Fate, death and Alma

Gustav Mahler is the most subjective, the most autobiographical, of composers. Other composers, particularly in the previous century, have asked their audiences to show an occasional interest in their private lives, sometimes in rather coded ways. There are the allusions, which of course never were completely private, of Schumann’s piano cycles, Carnaval and Davidsbundlertanze; there are the heartbreaking bits of autobiography in the late Beethoven string quartets; there are significant mottos about private acts of adoration even in Brahms’s third symphony; and, much later, a hidden love affair to be decoded in the Berg Lyric Suite.