Mahler Parts Six and Seven: "I'm not dead yet!" and Cascade House

Mahler Part Six
Mahler Part seven


Yes, this segment contains the funeral scene! Georgina Hale is astonishing and you feel as if you are going right into the Columbarium with Gustav. The precision and choreography is fabulous. The fab funeral sequence should not take away from the fact that there are also two very important scenes that flesh out the film here; Mahler's discussion with his two young daughters about God and Alma's rebuffed attempts at her own compositions.

Highlight: 6:54 Chatsworth House considered by many to be the most beautiful of all the English country estates serves as the Austrian palace grounds as Mahler and his sister try to gain acceptance as Jews. Addressing the Emperor as he sits in the Cascade House, Mahler does not seem so super human anymore. For him this is grovelling as he tries to convince the Emperor that he's actually goy enough lead the Vienna Opera and bring his unparalleled artistic brilliance to Europe's highest heights. Chatsworth's Cascade is a 300-year-old river of water gushing over 24 groups of steps. When I dreamed of coming to the UK no other heritage/landmark site apart from Big Ben held my interest more. I think I have never before seen something this beautiful on screen.

Mahler Part Five: In The Wilderness

Death of the pitiless enemy

My enemy has always been Trophy hunters, poachers and wildlife extermination in the name of corporations, fur trade and moneyed interests. The past few days or so saw me pulled away from Ken's Mahler and raging against this. I'm now catching up after missing a solid four days of Ken-ness.

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska Tiger 1913

Mahler Part Two aka "How I had plenty of tunes until you killed them all!"

The writing chalet that we saw metaphorically ablaze at the film's opening is now as calm and cool as an Andes thin mint bar on ice. Don't you want one?

Mahler's wife Alma was a spurned composer and yet she's still willing to silence all the cow bells, the men in lederhosen and even the lonely goatherd to get Gustav some peace and quiet. What a joy it must have been for Ken to work on this film. What a beautiful sequence. Dirndl and trachten come true in the Lake District. As Blondie once sang, my dream is on the screen.

Highlight: Is the Pumpkin man straight out of The OZ books an allusion to what Mahler faces as an outsider in Vienna?

The Chrysalis-Mahler Part One

(Took yesterday off for a birthday celebration. As I get more knowledgeable I am going back and noting which Mahler symphonies are used in which part of the film.)

Gustav Mahler is as great as Mozart or Bach was,  perhaps even more so. Ken's film Savage Messiah which we'll cover later was stunning but I think I love Mahler more. That is saying quite a bit as Savage Messiah is a masterpiece.  The magnitude of what Mahler's music is and who the man was is conveyed within every frame. He is not only the bridge between Romanticism and Modernism but he himself was a bridge between old world and post industrial revolution Western Europe. I almost need to wait to watch Mahler again, I don't want to be reminded that I don't live in such a beautiful world of forests, conservatories, demi glasses of chilled Gewürztraminer and cascade houses.

First things first-Georgina Hale owns as Alma Mahler. Robert Powell rules too but without Hale for him to play off of this film would not hit you as hard emotionally. Powell is a great actor, severely underrated, but he's also gifted with insanely fine and beautiful features that most women would envy (he played Christ) and an intrinsically graceful carriage. I can think of no one better to play Mahler and he makes it look easy.   There is no A List actress in Hollywood today or then, who could play this role-not Nicole Kidman. Not even Glenda Jackson or Helen Mirren. Georgina Hale is insanely sexy. She's also a natural dancer and her voice crackles simultaneously with humiliation, self confidence and passive aggression. Mahler is her film. By the end she had been so many different women: loyal wife, adulterous wife, failed artist, desolate mother, tormentor and best friend that we know Alma Mahler is real. 

Watch Alma as Mahler's shadow of death. 8:12

MAHLER

MAHLER (1974).

We will journey back within Ken's oeuvre to cover Elgar and the BBC Monitor films but for now, I feel it is appropriate that we arrive at one of Ken's colourfully sensuous cinematic masterpieces. Within Gustav Mahler's fairly short life span is the example of the artist as
1. Cultural bridge
2. Brutal perfectionist
3. Shape-shifter  (not to be misconstrued as a "preening dilettante")

Mahler may be known as a composer but in reality composition was not his first love- conducting was.   His own œuvre is considered small by classical standards and excepting for one piano quartet, confined to the genres of symphony and song. His ten symphonies are very large-scale presentations, several of which employ soloists and choirs in addition to augmented orchestral forces. Upon their respective premières, Gustav Mahler's works were considered controversial and were slow to receive critical and popular approval; an exception was the triumphant première of his Eighth Symphony in 1910.

I was fortunate to see the Bath Symphony and Bath Festival Chorus perform Mahler's 8th on my birthday May 29th, 2000, even sitting in for the dress rehearsal at Bath station. I had just come from the Lake District ( Derwentwater and Borrowdale where much of Mahler was shot)  I was thinking a lot about Ken and buying his biographies so it really was a full circle moment. The sound was phenomenal!

This entire next week will be all Mahler.