Like psychoanalysis, Western classical music is, in some quarters, thought to be esoteric, highbrow, and elitist. Orchestras are struggling to retain aging audiences and bring in the young. Marin Alsop, musical director of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, creatively reaches out into the community and opens the doors to her world of composers and sound in new ways. Last November, she presented two performances of a music and theater program titled Analyze This: Mahler and Freud.
In 1910 Gustav Mahler, distressed by problems in his marriage to Alma and unable to compose, was advised by Richard von Nepallek, a Viennese psychoanalyst and relative of Alma's, to consult Freud, who was then on vacation in Leyden. After making and canceling three appointments, Mahler arrived in Leyden. For four hours he worked with Freud as they walked through the town. Ernest Jones writes, “Although Mahler had no previous contact with psychoanalysis, Freud said he had never met anyone who seemed to understand it so swiftly.” Fifteen years later, in a letter to Marie Bonaparte, Freud discussed his encounter and his interpretations. Excerpts from that letter, including direct quotations, form the backbone of Didi Balle's elaborated script, which Earle Silber, a flutist and a psychoanalyst with the Washington Center for Psychoanalysis, said “was probably very much the way [Freud] worked at that time.”
One performance of the work, comprised of music and actors with images from the Alma Mahler archives at the University of Pennsylvania, was at Strathmore Hall in the Washington, D.C. suburb of Bethesda, Maryland. Joanne Gold, who, as a community member of the Washington Psychoanalytic Center and chair of their Social Impact Committee, organized a block of seats and a post-performance reception with Alsop for psychoanalysts and their guests. Seventy-seven came; a thousands seats overall were sold, and the work, in Bethesda and the next night in Baltimore, received standing ovations.
Richard Chavez, a psychoanalyst with the Washington Center, said with enthusiasm, now he wanted to listen to more Mahler. It was a program intended and shaped as a part of the 150th anniversary of Mahler's birth and the 100th anniversary of his death. “It was educational as well as beautiful,” said Georgia Royalty of the Baltimore Washington Center for Psychoanalysis. Alsop said in the question and answer discussion after the performance in Bethesda that the music was “Mahler's greatest hits.” Its portrayal of psychoanalysis “was too formulaic,” said Mark Levine of the Washington Center. Yet the musicians were talking about the production backstage, a sign of success.
People are “wired” these days, with a “terribly fragmented attention span,” said Balle in a phone interview. Working with that reality, she spent four months immersed in writing a script for “bona fide theater actors, lights, and costumes.” Images were projected onto a screen behind the orchestra. Musical excerpts selected by Alsop, scripted commentary delivered from the podium, and dramatic scenes acted on stage were woven into a work that was 60 percent music and 40 percent text. Tony Tsendeas played Freud and Richard Pilcher played Mahler. Mezzosoprano Kristina Lewis, at the conclusion of the program, sang one of Alma Mahler's songs. Alma, a promising composer, had been forced by Mahler to give up her work, but after his consultation he encouraged her. Mahler himself was freed to again compose. The Adagietto from his Fifth Symphony, one of Alsop's selections, interpreted in the program as a love letter to Alma, resonated with Freud's understanding of the profound losses Mahler suffered in his childhood and youth.
Balle, who hopes to market the work through her new production company, Symphonic Stage Shows, said she wants in this and similar efforts to give access to a composer's life and work. “Knowing his struggles, demons, and aspirations,” she said, will deepen the “emotional, cerebral, and visceral” experience of the music. But, she added, “it is available at the level at which we wish to enter and participate.
“I cringed at first,” said Silber of the portrayal of psychoanalysis. Freud himself, commenting to Bonaparte, had expressed surprise that Mahler, so close to his mother, had married a woman named not Marie, his mother's name, but Alma. Mahler said, yes, but her full name is Alma Maria, and I call her Marie. And, Walter Gropius, courting Alma while she was married to Mahler, sent a love letter intended for Alma by “Freudian slip” to her husband. It was, from the author of “Psychopathology of Everyday Life,” Freud's greatest hits in the time warp of his developing theory and technique of the early 20th century.
Alsop said Mahler “was willing to discuss childhood, but on his own terms, in music.” She performed excerpts that included klezmer music and the sounds of cowbells—sounds from his past. Balle said, “Both of them use material of their inner lives, of their dreams.” Following the 19th century Romantic vocation of childhood, the contours of our early years were being redefined in the 20th century. Leonard Bernstein, who championed Mahler and brought him back into the musical repertoire, stated, “Mahler was the prophet of the 20th century.” Balle said, “He was the first person to take on the musical idea of democracy, the separation of the high and the low.” It is an interpretation perhaps in tension with that of Freud biographer Ernest Jones. Jones wrote:
In the course of the talk [with Freud] Mahler suddenly said that now he understood why his music had
Michael Slevin, M.A., M.S.W., a former TAP editor, graduated as academic associate from the Baltimore Washington Institute for Psychoanalysis, where he completed as a clinician the Adult Psychotherapy Training Program. He works at Sheppard Pratt and has a private practice.
Page 25always been prevented from achieving the highest rank through the noblest passages, those inspired by the most profound emotions, because they were spoiled by the intrusion of some commonplace melody. His father, apparently a brutal person, treated his wife very badly, and when Mahler was a young boy there was a specially painful scene between them. It became quite unbearable to the boy, who rushed away from the house. At that moment, however, a hurdy-gurdy in the street was grinding out the popular Viennese air, “Ach, du lieber Augustin.” In Mahler's opinion the conjunction of high tragedy and light amusement was from then on, inextricably fixed in his mind.
Making classical music accessible is a challenge Alsop faces head on. The Baltimore Symphony has started a program, called OrchKids, which, based on the Venezuela's nationwide El Sistema program, organizes the entire school curriculum in an impoverished neighborhood around the discipline and enjoyment of performing classical music. She made a founding grant of $100,000 from her MacArthur Fellowship to its success, and the symphony provides administrative assistance. She herself is on the ground and known to the children. Her “Off the Cuff” series, of which the Freud-Mahler work was a part, brings in a younger audience.
Making psychoanalysis accessible and relevant is a challenge to the American Psychoanalytic Association. Preparing for her interview with me, Balle looked at the APsaA homepage. “I expected something fusty,” she said, but was delighted by its accessibility and social concerns. Freud leveled the social and economic playing field when it came to human character and emotions. We must regain that if we are to continue our enterprise. If we do so, and Alsop is in the game with us, we will find others who say, as Balle has Mahler say “You have given me hope.”