Mahler Re-Composed

Photographic portraits of Natalie from the ’90’s, in the florid stage of her devotion to Gustav, show a vigorous woman in her prime. She is blue-eyed, above the average in height. The nose is prominent, the lips, like Gustav’s, thin and set. Slender and taut without an ounce of fat, with her hair high above her collared neck in a bun, or alternately cropped short and streaked with gray cultivated to disguise her age, she refuses to show us an inch of skin anywhere from chin to ankle, covered as she is in white lace and gown. (It is said that as a child she persuaded her sisters to cut their hair to avoid the chore of hair-washing and combing, to the despair of her parents.) A profile shot from perhaps the summer of 1895, when she attended Gustav as he worked on the Third, is dominated by that long jutting nose and a frilly fall or jabot, knotted at her collared throat like a kerchief and descending into a puff of white lace over her breasts, which were small, low, slight. She was thirty-seven in this picture. One senses the athlete in her stance, the bicyclist, the swimmer, the mountain climber — Gustav’s ideal sporting companion. An 1898 group shot of the Soldat-Roeger Ladies String Quartet shows Natalie as the only one of the four not in décolleté; she is, as ever, collared, wearing a pendant over her breast; her dark eyebrows are prominent and her hair, at age forty, is very dark. The violinists and the cellist appear as stylized pneumatic nymphs staring into imaginary Beethovenian streamlets of sound. Natalie, rather heavily made-up, gazes into the camera with the sort of artificial half-smile the occasion demanded. There is another group portrait, this one from 1907, more than five years after Gustav’s flash-like disappearance from her life. The ladies are portrayed with their instruments; the violinist, M. Soldat-Roeger, is now a matron in the bloom of middle age; she is all in flowers to her neck. The cellist and second violinist, younger, are new to the group; they stare moodily away. Natalie, meanwhile, is all in white, collared, with a silver broach at her neck. Her right index finger supports her bow. Again she refuses to join her colleagues in romantic group meditation; she fixes her gaze at a point to the left of the camera as though at a door that has closed forever. Her face is unsmiling and masklike. She sits ramrod straight. The lighting seems to have failed with her hair; it appears as totally gray and it is in disarray. In this rookery of professional nymphs she is the white raven, out of place, not belonging. The unsympathetic photographer has included her only grudgingly; she sits squeezed into the far left corner, the viola under her taut right arm. In contrast, an en face of 1903, only a year after Gustav had gone, gives us an intimate and vulnerable Natalie (wicked-tongued Alma wrote that she immediately took a lover after his disappearance, prompting a careless remark from Gustav: “She might have waited for a suitable period of mourning,” but then, this all might be Alma’s cruel invention). We see Natalie with that selfsame broach or pin at her collar, head slightly inclined forward to the viewer as though listening to a word or a musical chord, chest covered in her style of white lace, two slender gold pendants taking the place of that puffy fall of 1895. She has suddenly become at once older and more feminine, more wounded, more sensitive. This could be a Latin teacher, a spinster aunt or widow, a lost and forgotten lover, a lonely forty-five-year-old woman. The eyes are rimmed with dark circles. The face is symmetrical and utterly composed, masklike, lips taut in her usual half-smile; the eyes are warmly eloquent as in no other photograph of Natalie, seeming to question, to search, to implore, to testify; they look into the camera as though into the eyes of Lipiner or Mahler, or her husband, or all three, with a brimming, expectant tenderness as though eternally in wait for the answer to a question.