GUSTAV MAHLER and DOBBIACO/TOBLACH

NATURE, SOUND AND INSPIRATION

Three disasters befell Mahler during the summer of 1907. Political intrigues and antisemitism forced him to resign as Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his eldest daughter Maria died from scarlet fever and diphtheria in Maiernigg at only 5 years old, and Mahler himself was diagnosed with a congenital heart defect. "With one stroke", he wrote to his friend Bruno Walter:

After the death of the little girl, the Mahlers fled from Maiernigg, and for their summer stay they sought a different heaven in Alt Schluderbach in Südtirol, a small village near Toblach (Dobbiaco).

During his solitarywalks on the meadows of Alt Schluderbach in July 1907, Mahler meditated for a long time. A painful lovewas born in him for those places that reminded him not of his living child but of his dreamed child andrelived in his memory. The following year, the Mahlers made their usual summer stay in Alt Schluderbach,in the house that the Trenker family had and still has at the center of their "farm". Near the house, he had ahut (Hütte) built in the middle of a wood, and there the music of Das Lied von der Erde was born in 1908;later, between 1908 and 1910, the Ninth and Tenth Symphonies. Whoever visits those places today,reaches the Hütte in two steps, turns his back on the hut sacred to music and looks at the wonderful valleyof Dobbiaco-Toblach, feels in depth of what might have inspired Mahler in composing Das Lied von der Erde("The Song of the Earth"). Despite the symphonic nature of the work, Mahler refused to number it, hopingthereby to escape the “curse of the Ninth Symphony” that he believed had affected fellow-composersBeethoven, Schubert and Bruckner. However, he was unable to escape his fate, dying in 1911 and leavingthe tenth symphony incomplete. The curse of the Ninth Symphony overwhelmed him too.