The Last Movement
by Robert Seethaler
translated by Charlotte Collins
The great Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler died at the age of 50 in 1911, the victim of heart disease exacerbated by a series of progressively worsening streptococcal infections. Mahler’s final years brought some of his most notable achievements, including celebrated conducting posts with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic, as well as the resoundingly successful Munich premiere of his gigantic choral Eighth Symphony, aptly nicknamed the “Symphony of a Thousand”. Yet these were also years of acute personal strain: the death of his young daughter Maria in 1907 ushered in a succession of tragedies, among them the diagnosis of the illness that would lead to his untimely death and the discovery that his wife, Alma Mahler, was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius.
Robert Seethaler’s novella Der letzte Satz (2000), now available in an English translation by Charlotte Collins as The Last Movement, imagines the ailing Mahler’s final journey from New York back to Europe aboard the liner Amerika. Ravaged by fever, Mahler looks back over his life, in particular his love for Alma and the pain occasioned by her betrayal.
The Last Movement left me somewhat underwhelmed. I appreciated that, while a work of fiction, the novella remains broadly faithful to Mahler’s biography. Yet, for a book about a composer, it is rather surprising and disappointing that there is no real attempt to convey or engage with his musical language. At one point, Seethaler has his protagonist insist that “you can’t talk about music; there’s no language for it. As soon as music can be described, it’s bad.” It is an intriguing thought, if not an especially original one (echoing the oft-quoted maxim that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture”), but it also feels like a convenient evasion of the very thing for which Mahler is most revered: his music. Although the novella’s attempt to probe the composer’s inner life is often affecting, Mahler’s identity curiously risks becoming almost incidental. Perhaps the most poignant touch is the figure of the cabin boy, who comes into sharper focus in the closing pages, as we learn alongside him of the death of “Herr Direktor”.
For all these reservations, this remains a worthwhile
read – particularly for Mahler devotees, or perhaps even more so for those new
to his work, who may find themselves prompted to explore it further.
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