The Last Movement
Gustav Mahler is dying in 1911. Seethaler composes the final reminiscences of a man trying to be honest with himself. He’s not very old, but he is very sick. That he is a world-famous conductor and composer is insignificant. That his wife was the most beautiful woman in Vienna matters less than that he has lost her love—perhaps through his own neglect—to a soon-to-be famous architect. That Mahler is an unreliable narrator is obvious, but the reader must discern in which direction resides the truth.
Thinking he is crossing the ocean for the last time, Mahler sits alone on the frigid deck of a trans-Atlantic Ocean liner returning to Europe reflecting on his life. Not perhaps his life reported in biographies, but life as he lived it—or at least as he remembers it. What he recalls gives him little comfort. Scenes rush through his mind in a semi stream-of-consciousness jumble. What is love? What is art? What is life and death? What is important? What is eternal? Maybe only music.
Readers who persist through the confusion may form a compassionate picture of a great man of a century ago, today largely unknown outside music circles. He is feted, pampered, and his every whim catered to. But he is dying. He and they all know it. Only the cabin boy in the too-large-for-him uniform appears in front of Mahler. All others—his wife, her lover, his children, the musicians, various captains and sailors—appear only in his memories.
