Natalie Bauer-Lechner

Natalie Bauer-Lechner (9 May 1858 – 8 June 1921) was an Austrian violist who is best known to musicology for having been a close and devoted friend of Gustav Mahler in the period between the end of her marriage in 1890 and the start of his to Alma Schindler in 1902. During this period, she kept a private journal which provides a unique picture of Mahler's personal, professional and creative life during and just after his thirties, including an exclusive preview of the structure, form, and content of his third symphony.

Bauer-Lechner was the eldest child of five children (4 girls and 1 boy) born to the Viennese bookshop owner Rudolf Lechner (1822-1895) and his wife Julie, née von Winiwarter (1831-1905). She was educated privately, and later studied at the Vienna Conservatory. At the Conservatoire, she met Mahler for the first time: though she had graduated in 1872 and Mahler was a student from 1875–1878, she appears to have been able to use the Conservatoire's facilities while her sister Ellen was still a student there.

Bauer-Lechner became the violist of the all-female Soldat-Röger String Quartet, whose leader was the Joachim-pupil Maria Soldat-Röger. As a trained professional musician, Bauer-Lechner grasped the technical and aesthetic content of Mahler's conversation. She noted many of his statements about music, literature, philosophy and life at some length and apparently verbatim.

In her later years, Bauer-Lechner became an outspoken feminist, and in 1918 published an article on the war and the need for female suffrage, which led to her arrest and imprisonment. Her health subsequently collapsed, and she died in poverty.

The publication history of her principal work is complicated. The source is a bulky collection of notes entitled Mahleriana, apparently deriving from some thirty diaries which no longer exist. During her life, brief extracts were published in two journals: anonymously in 'Der Merker' (April 1913), and under her own name in 'Musikblätter des Anbruch' (April 1920). Erinnerungen an Gustav Mahler was published in 1923, and represents an edited selection from the available materials—as does the later English volume Recollections of Gustav Mahler (1980).

Currently owned by Mahler-scholar Henry-Louis de La Grange, the Mahleriana manuscript is not intact: numerous pages have been torn out by unknown hands, and there is no indication of what they might have contained. During her life, Natalie Bauer-Lechner was in the habit of lending her manuscript to friends and acquaintances (E.H. Gombrich reports that his parents had it in their possession for some time), and it is presumably this practice that allowed material to be removed.

A collection of notes recording conversations with Mahler's long-standing friend Siegfried Lipiner is understood to have once existed among her papers. Its current whereabouts are unknown.

The director Beate Thalberg achieved a docudrama based on her diary: My time will come.