set gArticles = [["Partwork"], ["pic", "cutting", "cutting", "cutting", "pic"]]
set gDates = [[], [0, "The Sunday Times, Nov 30, 1986", "The Times, Aug 14, 1964", "The Times, Feb 19, 1960"]]
set gName = getat(["Mahler"],1)
@[]#MAHLER UNMASKED#A JOURNEY INTO NEW TERRITORY#THREE TIMES A STRANGER
As a little boy Mahler loved military music. For his third birthday he was given an accordion on which he quickly learned to reproduce the local band's repertoire of songs, marches and bugle calls#Asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, the five-year-old Gustav Mahler replied "A martyr."#Street music - the barrel organ in particular - began to have powerful and often negative associations for Mahler when, fleeing the house where his parents were fighting, he encountered an itinerant musician cranking out Viennese airs#Mahler's first composition, at the age of six, was a Polka and Introductory Funeral March, already establishing the bitter-sweet conjunction that some found so perplexing in his later works#Mahler's wife wrote: "I'll coddle him as though he were a child. It's sweet that he can't pronounce his R's and curious that he wishes I were called Marie, because he loves the strong R in the middle of the name." Mahler's mother was called Marie#The composer had an irregular gait and a tic in his right leg, which some suggest was an unconscious reproduction of his mother's limp, while some attribute it to his having suffered from St Vitus's dance as a child#As Mahler's relationship with his wife became increasingly strained, he turned to the great psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud for help#The original working title of the orchestral song cycle The Song of the Earth was 'The Song of the Sorrow of the Earth'#When Mahler's wife Alma was in pain during the birth of their first child, Gustav tried to relieve the pain by suggestion, and as she sat writhing at his desk, he read to her from the works of the philosopher Emmanuel Kant#One of the conditions Mahler stipulated for his betrothal to Alma was that she should give up composing, in spite of the fact that she had written over 100 songs#The last movement of the Sixth Symphony (The Tragic) depicts the demise of a man by three blows of fate, described in the orchestra by a hammer hitting the very stage. Due to his superstitious identification with the hero, Mahler omitted the hammer stroke from the final climax#In 1907 the composer's daughter died, aged only four. His mother-in-law arrived immediately but was struck by a heart attack on seeing the child's coffin. When the doctor arrived Mahler made a grim joke about his own health: the doctor confirmed he had a fatal illness#Mahler had finished his Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children) shortly before the unexpected death of his daughter, and the composer was tormented by the feeling that he had summoned Maria's fate upon her#Mahler's wife had an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. When Mahler found that the Gropius was waiting to meet Alma under a nearby bridge, he went and fetched the architect into his house him in and ordered Alma to choose between them. Gropius left on the morning train#Mahler addressed his wife in exclamations written in the score of the Tenth Symphony, which he knew to be his last: "Ah! Ah! Ah! Fare thee well, my lyre! Farewell, Farewell, Farewell. Ah well-Ah Ah. To live for thee! to die for thee!"#In delirium before his death, Mahler repeated his wife's name, Alma, hundreds of times, and at the very last, exclaimed 'Mozart' twice
