Mahler (1974)

Robert Powell: Gustav Mahler

Photos 

Quotes 

• [last lines] 

  Gustav Mahler : [reminded of some medications he should take]  They won't be needed! We're going to live forever!

• Gustav Mahler : [to Alma]  You wanted fame. Well, it looks as if you'll have to settle for notoriety.

• Gustav Mahler : You have wasted precisely two minutes of my time, Mr Krenek. Why don't you do what I do when I'm teaching the New York Philharmonic to play in time: beat it!

• Max : [laughs]  I can't remember - what religion are you?

  Gustav Mahler : I... am a composer.

• Anna von Mildenburg : Your song was charming, Alma, even if it was a little naïve, a little childlike.

  Gustav Mahler : Critics are always accusing me of being naïve. Don't associate naïvete with children, though. They don't even know what it means. Heaven lies all around us in our infancy. To enter that world, we must see with the eyes of children and hear with the ears of children.

• Krenek : Which do you prefer, conducting or composing?

  Gustav Mahler : I conduct to live. I live to compose.

• [first lines] 

  Alma Mahler : How do you feel? You dropped off.

  Gustav Mahler : Fine. I slept like a log. No, like a rock. The first movement of the 3rd Symphony kept running through my head.

• Gustav Mahler : I was the music. Therefore, I was the rock and the rock was me.

• Gustav Mahler : You were part of the dream too.

  Alma Mahler : A pebble, I suppose.

  Gustav Mahler : No, you were a living creature, struggling to be born.

  Alma Mahler : At last! You've noticed.

  Gustav Mahler : A chrysalis.

  Alma Mahler : Ready to turn into a pretty, painted butterfly.

• Alma Mahler : All your music is a hymn to nature.

  Gustav Mahler : Not quite all. You forget the most important title: what love tells me.

• Gustav Mahler : Privacy, punctuality, and silence. And the greatest of these is silence.

• Krenek : Dr Mahler, is it true that you cancelled your conducting commitments in New York; because, competition with Toscanini is too strong? Or, because the people didn't appreciate your own music? Or, was it simply ill health?

  Gustav Mahler : I was tired of skyscrapers and Sarsaparilla. I want to find a place near Vienna where the sun shines and the grapes grows and I can breathe again.

  Krenek : Congestion of the lungs. So, it was ill health.

  Gustav Mahler : Why is everyone so literal these days? I was speaking metaphorically.

• Gustav Mahler : It's about time you changed your tune.

  Alma Mahler : I have plenty of tunes, until you killed them all.

• Gustav Mahler : I don't want to imitate nature. I want to capture its very essence. As if all the birds and the beasts die tomorrow and the world became a desert, when people heard my music - they would still know, feel, what nature was.

• Princess : I understand you're searching for tranquility, Dr. Mahler.

  Gustav Mahler : Good Heavens. Yes.

  Princess : I fully appreciate the sensitivity of a mind so rare as yours. So delicately tuned into vibrations of the infinite, not to mention the harmony of the universe.

• Princess : It's a great privilege to meet someone who knows what it's all about.

  Gustav Mahler : The music of the spheres, you mean?

  Princess : No. I mean death!

• Gustav Mahler : Look, whether your spirit's been good or bad, it makes no difference. There are no presents or punishments. Heaven and Hell are made up by man, not God.

  Glucki : So there's nothing then.

  Gustav Mahler : Oh, yes. There is something, all right. Something He shares with us all.

  Glucki : What?

  Gustav Mahler : Love.

• Glucki : [looking at an engraving in a book]  Who's that man flying through the air?

  Gustav Mahler : Some people say he's God. Lunch.

  Glucki : What's God?

  Gustav Mahler : He made everything.

  Glucki : He looks just like a man. Is everyone God?

  Gustav Mahler : Everyone is part of God.

  Putzi : That tree?

  Gustav Mahler : Yes.

  Glucki : And the water?

  Gustav Mahler : Yes.

• Putzi : And when we die, does the bit of God die too?

  Gustav Mahler : No. It's the part of us that never dies.

• Gustav Mahler : Before we get to Vienna, you must choose between Max or me.

  Alma Mahler : Gustav, please.

  Gustav Mahler : Your choice must be made out of love, not duty. Duty destroys. Duty always destroys.

• Gustav Mahler : When your sweet mother comes through the door, In the candle's glow, I remember how you always came to me, Running before her to say good night. Now, in the growing darkness, We are left alone, O, light of joy, Forever gone.

• Alma Mahler : What is the meaning of this? Songs on the Death of Children? Why not Songs on the Joy of Children? Songs on the *Life* of Children?

  Gustav Mahler : There are many forms of death. Those songs - they're on the death of innocence! I don't choose what I compose. It is he who chooses me! Now, you take care of the children and I'll take care of the music.

• Gustav Mahler : No, never do anything out of duty. It's a treadmill. I sacrificed my work to it for years. It always ends in disaster. Do things out of love! Not duty.

• Gustav Mahler : As long as my music last, our love will last.

• Alma Mahler : As long as I thought you loved me, I didn't mind being your housekeeper, your music copyist, or your whore. One day, I thought you'd stop loving your music and start to loving me.

  Gustav Mahler : Did you never realize - my music is my love for you. It is - you.

  Alma Mahler : I thought it was all about the birds and the bees.

• Gustav Mahler : I had my first heart attack shortly after the death of one of my children.

  Doctor on Train : Yes, I read about that. Not on the heart, the coincidence, I mean: the child's death and those - those morbid songs of yours.

  Gustav Mahler : I was terrified all the time I was writing them that something might happen. But I had to go on, whatever the consequences.

• Gustav Mahler : Last year I was selected from many applicants to conduct a season of German music at the Royal Opera House in London. Where I performed with some success the works of Richard Wagner.

  Hugo Wolfe : Wagner? That there's the rub.

  Gustav Mahler : I beg your pardon, Your Majesty?

  Hugo Wolfe : Drop your trousers! I'm sure your wife won't object. I assume she's seen it before.

  [Gustav drops his trousers, the Hugo inspects] 

  Hugo Wolfe : It's as I thought. A Jew! There's the rub. We have some brilliant surgeons here, they could probably graft on a new foreskin, but - but I doubt you could deceive Cosima Wagner. She can smell a Jew a mile off and she's an even greater anti-Semite than her late belated husband. Unless we can win her over, my hands are tied. I rule the country, but she rules the world - of music.