Colonel Dragutin “Apis” Dimitrijević loved assassination to a fault. Yes, it was he who led the May Coup plotters in that most heinous of crimes: regicide. So went Alexander I of Serbia and – I don’t know why it had to be – Draga Obrenović, the Queen Consort. On his resume was an attempt at the life of Emperor Franz Josef I of Austria. As we shall see, he had a hand in killing that wise regent’s nephew, Archduke Ferdinand. We will never know how many he was involved in planning, only that he was obsessed. In terms of libidinal economy, plotting and carrying out assassinations served to exhaust intolerable drive energy which would otherwise threaten to make repressed complexes conscious.

But Apis could not do all this plotting by himself. No, he founded an organization which, at its core, had the purpose of maximizing the rate and efficiency with which its leaders could unwind themselves and transcend what they knew to be human – all this through unnatural means. Its periphery was a conglomeration of young rebels and nationalists, the most adept of whom were fed crumbs from the table of their superiors’ dark mysteries. Of course I speak of Unification or Death, which members of the Serbian parliament later referred to as The Black Hand.

As unbelievable as it sounds, let me tell you about Dimitrijević’s Reverse Crucifixion Rite for the Initiation of Dry Assassins, or at least the version of it I was told. It’s somewhat like those attributed to ibn Hassan by Wilson in Prometheus Rising. Why were they called dry? I wish I could forget!

The candidate was usually a South-Slavic young man of low status, sympathetic to pan-Slavism, Yugoslav nationalism or the general liberation of Slavs from Austro-Hungarian rule. Ideally, his relationship to his family and friends had deteriorated.

First he would have been offered a cigarette adulterated with opium and renowned Balkan hashish. A deep somnolence ensued and the candidate would have been taken to a hill which the officers called Golgotha. There he was fixed to a cross – by ropes of course – and the officers awaited his rousing. When the candidate awakened, they uprooted the cross, laid it on the ground and untied him. As night fell, he was forced to drag his cross down the hill into a garden. None other than Dragutin Dimitrijević was lying in wait, hiding in a bush and anticipating a rôle whose execution provided him with a pleasure that you and I cannot imagine. The colonel would spring from the bush like the blossoms of April. He would shout “Hail Rabbi!” in drawn-out lascivious ecstasy, kiss the candidate on the cheek and pour a goblet of very sweet wine down his throat. The wine was infused with opium as well and the candidate slumbered again. Then he was returned to some inconspicuous conditions and, upon arising, had no recollection of the rite.

What good is this for generating patsies? Well, all Dimitrijević had to do was imagine that delectable feeling he got playing his part as the betrayer, and the candidate, if he was successful in the ordeals, entered a state of suggestibility. In conjunction with other measures, Dimitrijević’s application of this device at crucial moments steered the candidate through his transformation.

Removed from society, the candidate divested from the cathexes foisted upon him thereby. The routines by which he formerly abided were replaced with a disorientating regimen of fasting, meditation, ritual sacrament taking, lectures, exercise and training. As the former modes of libidinal metabolism were dissolved, the candidate began to experience a pleasant buzzing feeling in his body (known in psychiatric orgonomy as charge). By virtue of the condition which the Skandalkonzert composers tried to inform us about, this natural feeling and marker of bodily health is largely unknown to people, especially to those low-status young men for whom these methods were designed. They asked their handlers, “what is this enigmatic sensation?” They were told it’s Prince Vlastimir’s spirit or the Archangel Michael or whatever. Thereafter the handlers’ task was to cultivate this feeling. It goes without saying that the candidate had to remain continent. The once pleasurable sensation compounded until it became overwhelming. The whole process was timed so that the final stage would correspond with some real-world event at which the target was to be present.

Lastly, the candidate was made to equate his infernal work with that tension’s resolution. The process had so far been concerned with creating conditions of disequilibrium between various tissues and surfaces in the candidate’s body. Meanwhile, a narrative of national division had been instilled: if the South Slavs are unified, all our problems will be resolved. Of course this is a metaphor for the orgastic discharge. The Slavs are the candidate’s disjunct body parts. The Austro-Hungarian Empire is the sum of repressive forces prohibiting the unification of the body and the restoration of its functional movement in the orgasm reflex. The impending assassination is the ultimate release from unbearable sexual tension, the destruction of what thwarts unification and the final ensuring of libido-economic equilibrium: a Slavic golden age.

As for Gavrilo Princip, I was told he also underwent the Crucifixion Rite. The trauma he accrued at the Skandalkonzert exacerbated the tension and only by this inordinate quantity of energy was he able to approach the royal motorcade. The rest is history.

It was March 31^st, 1913 in Vienna, the world’s capital of art and culture. Four young Mahlerians would turn the Musikverein’s Great Hall, the most prestigious concert hall on Earth, into a battleground with music alone. To the Austrians, this event was the Watschenkonzert, the slap-concert, as concert organizer Erhard Buschbeck was accused of slapping a patron during the fighting. In the ensuing litigation, composer Oscar Straus would testify that “the slap had been the most harmonious sound of the evening.”

Humor me. Let me give my opinion on the works performed that day of infamy. First we have Six Pieces for Orchestra by Anton Webern. This is easily the most effective work on the program, notwithstanding the Mahler which was never heard. Webern’s textures are well-proportioned and his reservedness and humility in this new domain are commendable. He respects us.

Second were the Four Orchestral Songs on poems by Maeterlinck (no. 1-3 & 5) of Alexander von Zemlinsky, a work which was later expanded to become his Opus 13. The only redeemable movement is the third, the Lied der Jungfrau (Song of the Virgin). Maeterlinck’s lyrics are superb and the composer’s setting is perfectly tailored for them.

Next we have the Chamber Symphony No. 1 of Arnold Schoenberg, their ring leader. At about the five-minute mark, one’s impression is that this piece may demonstrate the highest compositional virtuosity of those programmed, save Kindertotenlieder. After this point, one begins to feel cheated, as many of the Viennese that day must have felt. One suspects that the composer has lured us into an ambush. After all, not six weeks earlier, he refused to accept their applause at the premier of his Gurrelieder – basically a secular Mahler’s Eighth – because he thought they were still too conservative. What, then, was your intention with the Chamber Symphony, Arnold? In my opinion, there is not one meaningful instance of tension being built up and released; the single-movement, twenty minute symphony has the contour of a plateau, even with variations in instrumentation and dynamics. The texture and orchestration are disorientating. The ending is satisfying but this may be due to the fact that it’s finally over.

Fourth, they heard the second and third movements from Five Orchestral Songs on Picture-Postcard Texts by Peter Altenberg, set to music by Alban Berg. These two songs, which together take less than three minutes to perform, incited the good people of Vienna to violence. I tell you, if they held their peace, the very chairs would have cried out! They began to riot and demand that Berg join Altenberg in the insane asylum. The supporters of the Second Viennese School could not allow this affront to its honor and a brawl broke out.

Here are the lyrics from the Berg in English, if you’re curious:

No. 2
Have you seen the forest after thunderstorms?
Everything sparkles, gleams, and is lovelier than before.
See, woman, you also need thunderstorms!

No. 3
Over the borders of the universe, you gaze out thoughtfully,
You never worry about hearth and home.
Life, and the dream of life – suddenly it’s all gone – – – .
Over the borders of the universe, you still gaze out thoughtfully.

It’s true: women also need thunderstorms. Otherwise, I have nothing to say about this work. Altenberg was granted leave from the asylum that morning to watch the dress rehearsal. After hearing about what transpired, he wrote a prose sketch in which Alma Mahler attended the concert.

It’s easy to say this in hindsight, but if Buschbeck omitted either the Berg, or two of the first three works, Kindertotenlieder, Songs on the Deaths of Children, would have probably been performed and the program’s central implication would have been imparted to the audience. Of course I speak of the fact that we are the dead children, dismembered by our parents and the necrotic society they created, our dread inheritance. Modernity, then, is nothing more than our propensity to shirk this realization by employing every bromide available and, when these are exhausted, making new ones. The program implied that the works of Liszt, Wagner and the like present a purely musical treasure detached from the reality of man’s diseased state. Moreover, these are cast before swine who merely consume them to prevent their internal twistedness from becoming conscious. Romanticism can raise the dead, and we see this in the Bayreuth spell, Wagner’s cult of personality which Nietzsche came to find so repulsive – its concentric rings of devotion, the moths coming to the lamp to live vicariously through Siegfried. “No more of this!” says Schoenberg, “look at yourselves and realize what filth you are! This is what our diseased hearts sound like!”

The Second Viennese School’s position on this matter is unassailable, but to try and tackle the problem in such a way was an act of naivety. While some may argue that inciting the brawl was an artistic achievement, it really represents the composers’ desperate bid for catharsis regarding their personal frustrations, no matter how related to social issues these may have been. Wagner knew that Christ already went up against these living-dead charlatans for us so we don’t have to. Don’t tell them, Arnold! It is far more effective to capture them in your orbit. Dangle before them a simulacrum of what they lack and proceed to extract value from the energy they exert escaping the repressed. That’s what art should be for! … but whoever does this will have to answer for it on the last day of his life. Thus the Skandalkonzert composers – or at least Schoenberg – evidently had some neurotic need to strive against an immovable object. They damaged the wheat trying to uproot the tares.

Between Wagner and Schoenberg, temporally and temperamentally, we have the saintly Mahler, whose project is one of embracing the spectrum of human passions. He did not compromise for the masses or intentionally agitate them, but was utterly devoted to art. The deciphered message from the draft of the Tenth’s finale would seem not to condone the decisions that led up to the Skandalkonzert. In that symphony, Mahler is already trying to figure out what went wrong. We hear him toying with disembodied forms torn asunder by late Romantic stresses. After deconstructing every Romantic idiom with his symphonic oeuvre, he, in the three middle movements attempts to reanimate them with amateurish surgical procedures and jolts of direct current. This is a failure and often raises the most hideous of forms. Is this the exhumation of Titurel? But the finale is a promise of ultimate acceptance and ecstatic apprehension of the most sacred mysteries … and a musical cryptogram pointing the way to the objective interpretation of Parsifal. All this, whose essence enlivens every Mahler symphony, eludes Schoenberg and his colleagues. They inherited Mahler’s hammer of demolition but none of the Living Water given to him by Beethoven.

To make matters worse, what transpired that day would directly lead to the July Crisis and the Great War. According to sources familiar with the matter, Gavrilo Princip was convulsing on the floor during the fighting and babbling something about a Yugoslav state, free from Hapsburg influence. The Altenberg Lieder was evidently too much for him and, as many innocent people did that day, he passed “over the borders of the universe.” Why did the composers do this? Operatives from a Black Hand sleeper cell found him in the gutter that night and brought him back to Serbia. There, under Dragutin Dimitrijević, the ibn Hassan of Southeast Europe, Princip would be engineered to believe that only assassination could relieve the unbearable tension he acquired at the concert.

This brings us to the songs that were never heard: Kindertotenlieder, finished in 1904. Their lyrics are by Friedrich Rückert. These ghostly settings explore the maddening grief of parents adapting to life after losing their children. Concertgoers would have heard some of the experimental harmonies that laid the groundwork for modernist music, but I would like to call attention to the lyrics. Here we face disconsolate questioning about the bitterness and brevity of life. The grieving report hallucinations of the departed. They cannot understand what has happened. The fifth and last song is In diesem Wetter (In this Weather). In every regard, it embodies anxiety. The orchestra creates a violent storm and the vocalist recalls some vague tragedy. It is as though she lost her mind and now answers the thunder and lightening. She keeps repeating that she would never have let the children out in such weather but also that “they have been carried off.” When all this becomes too much to bear, the key changes from D-minor to D-major and the tempo is slowed to half of what it was. The last verse assures us that the episode, whatever it was, is over and no more harm can come from it.

In this weather, in this gale, in this windy storm,
they rest as if in their mother’s house:
frightened by no storm,
sheltered by the Hand of God.

With these lines was the Skandalkonzert intended to conclude. I believe much of what I said would have been understood in essence by the audience, Mr. Princip among them.

Welcome, welcome international readers. Here you can find rest.

The horn is the hero’s instrument. Siegfried slew Fafner with it. What do you think? does a hero slit a dragon’s throat while it sleeps? The Language of the Birds and more were his by this exploit.

Robert Schumann called the horn section the soul of the orchestra. In the finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, the Living Water bought with his hearing flowed from this instrument’s bell. So all of Europe was crucified. Do not however expect music to divulge its secret readily – for when horns sound, nothing can endure. Let us seek the answer then in Alte Deutsche Lieder.

Des Knaben Wunderhorn is a collection of folk poetry edited by Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. It was dedicated to Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The Secret of Romanticism is plainly read in each one of these poems wherefore we must rather sing them for good friends, accompanied by instruments. Gustav Mahler set them to music about eighty years after their publication and they have been privately performed in various Romantic circles ever since, even through the National-Socialist experiment. Speaking of nationalism, do not pay any heed to academic paranoia about the editors’ alleged nationalistic intent. Anything that stirs the heart is nationalism to them.

Of peculiar interest is an image preceding the text in the 1808 edition, published in Heidelberg.

What is this vaulted edifice looking like an orgastically convulsing spine? this gravity-defying cathedral? I haven’t the foggiest, but I notice that one side of this mysterious house is more developed than the other. On the big side, we see written “o mater dei,” which is “O Mother of God.” Above this is a series of crenellated balconies defended by fierce-looking pikemen. The density of armed defenders increases until, at the highest battlements, we are met with the most imposing of the characters. She appears to me to be a woman, but you might not agree.

Starting at the Latin superscription and following the facade down to the absolute minimum, we see more balconies populated by minstrels, knights and flagellants. Trefoils line what are, from our point of view, the sides in order to break the unpleasant line that would otherwise exist at the juncture of wall and background. Appropriately, the flagellants are upside-down. Past their position, as the building begins to turn around and reach toward the sky again, not a single armed inhabitant can be seen. Our eyes meet two horsemen who will have a hell of a time getting down from there. At the penultimate tier, are two dogs, looking bewildered and wondering what exactly it is they’re doing in such a tower. Finally, at the loftiest perch of the building’s undefended side, a maiden seated in a chalice unfurls a banner with “drink aus,” an archaic spelling of “trink aus,” viz. “drink up”written on it.

The structure itself is in the shape of a horn, evoking the cornucopia of Greek mythology. As you all know, the infant Zeus was hidden from his father Cronus, who sought to devour him. During this time, the little lightening-god was nursed by Amaltheia, whose horn he broke off. Therefrom fruits and goods are continually produced.

I now invite you to follow me on a schizoid but evidently necessary National Treasure style wild goose chase, the horn also being the instrument of the chase. The ancient Germans – the alte Deutsche – used horns as drinking vessels. Remember that the cornucopia is a horn that continually refills its contents. Combining the attributes of being a drinking vessel and perpetual replenishment puts us in mind of the Holy Grail. This Passion Relic, which collected our Redeemer’s blood during the Crucifixion, is said to miraculously refill itself with holy blood, should its contents ever be emptied. What do the Grail Knights from Wagner’s Parsifal keep at Monsalvat? You’re a little slow so I’ll just tell you: the Grail.

Now that we’re on the same page, let us recall that Mahler wrote his first symphony – sometimes called Titan – just a few years before he began to set the Wunderhorn poems to music. In the finale, after the key change, we hear a contrapuntal fusion of two melodies. One is carried by eight horns in unison who are required by the score to stand and put their bells in the air. In the zealous key of D-major, their phrase begins with these four scale degrees: I – V – VI – III. This same motif is carried by the contrabassi during the Grail Rite from the first act of Parsifal before which, Gurnemanz tells us, time becomes space. The countermelody is carried by the trumpet. We recognize it from Parsifal’s prelude; it’s that famous trumpet lick ascending the major scale to the fifth degree while the orchestra carries out an authentic cadence. Of course this is repeated throughout the whole music drama in typical Wagnerian fashion.

What is twenty-eight year old Mahler trying to tell us years before he would hide the message in the draft of his Tenth’s finale? What is the relationship between the horn, time and abundance? What are we implored to drink by the maiden? What is the youth’s magic horn?

Normally we let everyone believe that they already know what the word ‘romantic’ means but since you are reading this, you are a candidate for either Team Womb or Team Tomb. Therefore I will tell you the true origin of the word to the extent I am allowed by Phoenician Commercial Law.

Do not listen to the academics when they contradict. Our heritage comes down to Beethoven from the great, unknown minstrels and knights of the past. These sang the Medieval Romances and from hence does our name originate. I have not read a single one because I have been preoccupied with the works of Wilhelm Reich (including The Function of the Orgasm).

Why are they called Medieval Romances? This has nothing to do with “spitting game,” “buying her a drink,” waiting an hour to “text her back,” and those skills men try to impart to me. Romances are epic poems like The Aeneid. Our Knightly Race descends from Aeneas and those who fled Troy when she became inhospitable.

Let me tell you, if you are man enough, about Ilium and how her high ramparts were built. According to Edith Hamilton, female authoress extraordinaire but still a woman, it all began when Paris was asked to judge bribes from some goddesses. Now Paris was a fine young lad and didn’t want to rule the known world or crush the Greeks in war so he accepted Aphrodite’s promise of the fairest woman on earth, Helen. Hamilton tells us: “Paris, a weakling and something of a coward … gave Aphrodite the golden apple (1).” Yes Edith, you have a vagina, I get it, please stop! I have come to you for education!

When Helen was dropped off on the shore by Ilium, many men saw her beauty but felt compelled to get her number of bricks and built the wall. Thenceforth was the city called Troy whereas before it was Ilium. Now, in her wake, a tempest formed over the sea and sucked out some Aegean ships. The sailors and soldiers couldn’t leave without their ships so they all jumped in before it was too late. There was no army left to defend the city of Mycenae so Agamemnon got on board before realizing Helen was nowhere to be found. They fought for ten years but only Odysseus could figure out how to get in. He would pay another ten years for that. But the Aegeans, those dogs, abolished gift-giving.

How do I know this? I used to be, maybe in another life, a horn player and it was we who performed at Jericho all those years ago. So like T. E. Lawrence – that student of crusader castles – I have some understanding of fortifications and their integrity.

Oh. One more thing :

EXQVODETROJAESTEGRESSVSAENEASVENERISEVMPERDIEMQVOTIDIE
STELLAMVIDISSEDONECADAGRVMLAVRENTVMVENIRETINQVOEAMNONVIDITVLTERIVSQVARECOGNOVITTERRASESSEFATALES

This is how people used to read when not everyone read. Being translated from the Latin:

After his departure from Troy, he [must I give away all my secrets?] saw every day and during the day the Star of Venus, until he arrived at the fields of Laurentum, where he ceased to see it. This fact made him realize that these were the lands allotted by destiny. (2)

(0)

(1) Hamilton, Edith – Mythology, Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes – Part Four – The Heroes of the Trojan War – Prologue: THE JUDGMENT OF PARIS pg. 255

(2) Fulcanelli, Master Alchemist – Le Mystère des Cathédrales – 7 – pg. 52
(translated from the French by Mary Sworder)

A good compact disc of Mahler’s Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn) should begin with Revelge (Reveille) and end with Der Tamboursg’sell (The Drummer Boy) both of which concern the same person. Let me give you the alpha and the omega and we will fill in the rest later.

Now a reveille is a bugle call that is used to wake up soldiers. The two lieder follow the transformation of one of these soldiers. Every morning he marches between three and four while his girlfriend looks down from her apartment. We cannot tell if this is a complaint because of this nonsensical refrain “tralali, tralalei, tralala.” One day he is shot and calls for help but his comrade says “may the love of God help you. I have to march to my death.”

Our soldier retorts: “Ah, comrades, you pass me by as though I were done for … you march too close to where I lie.” Abandoned, lying on the dirt and bleeding he begins to play his drum “otherwise I will lose myself.” The enemy is advancing. He raises his brothers from the dead with the beat of the drum and “a terror smites the enemy! A terror smites the enemy!” They march back to their quarters.

The next morning, the skeletons stand in rank and file. The drum stands in front “so she can see him.” The enemy was defeated but at what cost? He has returned to his girlfriend a skeleton – yes, a skeleton. Any true Romantic will realize that this whole episode happens within basic training and that no formal combat between two armies is described in this lied. All battles have already been decided in songs.

Romantic inquiry into the Science of Human Rectification has shown that this song describes a method of libido-economic engineering. A perpetually upheld tonus of the skeletal muscles is endowed by these rites, neurological adultery which prevents the body from acting rationally when on the modern battlefield. This would entail getting as far away as possible. But when a soldier fights, it is as if he believes he is still in the womb by inversion.

Der Tamboursg’sell, in my opinion, is Mahler’s greatest song. Like Revelge its lyrics hail from the collection of folk poetry Des Knaben Wunderhorn. Because of its pertinence to our age, it must be reproduced fully here, now:

Ich armer Tamboursg'sell,
Man führt mich aus dem Gwölb!
Wär ich ein Tambour blieben,
Dürft ich nicht gefangen liegen!

O Galgen, du hohes Haus,
Du siehst so furchtbar aus!
Ich schau dich nicht mehr an,
Weil i weiß, daß i g'hör dran!

Wenn Soldaten vorbeimarschier'n,
Bei mir nit einquartier'n.
Wenn sie fragen, wer i g'wesen bin:
Tambour von der Leibkompanie!

Gute Nacht, ihr Marmelstein!
Ihr Berg und Hügelein!
Gute Nacht, ihr Offizier,
Korporal und Musketier!

Gute Nacht! Ihr Offizier'!
Korporal und Grenadier!
Ich schrei mit lauter Stimm,
Von euch ich Urlaub nimm!
Gute Nacht! Gute Nacht!

I, poor drummer boy,
They lead me from the cell!
Had I remained a drum,
I wouldn't have been imprisoned!

O gallows, you high house,
you look so terrifying!
I don’t want to look on you
for I know that I am yours!

When soldiers march past,
who weren't quartered with me,
When they ask who I was:
Drum from the 1st company!

Good night, you marble rocks!
You mountains and hills!
Good night, you officers,
Corporal and musketeer!

Good night, you officers!
Corporal and grenadier!
I cry out with a bright scream:
of you I take my leave!
Good night! Good night!

Our drummer has committed an unknown crime or something considered a crime by those in whose business he became embroiled. Has he fraternized with the enemy? He is led from confinement to the gallows like the hero from Symphonie Fantastique by soldiers who find his work incomprehensible. They walk at a painful misurato. Do they fear being zapped? This pitiful wretch strangely reminds them of the general, nay, the Kaiser!

We hear a ponderous funeral march, but all of Mahler’s funeral marches are Dom Sébastien funeral marches: the King is in the coffin but still alive. His brilliance is divulged by the tenor’s melodic material found at the end of each of the first three verses. At “I wouldn’t have been imprisoned,” we have the ascending interval of the major sixth followed by a descent back down to the third scale degree on which the motif began. It’s a voice crack. Again, this same motif at “for I know that I am yours.” However, his wisdom is fully realized at the end of the third verse. Only when our soldier shouts “Drum from the 1st Company!” can his voice remain on the third scale degree. It is the orchestra, specifically the oboes and clarinets, which must produce the voice crack this time.

The key changes . . .

What? Could it be possible? That was the way out all along?

He accepts his terror which he had always held at bay. “How strange,” he must have thought, “terror is not terrifying when at last it’s entertained!” Now all fear flies from him. It turns to disgust and absolute contempt. “Look at this mockery of Life they have made! How can I repay them? I will make them kill their own Kaiser and guarantee their eternal damnation! I will blot out their names!”

Meanwhile the orchestra is playing one of the most mysterious melodies of the Romantic period. In no other work is music so unpredictable yet so familiar. It oscillates between major and minor, volkslieder and klezmer, German and Jewish at a frequency only Mahler could have been comfortable with. He sings the officers to sleep. The musketeers and grenadiers hadn’t faith enough to watch. Our hero did not do them the honor of making their hearts beat with the drum this time.

They dream of our hero being hanged, but the hanged man is the only one still awake! “Ich schrei mit heller Stimm: ‘Von euch ich Urlaub nimm!’” They dream they hear his voice cracking. One has to hear the music to understand. “Gute Nacht!” he screams, and it sounds like two men screaming. A TERROR SMITES THE ENEMY, YES, A TERROR!

In musicology, the Alma Problem is the sum of lies fabricated by Alma Mahler Gropius Werfel concerning one of her husbands Gustav Mahler whom she outlived. After Gustav succumbed to the Curse of the Ninth, Alma was able to destroy the evidence concerning her role in his death and reinvent herself as an innocent woman who suffered a random misfortune.

“Unfortunately, as scholarship has investigated the picture she sought to paint of Mahler and her relationship with him, her accounts have increasingly been revealed as unreliable, false, and misleading, and evidence of deliberate manipulation and falsification can no longer be ignored (1).”

We must ask why Gustav fell for such a twisted woman. He was a magnetic, artistic genius and Alma is just not that pretty or intelligent. She must have done something unnatural to capitalize on his weakness, but what could that have been?

Alma Schindler at nineteen (please remember)

You see, Alma Mahler is what’s called a hysterical character. Authentic sexuality originates spontaneously from the body and is characterized by complete gratification. Contrastingly, hysterics such as Alma perpetually exhibit a fake, performative sexuality because of infantile fixations. According to Wilhelm Reich, they use ostensibly sexual displays in order to discover possible dangers. Whoever calls their bluffs quickly finds that they aren’t playing with a full deck, that they are just traumatized six-year-old girls in adult bodies. That’s why they’re always getting into trouble. When they finally do have sex, they surely make “pseudo-passionate displays [which] turn out to be the expression of severe anxiety which is overcome by activity.”

“In the hysterical character,” writes Herr Doktor Reich in Character Analysis, “the mouth and the anus always stand for the female genital organ.” This must have something to do with “the fact that the mouth, in its role as a genital organ, attracts a great deal of libido to itself in the ‘displacement from below upwards (2).’” I suspect this manifests biophysically as an inordinate electric charge in the oral musculature. Thus much of Alma’s speech is a kind of sexual nonsense which she indiscriminately spews, seeing what it will stick to. Inevitably, sexually starved men blinded by their own trauma find themselves inexplicably lingering near her, paralyzed and unable to escape while she prepares the next vial of poison. They wandered in the desert thirsting for so long, they would now drink poison! Alma, whose entire personality is arrayed to blame the world for her own wickedness, chooses rather to ignore these facts so she can inflate the illusion that she still has an integrated body.

All Alma’s perversions function to repel orgastically potent men and ensure that she ensnares only a weak, sickly (preferably Jewish) man whom she can control. From Alma’s diary, concerning Gustav: “He’s sick, my poor dear, weighs under 10 stone – far too little. I shall care for him like a child. My love for him is infinitely touching (3).” We can see here that she is a ravenous wolf.

When Gustav crossed his legs like a woman (restricting blood-flow to his genitals) and looked up at her with misery, it meant “please stop, you are hurting me.” That’s the old language. Due to her perversion, Alma interpreted this as an invitation. She thinks she speaks some secret language and that she just gets it. O God! I don’t want to know what she gets! A strong man who sits comfortably is disagreeable to her because his vitality threatens to make her dysfunction apparent to her. She finds many ways to rationalize her neurosis with ideology.

We have reason to believe that after her real father’s death, Alma was sexually abused by her step-father Carl Moll in childhood. However, she could never be sure that it happened because it only proceeded as far as it could without Moll himself becoming aware of it. Nonetheless, she was left in state of pathological, intolerable excitation that no child should or could ever endure. It was as if she was turned inside-out and her normal interfacing with the world was exchanged for the hysterical displays while her potential intimacy was plagued by terror. By employing this energetic excess, she was able to ensnare Gustav (who was too sensitive for his own good), holding the last memories of his mother’s love for ransom. Because intolerable excitation was a baseline to her, she was unable to see that it’s not acceptable to excite someone in that way and that it hurt him. Gustav reasoned that if he could stop her from composing her own music, this stasis of energy would be compelled to rectify her libidinal economy but it doesn’t work like that evidently. She was unable to love but kept insinuating the contrary. Meanwhile, Gustav could not entertain the idea that she was untrue because this seemed to be his last chance. Eventually she lost interest and began an affair with architect and Aryan Walter Gropius.

In desperation, he wrote for her his Eighth Symphony. It employs a thousand musicians whose wages feed many children. “The Symphony of a Thousand” is a divinely inspired, Romantic oratorio concerning ultimate release and redemption from Mephistopheles’s damnation. The finale which itself takes over an hour to perform derives its lyrics from the final scene of Faust Part II. A thunderous chorus chronicles the doctor’s ascension through the heavenly spheres, the forfeiture of all misery and trauma taken on in life and entire union with the primeval essence of love. Its effect was the opposite of its intention.

Daß ja das Nichtige
Alles verflüchtige,
Glänze der Dauerstern,
Ewiger Liebe Kern.
- Goethe

He could have given her the Philosophers’ Stone for Christ’s sake and she still wouldn’t have been able to realize what it was. No matter how great his offering was – she was a goddess to that fool – it could only have shown her her inferiority and fornication, that she was Kundry, the Wandering Jew, and if that medicine ever came near her he would die and a dove would fly out of her. Of course that’s just me being a Romantic. In reality, Alma would have merely divested from pathological cathexes of libido, integrated repressed elements of herself and gained the capacity to live a more fulfilling life if she embodied the Eighth’s energy.

As for my Mahler, this rejection left him with only one choice: exhume Beethoven and challenge his accursed precedent. Superstitious to a fault, he wrote a hybrid lieder-symphony Das Lied von der Erde in order to test Beethoven’s curse. Mahler was still alive, it seemed, so she proceeded with an utterly cataclysmic Ninth (my ringtone). There was only one way: forward. He then wrote a haunting Adagio for a Tenth Symphony, drafts for a finale and two scherzos, and a nearly complete, enigmatic, temporally centered movement called Purgatorio on which the whole work pivots. It was in the draft of the finale that I discovered the hidden message encoded in some bars, below which the following was scribbled to Alma in mad despair: “To live for you! To die for you!”

Still suffering from the wound she inflicted on her, he died of a broken heart before he could impart her message to the composers of the Second Viennese School. The Time War had already begun and nothing could stop those Austrian guns from rolling into the Balkans three years later. But thanks to the diligent investigation of musicologists, light has been shed on their crimes and Mahler’s name has been salvaged. I was overjoyed to have been told by someone associated with a secret court in Prague that Alma was pardoned because of what she had suffered.

(1) Wikipedia – Alma Mahler ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alma_Mahler )

(2) Reich, Wilhelm – Character Analysis – Chapter X, Some Circumscribed Character Forms – 1. The Hysterical Character pg. 204-209

(3) Fischer, Jens Malte – Gustav Mahler – Chapter 22 Vienna in 1900: Alma as a Young Woman pg. 372