Lies and Epiphanies: Composers and Their Inspiration from Wagner to Berg by Chris Walton (review)

As slim this volume might be, potent indeed it is. For Chris Walton captivates the reader in a concisely written English by cunningly deconstructing a major myth of a long-lasting Romantic paradigm by which it is the composer’s inspiration or Einfall that guides his creative activity and that he is eager to be known to his admirers. Yet Chris Walton shows in five case studies that some of these epiphanies turn out to be nothing but self-fabricated lies by which the composer sought to secure his heritage within the domineering German-Austrian tradition, and thereby either secure or increase his market value or career. Whereas up to Beethoven creating a music-piece was largely seen as a craft that did not require an extrinsic and added story of explanation, it became ever since clouded in the genius’s ability to communicate metaphysical revelations for which a narrative of epiphany often had to serve as a primer. To regard within this tradition the composer as a manager of his career, interested in advancing his social as well an economic status, would be nothing but an act of blasphemy. And yet, Walton provides nothing less than this sacrilege when he presents in chronological order Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler, Alban Berg, Wilhelm Furtwängler, and Richard Strauss, and some of their well-known and self-propagated narratives or anecdotes around some of their compositions.

Take for example Gustav Mahler’s Second Symphony, often called after the last movement the Auferstehungssymphonie, for which Mahler chose parts of Klopstock’s poem of that title. Mahler claimed to a friend that he had been so struck by Klopstock’s poem during the memorial service for Hans von Bülow that his otherwise unfinished Second Symphony only now could be completed after the Einfall during the commemoration for his mentor and one of the leading maestros of the time. Layer after layer, Walton is able to demystify this anecdote that continues to circulate unquestioned up to now. Thanks to his scrupulous archival research Walton is able not only to dismantle the coinage of that particular anecdote but also to do so in such a fashion that it is worthy of one of the better detective stories that keeps you spellbound until he reaches the point where he can conclude “that Mahler was not at home that afternoon, that he did not sit at his desk to work on his Second Symphony or anything else that day” (43). If Walton, however, would “only” embody his ingenious Sherlock Homes–style analysis in deconstructing self propagated stories such as Mahler’s, his research would remain somewhat of a nagging scholar, a kind of Besserwisser or Beckmesser: accurate but pedantic. What makes Walton’s five case studies so compelling, however, is his ability to combine minute historical research in order to reach larger and mostly very compelling conclusions. In the case of Mahler, he therefore interprets the self-fabricatedEingebung of the Auferstehung as “really that of his own symphony, a work that had been declared dead or dying by von Bülow, and which rose up to completing only after von Bülow’s death” (54).

Even more gruesome to the point of overdrive, Walton dismantles Alban Berg’s tale of musical inspiration for his violin concerto by the death of Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s eighteen-year-old daughter in February 1935, to whom it is dedicated. With almost forty pages the longest of pieces in this study, Walton counters the notion of Berg’s concern for Manon as an “angel” and instead provides, via some detours, rather juicy and even sexually explicit side stories and subplots that the violin concerto was “primarily a testament to Berg’s love for Hanna Fuchs” (92) and that for rather opportunistic reasons he used the quickly favored term for the young deceased Manon as “an angel” in order to cooperate with the Austrian version of a...