Mahler: Symphony No. 10: Adagio - Part 3 of 3 (via Tokkemon)

In spite of the emotional distractions, during the summer of 1910 Mahler worked on his Tenth Symphony, completing the Adagio and drafting four more movements.^[102][103] He and Alma returned to New York in November 1910, where Mahler threw himself into a busy Philharmonic season of concerts and tours. Around Christmas 1910 he began suffering from a sore throat, which persisted. On 21 February 1911, with a temperature of 104 °F, Mahler insisted on fulfilling an engagement at Carnegie Hall, with a relatively nondescript programme. This was Mahler’s last concert.^[104] After weeks confined to bed he was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis, a disease to which sufferers from defective heart valves were particularly prone, and for which the survival rate in pre-antibiotic days was almost zero. Mahler did not give up hope; he talked of resuming the concert season, and took a keen interest when one of Alma’s compositions was sung at a public recital by the soprano Frances Alda, on 3 March.^[105] On 8 April the Mahler family and a permanent nurse left New York on board SS Amerika bound for Europe. They reached Paris ten days later, where Mahler entered a clinic at Neuilly but there was no improvement; on 11 May he was taken by train to the Lŏw sanatorium in Vienna, where he died on 18 May.^[106]

On 22 May 1911 Mahler was buried in the Grinzing cemetery, as he had requested. Alma, on doctors’ orders, was absent, but among the mourners at a relatively pomp-free funeral were Arnold Schoenberg (whose wreath described Mahler as “the holy Gustav Mahler”), Bruno Walter, Alfred Roller, and the Secessionist painter Gustav Klimt.