Patrick Bade
Mahler Goes to New York

Patrick Bade - Mahler Goes to New York

- Right. Well, thank you, Judi. Well, Mahler’s decade in Vienna from 1897 to 1907 is generally regarded as one of the most glorious in the history of opera and he set the standard that everybody aspired to for opera performance for much of the 20th century. But by 1907, he was burnt out. He was exhausted. He had been worn down by constant battles with the management of the opera, with egotistical singers, and with the often very antisemitic press in Vienna, which was always carping at him. And then in the same year, 1907, there were the two hammer blows of fate, the death of his elder daughter, Maria, from scarlet fever, and in the same year he received a diagnosis of heart disease that was, in effect, a death sentence, and of course that disease would kill him four years later. So rather abruptly, he resigned from the Vienna Opera and he accepted an invitation to go to New York and conduct at the Metropolitan and that’s where he spent the rest of his career. Here you see him onboard, on the way to America and really looking a very diminished and rather sick man. And the image you see is New York as it was in the early 1900s. It was already remarkable for its extraordinary skyline and that was due to two American innovations, the steel-framed structure of the buildings and effective lifts that meant buildings could go higher and higher. So New York in the nearly 1900s, it wasn’t quite yet the great cultural capital it would become by the middle of the 20th century, but it was booming and buzzing and there was a lot of money and that money was attracting a lot of European talent. If you want to have a picture of what New York was like in the early 1900s, I strongly recommend Arthur Rubinstein’s autobiography, “My Young Years.”

It’s a very engaging book. He was obviously a man of enormous charm, although I have a good friend who as a girl was friendly with his children, and she said he was actually a bit of a monster. But it’s a very vivid book that gives a wonderful account of what New York was like at the time. And in that book, Arthur Rubinstein, he says it was an ugly city. I’ve never found New York ugly. I find it beautiful. I find it sublime, really, in the way that the Romantics found the Alps sublime. But in his book, Rubinstein says the only building of distinction architecturally in New York at this period was the Flatiron building, dating from 1903. But as I said, buildings were going higher and higher, and every year or other year, there was a new world record for the world’s tallest building,. While Mahler was there, for most of his time there, from 1908 to 1909, the tallest building in the world was the Singer Building, which you can see is 42 stories high, and there you see its construction on the left-hand side. So he was going to the well-established Metropolitan Opera. The Metropolitan Opera was created in 1883 by the new rich families of New York, who found themselves excluded from the previous opera house, the Academy of Music, by the old rich families of New York. And if you are familiar with Henry James and, above all, Edith Wharton, you know how incredibly snobby and exclusive the upper classes of New York were at this period. In some ways, they were like a parody or a caricature of the worst kind of snobbery to be found in Europe. So the Rockefellers and the Vanderbilts, these new rich people, the Fricks, they were unable to get boxes in the old opera house, so they simply built a new opera house where they were in charge.

Of course they were equally exclusive. They weren’t very welcoming to wealthy Jews, for example, until quite well into the 20th century. Now, for opera lovers in New York, there was the most incredible feast on offer between 1906 and 1910, in other words, throughout the Mahler period in New York, because there was a rivalry between the Metropolitan Opera and the Manhattan Opera, which you see here. Manhattan Opera was the creation of Hammerstein, who, of course, he’s the grandfather of the, God, what’s his first name, terrible, getting so old, Hammerstein who worked with Rodgers, Rodgers and Hammerstein. And he was born in Szczecin, which was then East Prussia and is now of course in Poland, Oscar Hammerstein, of course, and into great poverty, Jewish family. It’s a familiar story. He immigrated to America. He really renounced his strict religious upbringing and he was very successful. He made a huge fortune out of cigars. You can see him holding one here. And he then proceeded to spend that vast fortune on culture with, this is a story which I’m sure you’re very familiar with, and he spent it, he was particularly interested in opera, and he created opera houses, both in America and in London. So he was in direct competition with the Met and it was really a battle of attrition between the two. And Oscar Hammerstein, his big guns were these three ladies. These were the top female singers, the top sopranos in the world in 1906 to ‘10s. Nelly Melba on the left, Luisa Tetrazzini in the middle, and the Scottish Soprano Mary Garden on the right-hand side. Now, Garden and Melba had a sort of uneasy truce because they had very few roles in common, so they weren’t really rivals, but of course, Tetrazzini and Melba, there was a big battle going on for precedence between those two.

So the strong point of Hammerstein’s Manhattan Opera was the female singers, the sopranos, and the strong point at Metropolitan was that they had the world’s greatest tenor, Enrico Caruso. He could always fill a house. And they also had the two greatest conductors in the world, who were regarded as the greatest, Gustav Mahler and Arturo Toscanini. Here is Mahler soon after he arrived in New York, again, not looking a well man. He was reunited with his old frenemy, Leo Slezak, from the Vienna Opera, and Slezak, in his memoirs, describes how Mahler was a very diminished figure from the way he had been in Vienna, and it must have been a bit galling to him that he no longer had the autocratic powers as a conductor that he had in Vienna. He had to accept compromises that he would’ve never accepted before, such as big cuts in Wagner performances. He was also very disappointed at the low visual standard of the productions in New York, nothing like the wonderful quality of productions under his leadership in Vienna with designers like Alfred Roller. Although Roller was actually imported to New York for a “Meistersinger” production, this is it, but Mahler didn’t get to conduct it because “Meistersinger” was regarded as the property of Toscanini. But there were also pluses to working at the Metropolitan. He was very surprised by the high quality of the orchestra of the Metropolitan, and of course there were the most fabulous singers, and the Metropolitan could afford to have the best singers in the world. So he made his debut on January 1, 1908, conducting a performance of “Tristan and Isolde.” Curiously, I think Toscanini must not have liked “Tristan,” 'cause he doesn’t seem to have conducted it very often, and apart from, I think, possibly the prelude, there aren’t any recordings from “Tristan” with Toscanini.

So Mahler, this was the other thing, of course, that Mahler was an exhausted, ailing man and he had to contend with this slightly younger conductor, very ambitious, very sharp elbows, who was keen to elbow him out the way. Nevertheless, the “Tristan” was a triumph, and Henry Krehbiel, one of the leading New York critics, he said, “Mr. Mahler does honour to himself, Wagner’s music, and the New York public. It is a strikingly vital reading which he gave to Wagner’s familiar score. Livelier in tempo in many portions than we are used to, and, inasmuch as the acceleration of tempo in nearly every instance inured to the benefit of the dramatic effect, to that extent admirable: eloquent in phrasing, rich in colour, and always sympathetic to the singers.” And so apart from his conducting, the most remarkable thing about this performance was the debut of Olive Fremstad as Isolde. Now, I think this was the first time she sang it. And this was an interpretation that became legendary, and right up to Birgit Nilsson, every new Isolde in New York was always compared with Olive Fremstad. And another critic, Richard Aldrich, said, “Madame Fremstad’s voice is of indescribable beauty in this music, in its richness and power, its infinite modulation in all the shades and extremes of dramatic significance.” Well, I’m going to play you a little bit of her recording of the “Liebestod,” which after that ecstatic description may disappoint you. I don’t really think her greatness comes across in this recording. Certainly, you know, these early recordings process sometimes found these very big voices difficult to capture, so we don’t really have a sense of the power and nor do we really have much sense of “the infinite modulation in all the shades and extremes of dramatic significance.” What we can hear in this recording is that it was certainly a very beautiful voice. It’s got a lovely, pure, silvery quality to it. Very beautiful legato. That’s the way one note joins up to the next. So we can sense something of the beauty of this interpretation.

• Of the later Isoldes, the one she reminds me most of, actually, is Frida Leider who was the greatest Isolde of the 1920s and early '30s in that rather pure, contained, silvery sound. Now, the other Wagner opera that Mahler got to conduct was “Die Walkure” and that also had a very fine cast. Anton van Rooy, on the left-hand side, was considered the finest Wotan of the years around 1900, and the Brunhilde on this occasion was the German soprano Johanna Gadski. She was regarded, she wasn’t a huge star and she was never revered in the way that Olive Fremstad was, but she was always thought to be a safe pair of hands for these… She was very versatile, she was reliable, and she could sing practically anything. And I’m going to play you her “Hojotoho!”, the battle cry from “Walkure.” Her voice, I think, comes across better. She obviously had a more phonogenic voice. She has a good trill, which you don’t very often hear in a Brunhilde. The top Cs, they’re okay, but they’re not absolutely thrilling as they really should be.

• Mahler had his greatest successes conducting Mozart, and here all the New York critics were unanimous that he’d set a completely new standard. He brought his ideals of an ensemble performance, everything working together, he brought that to New York for the first time. And on the 23rd of January 1908, he conducted “Don Giovanni” with a legendary, fantastic cast. The Don Giovanni, who you see on the left, was Antonio Scotti, very elegant singer, very good actor. Donna Anna was the very beautiful Emma Eames, who you see on the right. Don Ottavio was the extremely elegant Alessandro Bonci, although they obviously couldn’t persuade him to get rid of his handlebar moustache, which is a bit anachronistic for “Don Giovanni.” And the Elvira was Gadski again and the Zerlina was, in the first performance, it was Marcella Sembrich and then the role of Zerlina was taken over by Geraldine Farrar, who you see on the right-hand side. Now, Geraldine Farrar, she was an American soprano, but she was one of the first American singers to have a huge international career. She was a superstar in Berlin in the first years of the century. She was rumoured to have had a love affair with the Crown Prince of Prussia, which didn’t do her any harm. When she came back to America, it all added to her lure. She was considered a very beautiful woman. She had also a major career around 1920 in early Hollywood, sadly silent movies, and she wrote a very entertaining autobiography, which she claimed was half-written by her mother. You know, there’d be one chapter which is in her voice and then the next chapter would be in her mother’s voice. In fact, her mother was already dead, so it’s all written by Geraldine Farrar. But writing as her mother, she was able to say things like, “Oh, Geraldine walked into the room and all the men were pulsating with desire at her exquisite beauty,” and all that kind of thing. But she’s interesting on the subject of Mahler and this production, and she said, “Mahler was very ill, a doomed man, highly sensitive, irascible, and difficult, but not unreasonable if the singer was serious and attentive. As I had sung Zerlina in Berlin under Strauss and under Muck in Salzburg, this training earned me Mahler’s pleasant commendation.” So we’re going to hear the Don Giovanni/Zerlina duet with Antonio Scotti and with Geraldine Farrar.

• Now, I didn’t mention that actually the most remarkable aspect of this cast was that Feodor Chaliapin was the Leporello. Now, I think Feodor Chaliapin can claim to be maybe the greatest opera singer of the 20th century, the most remarkable, the most powerful singing actor, an extraordinary phenomenon. And everywhere he sang in Europe, he caused an absolute sensation, in Paris, in London, in Milan. So he was rather disconcerted to arrive in New York and he didn’t have the same effect. The critics were quite iffy about him and the public didn’t fall at his feet. And according to Geraldine Farrar, this caused him to dissolve into a huge Russian pout and he was not very cooperative with Mahler. Farrar says he was completely oblivious to his rehearsal obligations, and she continues, “The beautiful Emma Eames, the reliable Gadski, with Bonci and myself did our best to avert the clashes.” But Scotti, of course, was also rather disconcerted at Chaliapin’s habit of reverting into Russian in the recitatives, and when I talked about “Don Giovanni,” I said how difficult these recitatives are, and certainly, if you’ve got one person suddenly doing it in another language, it would be really difficult for the other. So I’ve got a recording of part of Leporello’s “Catalogue Aria.” It’s recorded about 10 years after these performances. It’s still an acoustic recording, and it’s interesting, it’s amazing, really. You do get a sense of the vivid personality of Chaliapin, but you also have a sense of why Mahler would’ve found him absolutely impossible, 'cause he pulls the music around all over the place, does all sorts of very strange things in it, you know, hangs onto notes, does sudden pianissimi to show that he can do them, and ends on a resounding high note, which is not actually written by Mozart. Here it is. (Chaliapin singing the “Catalogue Aria” by Mozart in Italian)

• Very naughty to hang on to that note. (Chaliapin singing the “Catalogue Aria” by Mozart in Italian)

• So exactly the kind of thing that both Mahler and Toscanini had been battling against. Now, the Zerlina in the first performance was the veteran singer Marcella Sembrich. She was Polish. She had sung at the Met almost from the very beginning. She actually made her debut there in 1883 in only the second performance ever given at the Met, and she was the darling of New York critics and the New York public without becoming a kind of superstar like Melba or Mary Garden. But she’s a wonderful singer. It’s a very beautiful, very individual timbre and a wonderful technique. Mahler must have been impressed by her musicality. She could perform on the piano and the violin to concert standard. When she sang in “The Barber of Seville,” in the lesson scene, they wheeled out a piano onto the stage and she interrupted the opera to give a little concert and played Chopin, and then somebody handed her a violin and she played a movement of a violin concerto. Again, not exactly the most sort of disciplined behaviour in a singer. So here she is in Zerlina’s aria, “Batti, Batti,” and again there is eccentricities, at least to modern ears, in this performance. You’ll hear towards the end she has these little flourishes of ornament that she takes at the most incredible speed. So she turns what should be a very simple little aria for Zerlina into a kind of virtuoso display.

• Now, of the great singers who took part in that performance with Mahler, the one who actually sounds closest to what we’re familiar with today was the reliable Johanna Gadski, and it’s a big voice. As I said, she sang Brunhilde. She sang the really heavy roles, but it’s also very flexible for this very demanding aria.

• The other Mozart opera, 'cause Mozart was not as widely performed then as it is today, and the Mozart canon was a very narrow one, it was really, there were only three Mozart operas that were standard repertoire at the time, and they were “Magic Flute,” “Don Giovanni,” and “Marriage of Figaro,” so the other Mozart opera that Mahler conducted was “Marriage of Figaro.” And in that he had the great Emma Eames as the Countess and Marcella Sembrich as Susanna. Eames, she’d made her debut in Paris in 1889, so she’d been around for a time and she was more or less queen of the Metropolitan. She was a very beautiful woman. She was regarded as very beautiful and she had a very beautiful voice, although she was generally regarded as a cool singer and one critic, rather cruelly remarked, when she sang Aida, he said, “Last night when Madame Eames sang Aida, there was skating on the River Nile.” Sembrich I’ve already talked about, and this record of the “Letter Duet,” I think, is really wonderful. I can’t think of any other version, really, to match it in the way the two singers blend and interweave their voices. They must have practised this endlessly to get it this perfect. The phrasing is so lovely, and of course I’d love to be able to attribute this to Mahler and his coaching, but I can’t because this record was actually made the year before these two singers sang it with Mahler.

• Mahler introduced some novelties to New York. He gave the first performances there of Tchaikovsky’s “Pique Dame” and of Smetana’s “Bartered Bride.” And these two performances reunited him with a very famous singer that he’d worked with earlier in performances in Berlin, and this is the Czech soprano Emmy Destinn. So she certainly was a superstar, and in Berlin, he rather resented this and wrote some rather rude things about her being “prima donna assoluta” and all that stuff. And he actually, she performed the soprano solo in the Second Symphony and he reassigned music away from her to the mezzo, 'cause he actually wasn’t that keen on her. But she, oh, if you want to read about her, do read about her in… Arthur Rubinstein had a brief affair with her and he writes a very, very funny account of that in his book, “My Young Years.” The year after Mahler departed, 1911, she sang Minnie in the world premiere of “La Fanciulla del West,” which you see on the left-hand side, with Caruso. And the rather comical-looking man there with his hat, that is the hunky Algerian baritone Dinh Gilly. And she had to come on stage in this scene on a horse, and the horse didn’t, obviously she was a big woman and the horse was not happy about this and it threw her off on stage, and so Dinh Gilly actually broke her fall. He caught her. And she was so grateful to him, so impressed by his physical strength that she invited him into her bed, and she was even more impressed by his, how can I put it, his physical attributes. And she had a plaster cast taken and exhibited it under a glass dome in her castle in Bohemia. When I went to that castle about three or four years ago, I did ask about it, but it seems to have disappeared. But, so we’re going to hear her in Marenka’s aria from “The Bartered Bride.”

• While he was in America, Mahler also conducted symphony concerts and he collaborated with Rachmaninoff. Rachmaninoff had just written his Third Piano Concerto, the most ambitious and difficult of his four piano concertos. He wrote it really to display his own pianistic talents. And he came to New York and I think the premiere was not with Mahler. It was with Walter Damrosch and Rachmaninoff was very unsatisfied with Damrosch’s conducting. But there are letters from Rachmaninoff where he raves about Mahler’s conducting, saying how wonderful it was to have the sympathetic conducting and support of Mahler. But Mahler gave his, he fell ill at the beginning of 1911, no, Christmas, 1910, he fell ill and he gave his very last concert at Carnegie Hall on February 21. It was some kind of infection, endocarditis that was connected with his heart ailment, and of course today it’ll be something easy to treat with antibiotics, but they didn’t have those in those days. And as he was clearly declining and nobody seemed to be able to do anything about it, he sailed back to Europe on this ship, the SS America. Because he was a superstar, not as a composer, but as a conductor, he was very, very famous and admired as a conductor around the world, so it was news. And this, you can see, is a Viennese newspaper, which shows Mahler in the clinic in Paris where he was initially treated, but that proved hopeless as well. And so he went back to Vienna where he died on the 18th of May and this is his the death mask. But so Mahler’s, I’ve mentioned before that after Mahler’s death, there was relatively little interest in his music.

There were really two conductors who kept the flame burning. It was Willem Mengelberg in Holland, who continued to programme and perform Mahler symphonies, and Bruno Walter. Somebody asked me, I think, was it last week, whether the Mahler revival was down to Leonard Bernstein. And yes, to some extent, certainly in the '60s it was Leonard Bernstein who really promoted Mahler’s reputation and got the world interested. But it was Bruno Walter, as I said, who kept the flame burning and he continued to perform Mahler. He arrived in America as a refugee in, I’m not sure if it’s '39 or '40, 'cause he’d fled from, it’s a familiar story, he fled from Berlin '33 to Vienna. Then he had to flee from Vienna, I’ll be talking about that in a week or so, the Anschluss, getting out in the nick of time, went to Paris where he was welcomed with open arms. But of course that didn’t last long, as Paris fell in 1940, and Bruno Walter arrived in New York and he was invited to conduct at the Metropolitan. And it was particularly his Mozart that was very admired and all the critics said, “Ah, these are the best Mozart performances that we’ve heard since Gustav Mahler. This is Gustav Mahler’s ideals of ensemble, and so on, reborn.” So I’m going to play you an excerpt from a live performance of “Don Giovanni” from the Met in 1942, with a wonderful cast, particularly the men, 'cause you’ve got Ezio Pinza as Don Giovanni, and in this performance, one of the few bass voices in the 20th century that really could have rivalled him, that was the Ukrainian bass, Alexander Kipnis. So it’s in this scene from the beginning of the last act. It’s pretty amazing to hear these two monumental, great, dark bass voices facing up to one another.

• And I’m going to finish with Bruno Walter conducting the beautiful “Adagietto” from the Fifth Symphony. Those of you who know the film “Death in Venice” will be very familiar with this poignant music. This is New York, 1947, and this was a point when really nobody else in America was conducting Mahler except Bruno Walter. So Bruno Walter was really the favourite protege of Mahler and he worked very closely with Mahler, so if anybody really knew how Mahler wanted his symphonies to go, it should have been Bruno Walter. But I think this performance, if you’re very familiar with this music, might surprise you. I think the thing that will surprise you is actually the tempo, that it’s quite a lot faster than we’re used to hearing it in modern performances. Right, well, I’ll see what comments and questions we have.

Q&A and Comments:

No, the title of Arthur Rubinstein’s book is “My Young Years” and it was a huge bestseller, so I don’t think you’d have any trouble finding a secondhand copy of that.

Judi saying “The Gilded Age,” a series on Netflix, looks at New York during this time. I must say, 'cause on YouTube, if you just put in, say, New York, 1900, 1920 or whatever, you can find the most amazing digitalized, you know, film footage of New York in this period, and Paris as well, that has been colourized and improved, and it really gives you a strong impression of what it was like in the cities in those periods. “Currently on HBO is 'The Gilded Age,’ which deals with New York at that time.” Thank you. “Watch ‘The Gilded Age.’” That’s obviously something to do. Oscar, thank you. Oscar Hammerstein.

“The old rich families in New York City attended operas in an opera house.” No, you’ve got some things confused there. It was called, the old rich families attended the Academy of Music and that was superseded by the Met, and then, yes, the Manhattan Opera, as I said, it was built by a Jew. It was built by Oscar Hammerstein I, who’s the grandfather of the Hammerstein of Rodgers and Hammerstein.

“Did his wife accompany him to…” Yes, she did. Alma. She did go with him.

Q: “Are there conductors who specialise in operas? It’s very different from…”

A: Yes, there are conductors who specialise in opera and you’re quite right, it is different from conducting orchestral words.

“US listeners in particular may like to know that the heroine of…” Yes, I must read that. I’d heard that before, that Willa Cather’s novel is based on Olive Fremstad, who’s, I think, a rather tragic character in real life.

“Geraldine Farrar and Toscanini…” Oh, I forgot to tell you. Yes, that’s really spicy stuff. Geraldine Farrar and Toscanini had really quite a lengthy and passionate affair. I mean, initially he slapped her down and he famously said to her, she said, “I’m a star,” and he said, “Look, dear, the only stars are the stars in heaven.” And then they had this affair and then, again, she took liberties during a rehearsal. She called him Arturo and he retorted, “Here I’m the master, I’m only ‘Arturo’ in bed.” And then many years later, he came back to New York and she invited him to dinner and she served fish and he was very angry, and he announced, “I slept with that woman for five years and she can’t remember that I don’t eat fish.”

Pamela, you think that Chaliapin ruins the aria? Mm, yes. Well, he certainly pulls it about. What can I say? But, you know, I can forgive Chaliapin almost anything. He’s such an amazingly vivid and individual artist.

Q: “In 1908, didn’t singers strive for authenticity?”

A: I don’t think they had, they didn’t have that concept, really. That’s a new concept, of authenticity, and I think it’s quite a dubious one, actually, because there’s no way you can really recreate what 18th-century opera sounded like because we don’t have 18th-century ears. But I think, yes, and certainly if Chaliapin tried to do what I’ve just played to you, I think that would’ve driven Mahler nuts. There’s no doubt about that.

“I did not know singers were disciplined.” Well, they needed, obviously Mahler and Toscanini thought they needed to be disciplined because they were so taking all sorts of outrageous liberties.

“Chaliapin was not a great collaborator.” No, he wasn’t, and there are famous stories of him. In the 1920s at Covent Garden, in performance of “Faust,” during the performance, he didn’t like the way the conductor was conducting. He thought it was too slow and he stepped out of character and walked to the front of stage and started hectoring and shouting at the conductor that he should take it faster, and this in front of the whole audience. So he must have been a nightmare to work with.

My photos and musical… Well, the musical excerpts all come from… I still haven’t learned the technology of really downloading music from the internet, so all the musical excerpts come from my own record collection, and some of the photos too, and some are downloaded from the internet.

This is Michael Levin saying, “Superimposed on a chronic heart condition, Mahler developed endocarditis infection on his damaged heart valve. On his return to Vienna, he had a blood culture retained, which revealed streptococcus, for which nothing could be done.” Yes, no drugs at that time for that. There’s no an antibiotics.

“Ironically, Walter Gropius, another Alma attachment, also had endocarditis, which despite, resulted in death, but that was an awful long later. At least, you know, Gropius lived to old age.”

Karen says, “Yeah, well, if you fall off a horse on stage and the guy saves you, you really owe him.” But he was a good singer. You know, his name was Dinh Gilly. As I said, he was Algerian, and they were lovers, they were an item, and his nickname in the opera world, because her name was Emmy Destinn, and his nickname was La Forza del Destinn. And I met his grandson in Paris many years ago and he said, “Oh, my grandfather was a singer. I don’t suppose you know anything about him. His name was Dinh Gilly.” And I said, “Well, actually I know quite a lot about him.”

Q: “Why was Mahler considered…”

A: Was he considered a monster? I think he was very, very egotistical. I’m sure some of the singers that fell foul of him thought he was a monster. He never divorced Alma. He was still married her when he died.

Ooh, that’s awful. I don’t think, no, I don’t think Alma… Alma had lots and lots of other lovers, I’ll talk about that on Sunday, and I don’t think they all got streptococcus or whatever it is.

It’s David, “Our endocarditis is easier to treat, but still not easy.”

“Visconti’s ‘Death in Venice’ with the ‘Adagietto’ from the Fifth brought me and many others to Mahler.” That’s true, ‘cause I think it’s 1960s, isn’t it, that movie, so it really did bring Mahler’s music to the attention of a wider public.

Q: “Who are the singers in the opera?”

A: Ezio Pinza, it’s on the list, Ezio Pinza and the great, great Alexander Kipnis, who was of course at that time, like Bruno Walter, he was a refugee from Nazi Germany.

“'Adagietto,’ one of the most beautiful melodies ever written.” I wouldn’t argue with you. Thank you. “I think Mahler’s ‘Adagietto’ was played at the funeral of John Kennedy.” That’s interesting. Ingrid’s favourite piece of music.

Q: “Was Mahler’s family with him when he was in New York?”

A: His wife, well, yeah, I’m sure, Anna was the daughter who survived, she would’ve certainly gone with him as well.

“‘Death in Venice’ is a very interesting documentary on BBC4 about the tragic life of the boy in the Visconti film.” If it’s, yes, I might try and catch up on that.

“Leonard Bernstein commented in an interview that Alma Mahler came to several rehearsals before her death.” That’s true, she did at the end, and I will talk about that on Sunday.

“Hard to imagine this piece sounding any better than at this speed.” That’s interesting. You know, it’s funny, certain pieces of music, and obviously that is a melancholy, yearning piece of music, and I think there is always a temptation to take pieces like that slower and slower. I’ll tell you two other pieces of music that just got slower and slower as the years went by. One is the Strauss “Four Last Songs.” If you hear, the very first performance of course exists. We have a recording of actually the rehearsal for the first performance under Furtwangler and the first commercial recording with Lisa Della Casa, they’re relatively brisk. And the “Four Last Songs” have just got slower and slower and slower over the years. And another piece that’s slowed down is Gershwin’s wonderful song, “The Man I Love.” You know, if you hear early recordings of “The Man I Love,” it’s… ♪ Da da, da da, da da ♪ ♪ Da da, da da ♪ ♪ Da da, da da, da da ♪ But, you know, later recordings tend to wallow and to take it far too slow, I think.

“Who’s the lady…” Oh, I was going to, that was Kirsten Flagstad, ‘cause I was thinking of putting in a bit of Bruno Walter’s conducting of “Fidelio” with her, but I thought for time reasons, in the end I cut it.

“He only stayed for a year, but Mahler did conduct in Olmutz.” Yes, he did, early, very early in his career.

Q: “How do you think Wagner would’ve thought about Mahler’s music?”

A: I don’t know. He might have liked it. Wagner liked Bruckner’s. He was very happy to receive the dedication of Bruckner’s Third Symphony. It always seems to me that the three great children of Wagner, who all developed Wagner in very, very different ways, are Mahler, Debussy, and Strauss. They are three composers who are unthinkable without Wagner. They are the children of Wagner.

“Oh, I’m glad you liked the tempo of the…” The opera singer was Olive Fremstad. and her name, again, is on the list, who was in… I must read that. I’ve been told about that before. Thank you so much for your kind comments and that seems to be it.

Thank you very, very much. I’m on to the scandalous Alma on Sunday, and yes, I promise you, I will play the Tom Lehler song. I’ve had so many requests for that, so I’m going to start with that on Sunday. Thanks, everybody. Bye-bye.

• [Judi] Bye-bye. Thank you, Patrick.