for this precocious and unusual musical style emerged during a brief analytic experience with Freud, when a memory occurred suggesting that this juxtaposition was an effort to communicate about and master an actual childhood trauma, his father's cruel tormenting of his mother (Jones, 1954).

Perhaps this musical gift to his mother-the combined funeral march and polka-was also an offering of consolation, revealing the depth of feeling in the young son for his mother's losses, and suggests the intimate relationship his music had to the traumatic experiences of his own life as well as his empathy for his mother who was in perpetual mourning for her lost children. The early births and deaths brought Mahler face to face with mortality and its consequences of both joy and grief in sequence at an age when these issues could not be processed or communicated by Mahler.1

Gustav Mahler was his mother's first child to live past the first year and the only child to survive to maturity, marry, and achieve a successful career. Every year until he was nineteen, his mother was either pregnant or in mourning for a lost child. His role as the replacement child for her first infant son was a heavy obligation for him. He said that he felt helpless to bring his mother relief from her sadness or comfort for her losses. It seems likely that his music was an attempt to provide her such solace.

A number of analysts (Cain & Cain, 1964; Meissner, 1993)