Quotes & Memos(5) from Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (by Alma)

1910 Christmas

... One day while he was working Gucki stood beside him, watching with engrossment. He was scratching out one note after another. "Papi," she said, "I wouldn't like to be a note." "Why not?" he asked. "Because then you might scratch me out and blow me away." He was so delighted that he came at once to tell me what she said. ...

... I looked after him now just as if he were a little child. I put every bit into his mouth for him and slept in his room without taking off my clothes. We got so used to it that he said more than once: "When I'm well again we'll go on like this. You'll feed me--it's so nice." ...

1911

... When I arrived on board Mahler was already in bed and Frankel was at his side. He gave me his last instructions and warned me not to call in the ship's doctor. Then he bade Mahler a brief and sad farewell. He knew that he would never see him again. ...

... My mother and he wept bitterly. It was the only time during the whole of his illness that he was so utterly disconsolate. When Moll came in, he said again that he wished to be buried in the same grave as our daughter and asked him never to desert me. ...

... During his last days and while his mind was still unclouded his thought often went anxiously to Schoenberg. "If I go, he will have nobody left." I promised him to do everything in my power. Moll too promised to stand by Shoenberg. ...

... Once when Mahler was feeling better I sat on his bed and we discussed what we should do when he had recovered. "We'll go to Egypt and see nothing but blue sky," he said.

"Once you are well again," I said, "I shall have had enough of suffering. Do you remember when you first got to know me you thought I was too happy. I've suffered enough now. I don't need any more chastening. We'll live a careless, happy life."

He smiled tenderly and stroked my hair. "Yes, you're right. God grant I get better and then we can still be happy." ...

... During his last days he cried out: "My Almschi," hundreds of times, in a voice, a tone I had never heard before and have never heard since. "My Almschi!" As I write it down now, I cannot keep back my tears. ...

... Mahler lay with dazed eyes; one finger was conducting on the quilt. There was a smile on his lips and twice he said: "Mozart!" His eyes were very big. ...

... That ghastly sound ceased suddenly at midnight of the 18th of May during a tremendous thunder storm. With that last breath his beloved and beautiful soul had fled, and the silence was more deathly than all else. As long as he breathed he was there still. But now all was over.

... I could not understand it. Was I alone? Had I to live without him? It was as if I had been flung out of a train in a foreign land. I had no place on earth.

I went up to the Hohe Warte, in Heiligenstadt. The bells tolled without ceasing. I had Mahler's photograph beside me and I lay in bed and talked to him. He was still there--not yet in the earth. ...

... I can never forget his dying hours and the greatness of his face as death drew nearer. His battle for the eternal values, his elevation above trivial things and his unflinching devotion to truth are an example of the saintly life.

(THE END)

picture from: http://www.library.upenn.edu/collections/rbm/photos/mahler/63-3-18.html

Quotes & Memos(4) from Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (by Alma)

... I lived his life. I had none of my own. He never noticed this surrender of my existence. He was so self-engrossed that any disturbance, however slight, was unendurable. Work, exaltation, self-denial and the never-ending quest where his whole life on and on and for ever.

I cancelled my will and being; like a tight-rope walker, I was concerned only with keeping my balance. He noticed nothing of all it cost me. He was utterly self-centred by nature, and yet he never thought of himself. His work was all in all. ...

... Someone observed to me once: "Alma, you have an abstraction for a husband, not a human being." It was quite true. But I treasured every single day of my life in those days. ...

... This summer (1908) was the saddest we had eer spent or were to spend together. Every excursion, every attempt at distraction was a failure. Grief and anxiety pursued us wherever we went. Work was his one resource. He slaved at the 'Lied von der Erde' and the first draft of the Ninth.

（吐槽：这翻译乱七八糟的 = =+）

... On one occasion Artur Bodanzky went up to his room with him, and I spent an hour or so with the rest. He came back with tears in his eyes and said to me in an undertone: "I shall never love any woman as I love Mahler." ...

... Next, I suddenly saw Debussy, Dukas and Pierne get up and go out in the middle of the second movement of Mahler's symphony. This left nothing to be said, but they did say afterwards that it was too Schubertian for them, and even Schubert they found too foreign, too Viennese--too Slav. ...

... I could never have imagined life without him, even though the feeling that my life was running to waste had often filled me with despair. Least of all could I have imagined life with another man. I had often thought of going away somewhere alone to start life afresh, but never with any thought of another person. Mahler was the hub of my existence and so he continued to be. ...

（下面这一段是关键！弗洛伊德出场……）

... In conclusion, he said: "I know your wife. She loved her father and she can only choose and love a man of his sort. Your age, of which you are so much afraid, is precisely what attracts her. You need not be anxious. You loved your mother, and you look for her in every woman. She was careworn and ailing, and unconsciously you wish your wife to be the same." ...

... One night I was awakened by an apparition by my bed. It was Mahler standing there in the darkness. "Would it give you any pleasure if I dedicated the Eighth to you?" Any pleasure! All the same I said: "Don't. You have never dedicated anything to anybody. You might regret it." "I have just written to Hertzka now--by the light of dawn," he said. ...

Quotes & Memos(3) from Gustav Mahler: Memories and Letters (by Alma)

... Mahler was extremely susceptible to suggestion. If I had a pain anywhere, he immediately had it too. ...

... We saw more of him at home now than ever before. He could scarcely bear to be parted from the children, and for each he had a special form of entertainment--stories, jokes or funny faces. He loved telling the elder one Brentano's fairy tale--"Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeleia".

... He finished the Sixth Symphony and added three more to the two Kindertotenlieder. I found this incomprehensible. I can understand setting such frightful words to music if one had no children, or had lost those one had. Moreover, Friederick Ruckert did not write these harrowing elegies solely out of his imagination: they were dictated by the cruellest loss of his whole life. ...

... This is the great soaring theme of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony. In the third movement he represented the unrhythmic games of two little children, tottering in the zigzags over the sand. Ominously, the childish voices became more and more tragic, and at the end died out in a whimper. In the last movement he described himself and his downfall or, as he later said, that of his hero: "It is the hero, on whom fall three blow of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled." Those were his words.

Not one of his works came so directly from his inmost heart as this. We both wept that day. The music and what it foretold touched us so deeply. The Six is the most completely personal of his works, and a prophetic one also. In the Kindertotenlieder, as also in the Sixth, he anticipated his own life in music. On him too fell three blows of fate, and the last felled him. ...

... I remarked to him once during a walk: "All I love in a man is his achievement. The greater his achievement the more I have to love him."

"That's a real danger. You mean if any one came along who could do more than I --"

"I'd have to love him," I said.

He smiled: "Well, I won't worry for the time being. I don't know anybody who can do more than I can." ...

... Another understanding between us, which I understood as little, was that what he said one day was not to hold good the next. It was therefore out of the question for me to say: "But, Gustav, you said the very opposite yesterday" (as he very often did), because he reserved for himself the privilege of inconsequence. This characteristic of his was often a great shock to me. I could never be sure of what he thought and felt. ...