At the end of May, in the midst of a record-breaking heat wave, Alma and Gustav made the long train journey to Crefeld, an industrial city of 100,000 souls on the banks of the Rhine just north of Düsseldorf. The city appeared as a dusty jumble of neoclassical buildings, textile factories, workers’ tenements, and brand-new villas where the factory owners resided. Since Crefeld possessed little in the way of inns, she and Gustav were invited to stay in one such industrialist’s oppressively overfurnished home. Their wealthy host offered up his own master bedroom to the famous guest conductor and his wife.
Crefeld struck Alma as backward and hopelessly provincial. She and Gustav could hardly step out of their host’s front gate to go for a walk without being trailed by a gang of loudmouthed youths heckling Alma for her reform dress, the only clothing she could bear in this miserable heat.
“Hey, lady, why are you wearing a flour sack?”
The pimply yokels also taunted Gustav on account of his eccentric gait, his nervously twitching leg, his habit of carrying his hat instead of wearing it. Even when they returned to their host’s home, the boys loitered outside, loudly mocking Gustav’s and Alma’s foreign accents.
Though Gustav was accustomed to drawing crowds of curious onlookers wherever he went, this puerile taunting seemed to wear him down. As a man who relied on his routine and privacy, he appeared completely out of his element. Alma managed to persuade him to give up their punishing walks in the heat and instead hire a carriage to take them into the countryside, where they might leave their tormentors behind and find some peace and a cooling breeze.
“Perhaps coming here was a mistake,” Gustav said, mopping his sweaty brow as their carriage rattled along a rutted road through the vineyards skirting the Rhine. “I’d hoped to finally earn some applause and even some money for my own work. But these people probably won’t like my symphony, let alone understand it.”
“Nonsense,” Alma said, taking his hand. “You’re admired as a conductor everywhere, but now you have a chance to prove that you’re a great composer. Have courage, Gustl.”
Alma attended every rehearsal without fail, following the score and taking notes.
Her husband’s Third Symphony was his most ambitious to date, a work of staggering scope, a behemoth, running more than an hour and forty minutes in length, which explained why it had never before been performed in its entirety. It demanded the combined forces of a full orchestra, a contralto soloist, a women’s choir, and a boys’ choir. Gustav had confided that the Third was his attempt to explore the creative life force in a symphony that embraced every aspect of nature and human experience. Dark and light, comedy and tragedy, decay and resurgence all comingled. It was certainly a challenging piece to perform. Alma observed the perspiring musicians and singers struggling to come to grips with the music. They had just nine days to prepare for the concert. By force of necessity, the rehearsals ran hours over the official time until Gustav and his ensemble were utterly depleted.
“Almschi, what did you think?” he asked her anxiously, as though he trusted her discerning ear more than any other. He was worried that the concert would be a monumental failure.
“The contralto’s voice is darkly beautiful, just what you want,” she told him. “But the horns in the first movement sounded mawkish. I think they should be more crisply articulated. And be careful not to let the pace drag, especially in the final movement.”
Alma felt closest to Gustav when he turned to her like this, addressing her as his partner in music as well as marriage. His soul’s harbor. When it was just the two of them with no family or false friends to interfere or cast judgment on her.
“All in all, it’s beginning to sound splendid,” she said. “This will be the turning point of your career. I’m sure of it.”
“In Crefeld, of all places!” He laughed. “I miss home. Don’t you?”
She lowered her eyes and held her tongue. She did not, in fact, miss their frenetic regime in Vienna.
“At least I thought I was homesick,” he said, staring into her eyes. “Except now I realize my home isn’t a dwelling place or a city or a country. But another human being. You, Almschi. You are my home.”
A light blazed inside her, her heart beating like the wings of a thousand white doves.
The concert day was upon them, the world premiere of the first full performance of Gustav’s Third Symphony. Justine and Arnold Rosé had traveled up from Vienna. Even Richard Strauss had come, the most influential living German composer, hailed as the greatest thing since Wagner. Strauss was a strapping giant of a man who towered over Gustav when he shook his hand. Alma understood it to be a huge victory that such a celebrity had deigned to come all the way to Crefeld to hear her husband’s symphony. But what if Strauss hated it and let everyone know? Gustav’s future as a composer hinged on this performance.
In that packed and sweltering concert hall, Alma was so absorbed in the music, she forgot about the smell and press of the other sweating bodies around her, about her puffy ankles and aching back. The first movement, opening with the grandeur of eight horns playing in unison, sent tingles running through her. This movement alone lasted forty minutes, as long as an entire Beethoven symphony. Originally, Gustav had conceived it as a tone poem with the title “What the Stony Mountains Tell Me.” Those sonorous horns told the tale of emergent life struggling to break free of dense, inanimate matter until, at the climax, the orchestra erupted into swelling sound, igniting new tension. This symphony was its own universe with exploding volcanoes creating new landmasses. Life evolved, taking on increasingly complex forms. Although Alma had spent more than a week listening to the rehearsals, the music took her breath away, as though she were hearing it for the first time.
At the end of the first movement, Richard Strauss stood up, and cried, “Bravo!” Leading the applause, Strauss marched up to the conductor’s podium to offer Gustav his official benediction.
Everything that happened afterward seemed like one magnificent crescendo after another. With each movement, the audience seemed more deeply stirred. Alma watched their spellbound faces as the solo contralto sang “O Mensch! Gib Acht!,” a poem taken from Nietzsche’s Also sprach Zarathustra. In his younger days, Gustav had admired Nietzsche as much as she did. The world is deep, the poem declared, and deep are its sufferings, yet joy runs deeper still, and all joy yearns for eternity.
After this solemn declaration of the human longing for transcendence, the women’s and boys’ choirs broke into a joyful chorus. The women sang of angels while the boys chanted the tones of ringing bells. Then, in the sixth movement, after the adagio finale, the entire audience leapt from their seats and surged in a frenzy to the stage. Alma laughed and cried at once to see them moved to the heights of ecstasy, just as she was, by this symphonic celebration of love and life. The fickle Richard Strauss sauntered out before the final note, but it no longer mattered. The audience was now as convinced as Alma was of Gustav Mahler’s genius.
Alma was profoundly and irrevocably in love with Gustav’s music, her previous reservations swept aside. Catching sight of Gustav’s incredulous face when he turned around on his podium to bow to his audience, she felt a rush of pure passion and then the first stirrings of their unborn child, that kick of life inside her. This, her husband’s vindication as a composer and the part she had played in it, bound them together as soul mates far more profoundly than the formal wedding vows they had exchanged in Karlskirche.
“Almschi, you were right,” he whispered to her later, back in their guest room where they held each other, both of them trembling with wonder at what had transpired that night. “This is the turning point.”