This Austrian Safari Was Music to Their Ears

While working on his “Third Symphony” in Steinbach am Attersee, in Austria’s spectacular Salzkammergut region, Gustav Mahler’s young assistant conductor, Bruno Walter, arrived to spend a few days with him.

As Walter stepped off the lakeside steamer onto the landing platform, Mahler saw that his visitor’s eyes were captured by the peaks and crags of the Hollen Mountains, which provided a theatrical backdrop for the lake.

“You need not pay any attention to them,” Mahler said. “I’ve already composed them into my new symphony!”

Mountains, lakes, trees, meadows, birds, cowbells and virtualy all of the sounds of nature were grist for Mahler, who, as one of Vienna’s most popular conductors, found time to compose only during the off-season.

Retreating every July and August to a hideaway in Austria, Mahler often described himself as “a summer composer.”

He wrote all his great symphonies and enduring lieder-- works that are landmarks in 20th-Century music--in the midst of natural surroundings.

One of my great desires was to visit the Attersee where Mahler finished his “Second Symphony” and used up three summers to complete the third.

My wife and I, then caught up in the current Mahler boom, which has placed him among the most listened-to composers of today, got the idea of paying a call to each of Mahler’s summer sanctums. It would be our own Mahler safari.

To enhance the expedition, we would play Mahler’s music on our automobile cassette, listening to a particular symphony or lieder as we approached, or departed, the place where the music had been composed.

We began our mobile concert with Mahler’s Second Symphony. About three hours later we reached Steinbach am Attersee with the Third ringing in our ears.

The blissful Attersee was not disappointing, for there was the inn where Mahler had lodged (today the Gasthof-Metzgerei Fottinger) and 100 feet away was the cottage, just steps from the quiet waters of the lake, where he had composed.

Planted on the grassy meadow rife with trees, bushes and flowers, was the tiny, one-room, wooden, square “dollhouse” (familiar from archival photographs), whose size was just large enough to hold four telephone booths.

Of its three double windows, the one facing the lake was Mahler’s choice. There he sat at a small desk with his pen and paper; he rarely used a piano. The piano would be put into action only later for revisions, which were few.

During the summers of 1894 to 1896 Mahler would hide in this den from early morning to lunch. It was forbidden to disturb him when he worked.

In May, 1985, the Mahler minihouse was formally dedicated by Austria as a national monument. In need of some repair--it had been used as an outhouse by campers for several years--the cottage was restored. Some of the original furniture that the composer had used was returned together with pictures of Mahler photographed while at the lake.

The second Mahler retreat was at the south shore of the vacationparadise, Worther See, in the Carinthia province about 4 1/2 miles from Klagenfurt, where access roads lead to the frontier of both Yugoslavia and Italy.

At Maiernigg, near the towns of Maria Worth and Sekirn, the composer spent 10 summers between 1897 and 1907 creating the Fourth Symphony (1900), the Fifth (1902), the Sixth (1904), the Seventh (1905), the Eighth (1906) and the “Kindertotenlieder” (Songs on the Deaths of Children) (1901-1904).

Once again, Mahler prefered being a hermit, protected and enclosed in a small hut. About five-eighths of a mile from the main road that flanks the lake, he built a ring cabin atop a wooded hill.

The structure now can be reached after about a 20-minute walk, mostly uphill and through thick woods.

Mahler came to detest Maiernigg after his 5-year-old daughter, Maria Anna, died there from a complicated case of scarlet fever and diptheria.

A few days after her death, Mahler--who was passionately attached to the little girl--suffered a massive heart attack that his doctor diagnosed as a “double-sided, congenital, though compensated, valve defect.”

Because Maiernigg would forever remind him of the loss of Maria Anna and because he believed he could no longer compose there, he abandoned the location and left Worther See and its environs for good.

The next summer he went to a farmhouse and hut at Toblach for solitude.

Toblach in South Tirol, no longer part of territorial Austria because it was ceded to Italy after World War I, is a politically disputed area that the Italians insist on calling Dobbiaco and the region Ato Adige. It is bilingual--with German having an edge over Italian as the preferred language among the natives.

In Dobbiaco, the reverence for Mahler is immediately evident when you reach the city hall square, where a bronze statue of Mahler (unveiled in 1983) dominates the tree-shaded piazza.

Our arrival at this destination came during the Ninth Symphony, one of the three works last written by Mahler in the Toblach farmhouse cocooned by woodland that his wife Alma found about five-eigths of a mile away from the city limits. For his composing, Mahler adopted a small wooden cabin about five minutes away on foot, amid protective fir trees.

Starting the day promptly at 6 a.m. with a hearty breakfast that a maid cooked on a small wood-burning stove (a meal of coffee, biscuits, eggs, chicken parts, butter, honey and fruit), Mahler would then chase the woman off after she cleared the dishes.

Then he would sit down to compose. Not even his wife was permitted to visit.

Although aware he was suffering from a heart condition, Mahler worked feverishly.

In Mahler’s last summer retreat in 1909, “Das Lied von der Erde” (Song of the Earth), he composed his Ninth (Mahler’s last complete work that he unfortunately did not live to hear performed), and the two movements of his unfinished Tenth Symphony. Walter called the Ninth “the most personal utterance among Mahler’s creations and perhaps in all music.”

In May, 1911, shortly before he was to go back to Toblach to work on the completion of the Tenth, Gustav Mahler died at 51 years.

The farmhouse that the Mahlers lived in had 10 large rooms and a closed veranda. Today it is an inn, restaurant and cafe run by Bepo and Clara Trenker.

Called the Gustav Mahler Stube, the inn gets mostly skiers in the winter and tourists and hikers during the warmer months.

The Trenkers rent five rooms in the summer only, but Mahler’s big living room on the first floor, Room No. 1, is not let out. It is kept as a miniature Mahler museum (admission free).