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General Category => Gustav Mahler and Related Discussions => Topic started by: Jot N. Tittle on July 07, 2008, 01:05:11 AM
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How will you mark his 148th?
Listen to what??
Please, won't some Bored Member take up Henry-Louis's Appendix 3 I (pp. [1716]-1717) in Volume IV and make some Marillenknödel and let us know how they turned out?
. & '
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I began the birthday anniversary by plowing through another 40 pages of La Grange's v4. Sorry about the term "plowing" but Henry-Louis' unfathomably comprehensive knowledge leads to his inclusion of so many anecdotes and tertiary references, that it is sometimes a real effort to keep in mind his original point.
I will definitely set aside time to enjoy an M6 or M3, and if I can tear my wife away from her busy summer commitments, perhaps we will work together to try our efforts at Mahler's Marillenknodel. Thanks to Jot N. Tittle for the recipe, of course from La Grange's Appendix. (hope that bodes well!)
--John H
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Marillenknodel
Shame on those who failed to honor GM's memory today!
Thanks to the information that Jot N. Tittle provided, I successfully prepared Mahler's favorite dessert today.
For those who care to know, Marillenknodel is a sort of apricot dumpling.
The first recipe that La Grange presents involves mashing a kilo of potatoes.
Sorry, but non-European that I am, i simply couldn't face (or should that be stomach?) mashed potatoes with my apricots.
I opted for "Variant no. 1 with cream puff pastry instead of potatoes.
Here, I encountered another problem: I found that I was not all that competent at preparing pastry dough from scratch. I achieved a very sticky mass that would have been able to stick to the apricots, had I been able to discourage it from sticking to my fingers. Eventually, I switched to my mother's recipe for sweet rolls, which provided a pastry dough to enrobe the sweet apricots. Following an eight-minute bath in boiling water, the dumplings are next rolled in melted butter (some will remember Mahler's fondness for butter) and then dusted with cinnamon sugar.
The end result was that they were delightful in spite of my ineptness in the kitchen. As I savoured the apricot confection, I imagined Mahler enjoying the same or very similar taste, nearly a century ago.
This is also my 100th post, so I've saluted Mahler in my own little way.
--Cheers-- John H
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I am passing Mahler's birthday by NOT listening to his music, which very efficiently reminds me how essential Mahler has become in my life. I've listened to, instead of Mahler, Vaughan Williams Ninth Symphony , Saint-Saens Third Symphony, Dvorak Violin concerto, and Berg Violin concerto. But I don't know how much longer I can
go on w/o his music for the rest of the day :-[
John,
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Good choices, John, but I agree that they will whet your appetite for a return to Mahler.
--John H
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I did absolutely nothing for Mahler's birthday (except to post here), and Mahler is very pleased about that. I know because I asked him. ;D
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I spent the day in sauna, back at home. Not immediately Mahlerian, I know, but in retrospect there was something of the spirit of his Toblach häuschen present.
(http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/20/Ainola_sauna.jpg/450px-Ainola_sauna.jpg)
[This by the way is where my avatar spent his evenings recovering from previous nights' pub
crawls and thinking about his Fourth through Seventh. In fact, Mahler may have bathed there,
too, in 1907, now that I think about it.]
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This is also my 100th post, so I've saluted Mahler in my own little way.
Another special day I missed! Belated congratulations and now I'll have to learn to live without the pleasure of addressing you as "Junior."
I'll make Marillenknodel in your honor as soon as I get the Volume IV home and they will be all potatoes, living as I basically do on the potatoes-and-cabbage belt. I'm really piqued!
PT
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PT, you might take some potatoes into that sauna to get them steamed before mashing them for use in Marillenknodl dough.
Seriously though, thanks for posting the picture of the sauna. It looks just like the sort of place Mahler would have enjoyed visiting. He was so receptive to the self-help health care suggestions of friends, that someone's mere mention of the therapeutic effects of sauna use would probably send him running to the nearest sauna.
JH
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In fact, you can have those potatoes either boiled or broiled, in any common sauna heater setup:
(http://www.mit.jyu.fi/tjlahton/2003/korsu/normal/20031226017-Saunan_kiuas.jpg)
In fact I'd think Mahler must have been in sauna with Sibelius, given that by the time he visited the latter in Finland the premises had been there for three years already and in any case the sauna is always the first building to go up (for traditional reasons having to do with physical survival in wintertime and superstition) and the center of all social activities.
More stuff incl. images of Sibelius' home ("Ainola") can be found for instance at http://www.ainola.fi/eng_arkkitehtuuri_kuvia.php (http://www.ainola.fi/eng_arkkitehtuuri_kuvia.php). The place is great (my sister lives next door so I've been there several times), no longer a "hauschen" exactly but more of a burg, wouldn't you say, and (besides those frequent pub crawls) the reason for Sibelius' constant financial woes.
PT
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More hauschen!!! - every topic I look under, there are photos of small houses!!! ;)
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Plus one that's not so small: il castello di Gesualdo, which gets my vote for the Greatest Composer Häuschen Ever.
(http://www.carlogesualdo.eu/immagini/castello/veduta_castello.jpg)
That's the one in the middle. Even better than Bluebeard's Castle, wouldn't you say? But poor Maria, she ended up the worse off between her and Judit.
PT
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I have to be composer to have at last a decent house like the aboves. ;D
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I have to be composer to have at last a decent house like the aboves. ;D
Better calculate your odds carefully: you might end up like the Brazilian composer-multi-instrumentalist Egberto Gismonti who for a substantial period in his life lived with the Amazonian Xingu in something not so dissimilar from this:
(http://www.survival-international.org/lib/img/gallery/Image_Galleries/isolatedperu/800x600/PERU-MASH-FENAMAD-01_medium.jpg)
Or more likely his residence resembled this:
(http://jpdutilleux.com/thework/kamaiura/images/image1.jpg)
Then again maybe you wouldn't blink. :)
Now, how that all relates to Mahler becomes clear when you read John Haueisen's story of that incident with Bix Beiderbecke...
PT
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Though I fear we may be getting OT (which in addition to Off-Topic may also be "Over-the-Top.") I think PT may be under the misapprehension that Alma was only interested in Bix Beiderbecke's horn, whereas, the truth be told, Alma was usually more interested in tooting her own horn.
JH
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Actually, the Bix Beiderbecke/Gustav Mahler connection is a bit more complicated than that:
Prior to moving into the Amazonas to live with and learn from the Xingu, Egberto Gismonti studied orchestration and analysis in Paris with Nadia Boulanger (and Jean Barraque, who in turn was a disciple of Schoenberg who claimed his own work to be nothing but a continuation of...Mahler whose 9th, according to him, was "the first work of new music"), who also taught Aaron Copland whom she introduced to the music of...Mahler; one of Copland's own proteges was then to be the Oscar-winning composer and pianist Elmer Bernstein (no relation to Leonard), known mostly for his jazz-influenced film scores, who credits much of his success as a composer to his father's habit of spending all his evenings listening to...Bix Beiderbecke!
But the plot thickens. Gismonti's teacher was also the mentor of another young man frequently referred to on this board. Studying analysis and counterpoint with Boulanger launched a certain H.L. de la Grange's career in criticism, prompting him to start writing about music and records and decide to one day write a biography of...the composer Gustav Mahler.
The plot becomes thicker still. There was yet another youngster studying with Boulanger, going by the name of E. Carter, who later on went to write his sole opera "What Next?" based on a libretto by the well-known music critic Paul Griffiths who is the celebrated author of a distinguished biography of the above-mentioned composer Jean Barraque (The Sea on Fire) who, as noted, was the mentor of said Mr. Gismonti who went on to live with the Xingu of the Amazonas in the kind of a hut pictured.
That's not all of it, however. After a NY Philharmonic concert in 1943 (which featured music by Miklos Rozsa, one of the mainstays by the way of the above-mentioned Elmer Bernstein's own record label, in addition to Bernard Herrman who was heavily influenced by...Mahler [and Alban Berg]!), the owner of the Samuel Bernstein Hair Company expressed doubts that his son participating in that performance would ever be able to make money from his hobby, said son being the conductor debutant Leonard Bernstein, a notable future proponent of...Gustav Mahler, and the friend lending an ear to such paternal worries David Diamond, an American composer who too had studied in Paris with Nadia Boulanger, the teacher of the composer-instrumentalist Gismonti in question, and himself was the music teacher of Artie Shaw, a clarinetist who played jazz with...Bix Beiderbecke! (And Mozart with Leonard Bernstein, the noted...Mahler conductor.)
A little bit labyrinthine, I know, but so are all the true stories in real life, and on the face of it we seem to be nowhere OT yet.
:)
PT
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PT may be wrong, but I doubt it. He's sounding more like Henry Louis de la Grange.
(and sounding like HLDLG can certainly not be bad!)
--JH
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"Frenesi" by Artie Shaw is one my very, very favorite American tunes of any genre.
(http://www.cbc.ca/gfx/photos/shaw_artie_cp_6917903.jpg)
Here he is with Eva Gardner, when they got married in 1945.