RIP Elizabeth Edwards (1949-2010)—With a Gustav Mahler Connection

NEW YORK—

As someone who admittedly isn't particularly into following politics with the same zeal as I follow, say, film news, I was surprised to find myself reacting rather intensely to news of the death of former North Carolina senator John Edwards' ex-wife, Elizabeth, at the hands of a breast cancer that she had battled for about a decade.

My stronger-than-expected reaction probably has less to do with any interest in her political and personal life than with the fact that just one day before her death, she had publicly announced that she, upon hearing from doctors that further treatment of her cancer would not make a difference at this point, would stop treatment and basically accept her impending death with as much high spirits as possible. As she said in her statement:

I have found that in the simple act of living with hope, and in the daily effort to have a positive impact in the world, the days I do have are made all the more meaningful and precious. And for that I am grateful. It isn't possible to put into words the love and gratitude I feel to everyone who has and continues to support and inspire me every day. To you I simply say: you know.

This, keep in mind, was announced just one day before she passed away.

Life just isn't fair sometimes—especially Elizabeth Edwards's life, what with cancer; the death of her son Wade in 1996; and, more recently, the revelations that her husband had not only cheated on her, but fathered a child with the other woman in the process.

Now that I think about it, you know who else suffered such traumas during his lifetime?

That's right: Gustav Mahler did. His firstborn daughter, Maria Anna, died from diphtheria at the mere age of 5 in 1907; soon afterward, he discovered he had an incurable, if not fatal, heart defect; and he then found out that his wife, Alma, was cheating on him (perhaps out of resentment borne out of her husband's banning her from composing her own music so she could focus on child-rearing). One of the major legends surrounding Mahler's Sixth Symphony is that the three hammer blows in its epic finale foretold some of these personal tragedies, even as it was written during a relatively joyful time in his life.

And yet, Mahler endured through these tribulations and went on to produce such later masterpieces as Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth Symphony, works in which you can sense his struggles in just about every note. It seems that Elizabeth Edwards found her own way of working through her own tragedies in public: by advising her husband on his senatorial and presidential campaigns; by making health-care reform a great mission of hers (one that eventually bore fruit last year); and basically just by staying politically engaged and active after quitting law in the wake of her son's death. She may have laid bare her private pain on a public stage, but she nevertheless proved to be an inspiration to many with her passion and intelligence.

And now she's gone. Just like that.

Newsweek's Jonathan Alter, by the way, has this touching remembrance of Elizabeth Edwards over at The Daily Beast.

Happy 150th Birthday, Gustav Mahler!

EAST BRUNSWICK, N.J.—On this day in 1860, the great Austrian composer Gustav Mahler was born.

Mahler's music holds a very special place in my heart, for reasons that are as much about nostalgia as about the extraordinarily rich, ambitious and influential music he gave the world. Throughout my high-school years, I pretty much couldn't stop listening to his symphonies, finding in these generally large-scale musical epics entire universes that spanned the entire range of human experience, from the heights of ecstasy to the depths of despair. In short, it was music that spoke directly to my neurotic self. It still does.

For my money, the most representative of Mahler's music lies in one of his less popular symphonies: the Sixth, which I actually wrote about at length at The House Next Door here. The piece is often dubbed "Tragic," and certainly the work's despairing conclusion bears out its unofficial subtitle—but the Sixth is far more than relentless doom and gloom. It encompasses extremes of sonority and emotion, touching on sometimes straight-up bizarre notes of bitter irony and pastoral spirituality in its march to a sonic scaffold. Stylistically, too, it represents a clash between the late Romanticism of his early music and the modernist bent of much of his later work. (Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and other Second Viennese School composers in the first half of the 20th century all publicly expressed admiration for the work, with Berg even going so far as to proclaim it "the only Sixth, despite [Beethoven's] Pastorale.")

If you want to experience Mahler at arguably his most unhinged, his Sixth Symphony fits the bill (though his even more forbidding Seventh runs it close). But really, all of his works are monuments of visionary imagination and passion for life in all of its splendor and gloom. They're truly something to behold and treasure—now more than ever.

For a taste, here is Leonard Bernstein—one of the most famous interpreters of Mahler's music, instrumental as he was in bringing them, especially lesser known works like the Sixth, wider exposure and popularity in the 1960s—conducting the Vienna Philharmonic in the first movement of the Sixth in this filmed performance, shot by director Humphrey Burton in 1976 (and available on DVD here):





P.S. Fans of Shutter Island—of which I am one—might be interested to know, if you don't already, that the piece of music Max von Sydow's Dr. Naehring is listening to upon his introduction in the story is from Mahler's Quartet for Piano and Strings in A minor—his only known chamber work, written while in his mid-teens in 1876. Oh that Martin Scorsese, always having a knack for digging up these pieces of music and using them immaculately in his films!