THE FAREWELL - Ettore Napoli

ETTORE NAPOLI: DER ABSCHIED, Gustav Mahler’s Last Year of Life

On May 18, 1911, Mahler died in Vienna. His tombstone bears only his name: “those who know me know who I was, others do not need to know.” Despite his wish for a funeral without pomp, the presence of hundreds of people transformed the ceremony into an event bordering on a social gathering. Among them were many personalities close to him: Berg, Klimt, Walter, Webern, Zweig, and others, as well as delegations from the orchestras he conducted in Europe and the USA. Almost exactly a year earlier, on his way back to Vienna from New York, he was in Paris to conduct Symphony No. 2 and then in Rome on the podium of the Santa Cecilia Symphony Orchestra. Back in Vienna, he resumed his usual rhythm: the premiere of the Eighth Symphony, continuous revisions to scores that were never truly finished, the beginning of an uncompleted Tenth Symphony, the discovery of the affair between Alma and Gropius, a consultation with Freud, and the sudden relapse of an incurable heart infection. These are the events that will be accounted for in the volume, in an intertwining of man and artist that would have destabilized many but not Mahler, who never allowed the incidents of his private life to influence his artistic activities, thus proving Karl Jung right, for whom the true artist "is nothing but his work and not a human being."

320 pages

A 5 format