Stephen Johnson talks to Classical CD Choice about his mesmerisng New Mahler study:
One of several surprises that came out of writing this book was the realization that quite a lot of my private reading over the past thirty years had been preparing me for this. Notes I’d scribbled in the backs of novels, philosophical, historical and psychological books turned out to be invaluable, as well, of course, as many of the musical sources I’d been consulting over the years. As well as loving the music of many German and Austrian composers during the late-18th – early 20th centuries, I’ve felt the pull of German language poetry and fiction, and of philosophers such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, for a long time. I’ve also read a great deal of and about Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. Research trips to Vienna for books and radio documentaries have added a great deal of background, making me realise just how much the music, literature and thought that emerged from Vienna owed to its prevailing culture, its history and even to its geography.
But something else became clear to me only after I’d finished the book and sent it off. It may seem crass to talk about being a ‘beneficiary’ of the twentieth century’s tragic Central European Jewish diaspora, but I think that’s what I am. Jewish friends and friends of friends were vital early influences, and I remember hearing Hans Keller talking about and introducing Schoenberg’s Second Quartet at the RNCM as a life-changing experience – I’d cycled 20 miles there and back to hear him, and it was worth it! But I realise too how much that astonishing German-Jewish and Viennese-Jewish enriched and enhanced the artistic and intellectual life of this country – something we’re in danger of losing now – and that Mahler’s idea of ‘German-ness’, the notion of a humanist tradition stemming from Goethe, Kant and Beethoven that transcended narrow nationalism, was something that mattered to me greatly. The Eighth, in its complicated, sometimes self-contradictory way, is a colossal monument to all of that.
Stephen Johnson’s The Eighth: Mahler and the World in 1910 is published by Faber