The question really isn’t why the conductor-composer Gustav Mahler had a therapy session with the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in the summer of 1910 but what took him so bloody long. Mahler’s celebrated musical output — turbulent song cycles and gargantuan symphonies — represents the ne plus ultra of Late Romanticism, and his works swirl with a neurosis as insistent as it is overpowering. By all accounts, the man was a handful himself: impassioned, ambitious, insecure, death-obsessed. Nor was he happy that his much younger wife, Alma, had recently started groping the up-and-coming architect Walter Gropius.
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The question really isn’t why the conductor-composer Gustav Mahler had a therapy session with the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, in the summer of 1910 but what took him so bloody long. Mahler’s celebrated musical output — turbulent song cycles and gargantuan symphonies — represents the ne plus ultra of Late Romanticism, and his works swirl with a neurosis as insistent as it is overpowering. By all accounts, the man was a handful himself: impassioned, ambitious, insecure, death-obsessed. Nor was he happy that his much younger wife, Alma, had recently started groping the up-and-coming architect Walter Gropius.
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