Young Mahler - encouragement worthwhile?

A charming and previously unpublished reminiscence of an 11-year-old Gustav Mahler (photo above) comes to An Overgrown Path from Elissa Minet Fuchs former ballerina with the Ballet Russe and the Metropolitan Opera. Mrs. Fuchs (see photo below) is the widow of conductor and composer Peter Paul Fuchs who was the subject of two tributes here when he died last year. A reader drew Mrs. Fuchs' attention to my articles and she has very kindly supplied me with material, including previously unpublished photographs, on her husband for a full appreciation to be published here on the first anniversary of his death next week. Among the material was this memory of a young Gustav Mahler.

Peter's grandfather on his mother's side, Alois Rusicka, was born in a small town in Czechoslovakia not far from the Austrian border. He was a law student - pursuing his degree and an amateur musician, a cellist. On one of his visits home, he was approached by a tavern keeper. He was asked to meet the tavern owner's young son, 11 years, and to judge the boy's musical talent to see if encouragement in this field would be worthwhile. Herr Rusicka was absolutely sure that this was a significant talent - the boy's name was Gustav Mahler.

Peter's mother told me that her father never revealed this incident to Mahler even though much later in Vienna the then well known lawyer and the then intendant of the Vienna Opera crossed social paths - at soirées, the Opera, coffee houses.

Also of interest - Peter's theory teacher at the Vienna Academy of Music (graduated with honors in 1935) was Karl Weigl, an assistant to Mahler during his Vienna Opera tenure - and also a composer.

Below is the text of this story together with a photo of Elissa Minet and Peter Paul Fuchs. I would like to thank Mrs. Fuchs in Greensboro, NC and Adrian McDonnell in Paris for making this valuable material available. There also is the possibility (and I stress possibility) of private recordings of Peter Paul Fuchs music being made available for An Overgrown Path radio programme. And just think, someone once said "Classical blogs are spreading but their nutritional value is lower than a bag of crisps. Unlike financial blogs, which yield powerful and profitable secrets, classical web-chat is opinion-rich and info-poor."


Lower image (c) On An Overgrown Path 2008. Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk

Holocaust opera's rare performance

A rare performance of an opera written in the Theresienstadt ghetto in Terezin, Czechoslovakia during World War II takes place at the University of Hertfordshire on Holocaust Memorial Day, January 27th. The Emperor of Atlantis was composed by the Czech composer Viktor Ullman, and is based on the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. Ullman was sent to Theresienstadt from his home in Prague in the autumn of 1942. He was later moved to Auschwitz where his fellow prisoners included the musicians Karel Ancerl, Rafael Schachter, Gideon Klein, and Hans Krasa.

While in Theresienstadt Viktor Ullman wrote: 'For me Theresienstadt has been, and remains, an education in form. Previously, when one did not feel the weight and pressure of material life, because modern conveniences - those wonders of civilization - had dispelled them, it was easy to create beautiful forms. Here where matter has to be overcome through form even in daily life, where everything of an artistic nature is the very antithesis of one's environment - here, true mastery lies in seeing, with Schiller, that the secret of the art-work lies in the eradication of matter through form: which is presumably, indeed, the mission of man altogether, not only of aesthetic man but also of ethical man.

I have written a fairly large amount of music in Theresienstadt, mainly to satisfy the needs and wishes of conductors, producers, pianists and singers and thus to make provision for the permitted leisure activities within the ghetto. To make a list of this music seems to me as idle as it does to emphasize, for instance, that in Theresienstadt it was impossible to play the piano since there were no instruments. The severe shortage of manuscript paper will surely also be of no interest to future generations. All that I would stress is that Theresienstadt has helped, not hindered, me in my musical work, that we certainly did not sit down by the waters of Babylon and weep, and that our desire for culture was matched by our desire for life; and I am convinced that all those who have striven, in life and in art, to wrest form from resistant matter will bear me out.' Viktor Ullmann, 26 Kritiken über musikalische Veranstaltungen in Theresienstadt.

+ Viktor Ullman died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz on October 14th 1944 +

The Emperor of Atlantis was first performed in 1975, and is recognised for its contribution to the understanding of the Nazi atrocities.

* The one-off student performance will be staged at the Weston Auditorium at the University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, UK on 27th January 2006 preceded by a talk by Holocaust survivor Stephen Frank about his experiences of Theresienstadt.
* Internet resources available at Viktor Ullman Foundation
* Thanks to SomethingJewish for the lead on this story.
* Report broken links, missing images and other errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
* Image credits - Auschwitz from Libertarian.nl. Viktor Ullman from Viktor Ullman Foundation
* Image owners - if you do not want your picture used in this article please contact me and it will be removed. If bandwidth is a problem with your permission I will host your image.
For a related story take An Overgrown Path to Childhood luggage