Mahleromania

Ken Russell's biography shoots the works

by Jeffrey Gantz

For the first six seconds of this composer bio-pic, there's no music at all, just the soothing chatter of birds as we gaze at Mahler's summer composing hut on an Austrian lake and the surrounding Alps. Then, in a single frame, the organ-like

"Apocalypse" chord from his Tenth Symphony blazes forth as the hut combusts. It's the perfect Ken Russell moment: no plot, no dialogue, just an image/metaphor playing off the music, expressing what neither composer nor filmmaker could have put into words. And it's the essence of Mahler, Russell's glorious/godawful 1974 biography that's getting a rare series of screenings this weekend at the Harvard Film Archive.

Mostly glorious. The godawful part has to do with Russell's utter disregard for facts or chronology (consider what he did to Tchaikovsky in The Music Lovers, or to Liszt in Lisztomania), his calculated outrages (Nazis all over the place, though Gustav didn't live to see World War I), his sophomoric references (the Marx Brothers, Al Jolson, Visconti's Death in Venice and his own films), and his often dreadful dialogue ("I conduct to live," Mahler tells an obtuse reporter; "I live to compose"). Much goes unexplained; if you're not a Mahler junkie, you may lose your way now and then. (The mystery woman who stretches out her hands to Gustav's children early on is, we'll learn, former heartthrob Anna von Mildenburg.) This isn't the stuff of Masterpiece Theatre -- it's more like a sophisticated comic book. But when Russell is on -- which he is for most of Mahler's 110 minutes -- his movie sears like Gustav's music, bursting over and over into illuminating flame.

The framing device is a train trip: Gustav (Robert Powell, looking eerily like the real thing) and wife Alma (Georgina Hale, all long blond hair and even longer legs but superb nonetheless) are traveling from Paris to Vienna, the last part of their journey home after the 1910-'11 New York Philharmonic season. It's rumored that Gustav's health is failing. Then there's the young cavalry officer Max (Richard Morant), Gustav's rival for Alma's affections, who sprawls on a compartment seat and tells him, "You know it's been over between you two for ages." (This character is a mystery: Alma's conquests included Gustav Klimt and Oskar Kokoschka, and at the time she was being courted by Walter Gropius -- but no Max that I know of, certainly not Max Klinger.) Will Gustav get a clean bill of health from his doctor in Vienna? Will Alma leave Gustav for Max?

Waiting for the answers keeps you focused through Russell's flashback/fantasy sequences (all backed by excerpts from Mahler's music). The first is Russell's song of innocence: an irritable Gustav orders his radiant bride to quiet the surrounding countryside so he can compose, and we see Alma lulling a crying baby to sleep with a rattle (the Fourth Symphony's opening sleigh bells), relieving cows of their bells (the "Paradise" interlude from the Sixth), silencing church bells (the bell song from the Third), and shushing an outdoor festival by plying the musicians with liquid refreshment and then "conducting" the dancers with a beer stein (the ländler from the First). When she returns to the composing hut, Gustav goes for a swim (the Resurrection Symphony) and there's some teasing and kissing (the "Alma" theme from the Sixth). None of this is factual; all of it is true. And it expresses two of the film's main ideas: Mahler's music is nature, and resurrection is achieved through love.

This picture soon darkens. The second flashback, occasioned by a brass-band reception at one of the stations en route, takes us into the world of Gustl's childhood: an overbearing father (Lee Montague), a passive-aggressive mother (Rosalie Crutchley), rapacious relatives (un-sugarcoated but not unsympathetic), boring piano lessons, virulent anti-Semitism ("Dirty little Jew boy -- about time he had a bath"), ambivalence about sex, and, finally (to the "Paradise" interlude from the Seventh Symphony, cut off too soon, and then the Scherzo from the Third), Gustl finding nature -- the moon, a spider web, an owl, a fox, hedgehogs -- and his own nature, and riding off on a white horse. There's another flashback where Gustav talks to his two young daughters, Putzi and Gucki, about death ("Everyone is part of God"), and that leads to the "Death Fantasy," where a still-living Gustav in a coffin with a convenient glass window is conveyed to the mausoleum/crematorium (to funeral marches from the Fifth, First, and Ninth) by goosestepping Nazi pallbearers led by Max and Alma; she does a cancan on the coffin, then pisses on it. Inside, Gustav is reduced to ashes (of course no cremation can be "normal" in the wake of Auschwitz) while Alma strips, dallies with Max, and gyrates atop a huge gramophone. Again, no facts, just reality.

Gustav wakes with his head on Alma's lap. He describes his death dream; she flashes back to the death of her songs. (Before she married Mahler, Alma Schindler was that 19th-century Viennese rarity: an educated woman and an able composer of songs; but Mahler said that one composer in the family was enough.) We see her listening humbly as Gustav accompanies busty opera star Anna von Mildenburg (Dana Gillespie) -- whose relationship with Mahler actually ended long before he met Alma -- in one of Alma's songs. The music is not one of Alma Schindler's tunes but a simple if classy melody with arpeggiated bass (think of the theme from Ice Castles); the words are William Blake's. Typical Ken Russell irresponsibility? Yes, but listen to those words: "How sweet I roam'd from field to field,/And tasted all the summer's pride,/'Till I the prince of love beheld,/Who in the sunny beams did glide!//He loves to sit and hear me sing,/Then, laughing, sports and plays with me;/Then stretches out my golden wing,/And mocks my loss of liberty." Anna and Gustav call the song naive; they don't realize that Alma is describing her own marriage. Eventually they continue with their rehearsal of the Liebestod ("Love-Death") from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde; a sobbing Alma take her song to the woods and buries it.

Fade to black: a chilling flashback/fantasy (to the spectral Scherzo from the Seventh) in which Gustav and his sister Justine (Angela Down) visit the now mad composer Hugo Wolf (David Collings). Gustav decides he'll never be appointed director of the Vienna Court Opera unless he placates the powerful Cosima Wagner by converting to Catholicism. That leads to a silent-movie fantasy titled "The Convert" in which Gustav ascends to Valhalla to confront a whip-wielding Cosima (Antonia Ellis) in Nazi regalia and black lipstick. He jumps through the cross-inscribed paper of burning hoops ("Baptism of Fire"); he forges the Star of David into Siegfried's sword; he slays "The Dragon of the Old Gods," then consumes its head -- a pig's snout -- and washes that down with a stein of milk. Cosima rewards him by singing (to the tune of the Ride of the Valkyries), "No longer a Jew boy/Winning strength through joy/You're one of us, now/Now you're a goy." Conversion accomplished, appointment secured -- but meanwhile Gustav's brother Otto (Peter Eyre) commits suicide (to the "Cataclysm" chord from the Tenth, while Cosima writhes seductively on a cross).

And this isn't even Russell's most horrific sequence. That's reserved for Alma's final fantasy, in which we hear "In diesem Wetter," from Kindertotenlieder ("Songs on the Death of Children"), sung in English (with some altering of lyrics) while Alma searches frantically for her children in the midst of a storm and Anna and Gustav rendezvous. The song ends in illusory hope, and Alma does find the children safe and well; but then we see a feverish Putzi waking and crying, "Mummy," followed by a devastating shot of a small coffin atop Mahler's piano. (After the completion of Kindertotenlieder, Putzi died of diphtheria and scarlet fever, age four and a half.)

Meanwhile we've almost reached Vienna, where Russell finds easy resolutions ("As long as my music lasts," Gustav tells Alma, "our love will last") and easy ironies (a new, more secular notion of immortality). A good deal of Mahler is missing in er: his early loves, his early compositions, his life in Vienna and New York, his entire conducting career. But Russell can make up for a lifetime of omissions with a single shot -- like the one in which Alma picks up one of Max's "I love you" flyers and, in front of Gustav, folds it neatly into her bosom and stalks off. He has magnificent actors: Powell is eternally grouchy and yet grand in his vision, his love; Gary Rich is uncanny as the young Gustl; Hale is a little girl, a sexual fantasy, and a maternal comforter all at once. (Note how Alma gets turned from a free-striding athletic young intellectual into a hobble-skirted devourer of fashion magazines.) And Russell ranges through Mahler's entire symphonic output (only the Eighth is missing); even the stolid Bernard Haitink recordings he uses sound somehow inspired. The concluding freeze frame is all but lifted off the screen by the final moments from the first movement of the Sixth, the "Alma" theme again, triumphant and enigmatic, love and death and then love again. As long as Mahler's music lasts, Russell's Mahler will last.