Hilan Warshaw was a musician growing up, but it always felt inevitable that he would become a filmmaker.
Nowadays, he’s made a career combining both. Warshaw founded the production company Overtone Films, and regularly directs multi-camera concerts for ensembles like the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and the Cleveland Orchestra. His new film “Mahler in New York,” is playing at the Atlanta Jewish Film Festival on March 1.
Warshaw said that you don’t have to know anything about Gustav Mahler – the famed, Jewish composer who also became one of the leading conductors of his generation – to enjoy the film, which focuses on Mahler’s final years in New York City while he composed his ninth and tenth symphonies. The movie focuses on Mahler’s love for America, his struggle against antisemitism, and, primarily, his relationship with his wife, Alma. Warshaw hopes everyone experiences the film as the amazing story it is.
“I don’t think one needs to be a musician, or have a particular interest in Mahler [to like the film] – if people become a bit more interested as a result, I’ll be thrilled,” he said. “But what touched me was the trajectory he went through as a person.”
Ahead of the screening, Rough Draft Atlanta spoke to Warshaw about the making of the film. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
You went to school for conducting and since then, you’ve made a series of films about the personal lives of composers and conductors, like “Wagner’s Jews,” and this movie. I’m curious, how do you think conducting specifically pours over into being a director, or pours over into the interest of your films in general?
Hilan Warshaw: I’ve always said I think that cinema is an orchestra with more instruments. What you’re doing as a conductor is, you’re sort of figuring out how to vertically bring together all of these different forces, which complement each other, sometimes contradict each other. You’ve got the brass, you’ve got the percussion, you’ve got the strings. You didn’t write the piece – unless you’re Mahler, and you did write the piece – but you’re conducting it.
That’s exactly what film is. You have more instruments – you have the staff of dialog, you have the staff of visuals. I also think that film is a very musical craft, even when there’s no music involved. If you think about what a great composer does, one of the things they do is they set a rhythmic expectation, and then they either satisfy it or they frustrate it, but for a reason. That’s what you want to do in a film. In a Hitchcock thriller, if you have a shot of a woman entering a house, and she looks around, and there’s a shot of the doorknob for three seconds, there’s a shot of the hallway for three seconds, there’s a shot of the window for five seconds – whether you know it or not, the tempo is telling you something’s about to happen, because the tempo has changed. Something one of my conducting teachers in college made us do was, he would have us analyze the measure, the phrase lengths, of every phrase in a piece, and break it down. How many measures is it? Is it four, four, four, then six? Why? Why did it change? Those are the things you think about in film, even when you’re not dealing with the actual music and the soundtrack.
I just love bringing things together in that way. When I’m directing on a set, especially if there’s a dramatic element – actors, or in “Mahler in New York,” there are some recreations, lighting – I’m in heaven. I feel like I’m back at the podium. That’s the closest that I come to recapturing that performative sense.
For this film in particular, starting with your experience with Mahler – when do you remember hearing him for the first time, or becoming interested in him for the first time?
Warshaw: I was 14, and I was a violinist in the New York Youth Symphony. We played three times a year in Carnegie Hall, which was a trip. When I was 16, I became the apprentice conductor of the orchestra, and actually conducted the orchestra in concert, which I think is a dopamine rush I’m still coming down from. Very few things since touch that – 16, to be conducting there. First and last time, for me.
One of our pieces was Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. It just totally, I mean completely, swept me away. There’s some music that’s great to be 14 with, you know? [Laughs] The emotions are so out there. I think every teenager in that orchestra was like, “That’s me!” [Laughs] I just fell in love. That was the first time.
So that was Symphony No. 1, and this is about his later life – I think he’s composing 9 and 10 when he’s in New York. Where did the idea for this film in particular come from, and why focus on that part of his life?
Warshaw: As a documentary filmmaker who has made this, as you say, kind of a string of films about composers’ lives, my ears are always perked for a great story. And this one, I kind of walked into it, because I live in New York. I live in the Upper West Side, just a few blocks from where Mahler used to live. I’m the kind of guy who jogs in the park and listens to some of Mahler’s symphonies as he’s doing it. That was happening, and I was listening to Mahler’s ninth as I’m jogging. Maybe partly because I’m a filmmaker, I’m often thinking about how sight and sound works together. But I was looking around the park at the gaslight lampposts, this wonderful sort of capital R Romantic landscape that went so well with the music. It was autumn, so the colors of the leaves, the sunlight coming in – I was like, this music could be a soundtrack for this landscape. I grabbed an iced coffee, and I walked home, and I remember reading that Mahler had actually lived in New York.
I decided to Google what were the years of that? And it turned out that he was living in New York, living right by Central Park, when he wrote that piece. That’s when I realized, okay – I think maybe this is something I should explore. This is a story. I almost got chills when that happened, because it was like, yeah, this music goes with this landscape very well indeed!
I don’t have a huge background in this type of music – I know his name.
Warshaw: Well then, you’re the ideal audience. I never want to feel like I’m making films like this for specialists. I mean, the specialists will find it anyway. But I want it to be, hopefully, a film that anyone can watch.
There’s so much to talk about – the technical aspects of this, him being on the forefront of a lot of things musically, and also facing antisemitism in Europe, and moving to New York and having it become like a whole new world. That is all very interesting. But I think the real lynch pin of this is having Alma, his wife, do most of the narration. I was curious about that choice in particular. Because at the end of the film, there’s one historian calling her an antisemite, one saying she’s misunderstood. There’s a real interest in her as a person.
Warshaw: I love films where you’re playing with who to believe. A lot of life is that way, you know? We encounter things, we encounter people, and sometimes we only find out later on how much they should be believed. So films that honor that, I always feel like that’s a way of respecting the audience a bit.
What really interests me most of all in film, in storytelling, is relationships. I think every film I’ve made until now has really been about relationships, and that probably will continue to be the case – just the space between two human beings. Or, if you want to get dramatic, three human beings. That’s when it gets interesting! And with Mahler, I think of this film as fundamentally being a love story. It’s about two brilliant and, unfortunately I think, completely incompatible people, but who really loved each other as best they could.
Alma is a fascinating personality. She’s somebody that it’s very easy to make into a punch line, and many people have. It was very important for me to try to be as fair and as three dimensional as I could. I think especially as a filmmaker who’s male. I really wanted to, and I do, have a lot of empathy for everybody in that situation. You can certainly look at certain choices she made, and her relationship to the truth, and call it what it is. At the same time, she’s somebody who entered into a relationship where the power dynamic was completely asymmetrical. She herself was a very brilliant and ambitious person, who suddenly was swept into this vortex – by her choice, of course. I mean, no one forced her to marry him – by this brilliant, world-dominating kind of guy. I think that didn’t end well. But I do have sympathy for both of them, and I hope that comes across in the film.
It’s interesting – throughout the description of her infidelity, the whole time I was like, well of course she feels that way! And you do kind of feel for her in that sense. And his realization that he hasn’t been the kindest to her is pretty funny. And then, at the end, she says some very nasty things about Jewish people, and you’re like – Alma, stop!
Warshaw: That was also a choice on my part, not to thread that earlier in the film. Because she was antisemitic, always, honestly. Her stepfather is not really in the film, but her stepfather was a rabid Nazi who stayed behind in Germany, as she almost certainly would have herself if her third husband, Franz Werfel, had not been Jewish. She had to flee with him, and her stepfather killed himself when Hitler lost the war, because he couldn’t imagine a world in which there was no Hitler. I mean, those are the people who raised her.
But I made a decision not to introduce that [too early]. I think there’s one line where she says in her diary, in her objections to marrying Mahler, she does say he’s a Jew. But she doesn’t really dwell on it. I just thought that by hitting it too hard on the head at the beginning, that she’s an antisemite, that kind of conditions the viewer. From the beginning, we’re looking at her as kind of an it, you know? I wanted people to really experience the humanity of everybody here before we put labels on it.
I’ve made other films that really deal with the topic of antisemitism, front and center. With this one, I wanted to phase it a little so that it doesn’t take over the whole discussion.
I think it certainly makes you think about her in other ways, before that particular aspect comes up.
Warshaw: And whatever kind of antisemitism she had was a complex kind anyway, because she was obviously very drawn [to Jewish people]. I don’t know – maybe it was the lore of the forbidden. Who knows? It’s not Manichaean. It’s not simple hatred. There was something deeper going on.
Was there anything you learned about Mahler that surprised you over the course of making this film?
Warshaw: I was surprised by how, by how deeply inspired he was by America. When he came to America, he said – I think this is going to be my spiritual home. He was unbelievably optimistic, and that was very touching to me. I was also surprised by, frankly, how incorrect a lot of the received narrative about Mahler is. There’s a sense when many people speak about Mahler that he’s kind of – especially in the last symphonies at the end of his life – he’s living under the shadow of death. He knows he’s going to die, and everything is kind of nostalgic, and it’s a long farewell. Part of this might have to do with the fact that in the 1970s, there was this really successful, influential film “Death in Venice,” which was done by the Italian director [Luchino] Visconti. It’s all about a man dying in Venice, and the soundtrack is Mahler’s Symphony No. 5, the adagietto, which was one of the things that hyper charged [Mahler’s] popularity.
People started associating Mahler with a sense of “end of life” – autumnal, goodbye, goodbye, goodbye. What I realized reading the letters is right up until the end – I mean, right up until one week before he collapsed on the podium at Carnegie Hall – he is not slowing down at all.
Quite the opposite.
Warshaw: Quite the opposite! I think one of the sources of that idea of the morbid Mahler, the dying Mahler, is Alma. In her memoirs she’d written decades after, she paints him that way. She paints him as this frail, kind of sickly older man. She also has an agenda, I think, exaggerating the difference in how vibrant they were – she’s young and healthy, he’s old and decrepit. Maybe that’s a way of explaining herself a little more, or making excuses. But actually, Mahler – I mean, he was bicycling, he was swimming rivers. He was an athlete [laughs]. You don’t take on the workload he took on, conducting 64 concerts in 30 weeks, unless you’re an athlete.
So I don’t think he was dying. I don’t think he thought he was dying. I think he got a nasty cold, and he got a nasty infection before there was penicillin. But it was a sudden blow … This is a tree that was cut down – it didn’t die. And then you realize he was really very enthusiastic about America. He really thought that this was going to be a new thing for him. He could have lived another 30 years, easily.
It’s interesting, because Leonard Bernstein – who is one of the people in this world who I feel like myself and most people know a good bit about, through “West Side Story” and things like that – but he calls him a “prophet of doom” in the documentary. I wonder if that contributes a bit.
Warshaw: That completely contributes. That’s part of that reading of Mahler. It’s in the film, but I’m not sure I agree with it. I think there’s a lot of humor and a lot of lightness and a lot of wit in Mahler. You can tell he loved life. You could tell he loved love. You can tell he was a charming person. He had to be. He worked with hundreds of people.
There’s a famous Billie Eilish story about her hearing the noise of a walking signal going across the street, and being like – let me record that and use it! It’s funny to me, because Mahler essentially did the same thing with different sounds.
Warshaw: I’m so happy you mentioned that. I feel like Mahler – I personally don’t think he’s a prophet of doom, but I think he’s a prophet of our culture today, which is all about being eclectic. You grab influences from here, from there. Bruno Mars – it’s r&b, it’s Latin, some of it’s a throwback to Michael Jackson. And these are good things! We love Bruno Mars for that. We love Lady Gaga for that. In every field of culture – especially in America, I think, because ingrained in us is the sense that we’re a nation of immigrants, ultimately, for anyone who’s not descended from the original tribes who lived in North America. We are all historical newcomers in this country. So I think we love the idea of grab bag culture. And Mahler was the first composer who did that in classical music, truly to that extent. That’s the reason why they couldn’t understand him in Europe. The fact he was Jewish didn’t help, but they saw this guy and they couldn’t wrap their heads around him, because he didn’t belong to any one thing.
But in America, that’s all of us. I think that’s the point I was trying to make in the film, is he’s the prophet of the way we are all living now, and the way we are all making art now, and the way Billie Eilish wants to incorporate what she heard!