The first the public knew of Gustav Mahler's illness was a perjurious Philharmonic press release, announcing his temporary withdrawal with "a light case of grippe". The Philharmonic, playing on under concertmaster Theodore Spiering, was urgently trying to interest the Austrian Felix Weingartner and the Englishman Henry Wood in Mahler's job. Neither took the bait and the local press quickly lost interest.

Viennese newspapers, by contrast, donned full hunting gear the moment Mahler disembarked in France. Stringers doorstepped the Chantemesse clinic, pestering all who entered and left for news of the famous patient. The Neue Freie Presse, a liberal paper, obtained daily health bulletins from Mahler's Umgebung, the people around him (presumably Alma). The details it received and published included the patient's temperature measurements and food intake, with a product-placement emphasis on Metschnikoff's Bulgarian Milk, a kind of yoghurt that had been recommended to Mahler in New York. Brand and celebrity were in the process of forming a powerful marketing coalition.

Other papers whipped up a blame game in which Alma happily pointed the finger for Mahler's collapse at those hard-headed New York ladies. Twenty-six Viennese personages led by Baron Rothschild composed a private get-well telegram to Mahler, which they duly leaked to the press. Bruno Walter, Mahler's protégé, wired a journalist that his mentor's illness was "protracted but not dangerous". Chantemesse, alert to his own prestige, dropped airy hints of a false remission. Every casual word from the clinic doorstep was reported as medical fact and then heavily masticated by well-padded columnists. 

The feeding frenzy around Mahler's sickbed was of an unprecedented indecency, the like of which was possibly not seen again in Paris until the death of Princess Diana on August 31, 1997, when many of the same conditions prevailed — the conflicting clinic reports, the hopeless fight to save a life, the frantic search for a cause, the exotic brands, the wild accusations and the self-exculpation of the mass media from any moral responsibility for fomenting public hysteria. 

Across Europe, dispatches on Mahler's condition were read around breakfast tables. Thomas Mann, holidaying on an Adriatic island, imprinted Mahler's features on Gustav von Aschenbach, the protagonist of his novella Death in Venice. Mahler's train journey to Vienna was covered as if it were a monarch who was dying, not a musician. "Journalists came to the door of the coach of every station in Germany and Austria, eager to obtain the latest bulletin," noted Alma. At Salzburg, his condition was reported "unchanged". In Vienna, editors telephoned the hospice every two hours for updates. One newspaper, the Wiener Bilder, published a prurient sketch of Mahler on his deathbed. 

The renowned dramatist Arthur Schnitzler, castigator in chief of Viennese hypocrisy, hung around the hospice grounds in search of inspiration. He ran into the essayist Hermann Bahr and the composer Alban Berg on similar missions. Voyeurs, poseurs and every kind of cultural-intellectual parasite and paparazzo converged in their hundreds, literally hundreds, every day of Mahler's dying. The Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, which once sacked Mahler as its conductor, sent a massive bouquet of flowers to his room — and an even bigger one to his funeral.