Justin Gregg: „The Other Mengelberg: Assessing Rudolf’s Personal and Professional Writings on Mahler“

In the field of Mahler studies, the name “Mengelberg” almost always refers to Willem, the conductor and early advocate of Mahler’s works, with whom Mahler developed a close personal friendship during the last decade of his life. In this lecture, however, I will explore the writings of Willem’s younger cousin, Rudolf Mengelberg (1892–1959), who moved from Germany to the Netherlands during the First World War and spent his career as an administrator of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. As a musicologist, Rudolf wrote about Mahler in numerous documents spanning his lifetime, including a 1916 essay on the contemporary world, an extensive program book for the Concertgebouw’s 1920 Mahler-Feest, a shorter 1923 biography of the composer, and a 1948 monograph on the state of music after the Second World War.

For Mengelberg, Mahler’s music takes on different cultural and political meanings across time, in parallel with ongoing changes to society during the pivotal era in which he lived. In this lecture, I will examine his published writings as well as unpublished archival sources, tracing the evolution of his views on Mahler in order to add to the increasingly complex story of Mahler’s global reception across the twentieth century.