Word: artful
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...course, some people are naturally conservative; they prefer to avoid taking a position whenever possible. They just don't believe in going out on a limb when they don't know the genus of the tree. For these people, the vague generality must be junked and replaced with the artful equivocation, or the art of talking around a point...
MAHLER comprehended life and therefore his music as spiritual dramaturgy. His genius resides in the incorporation of every conceivable human mood and impulse, short of mordancy, into an art of the highest technical integrity. Anguish and exultation resonate with equal energy throughout his entire symphonic cycle. His dramatic frescoes are now disconsolate, now ebullient, momentarily morose, exploding with dance, suddenly peaceful, dreaming. The First Symphony furnishers a splendid example of his multitudinous and mercurial temperament. It is a sepulchral, reflective, affirmative, anguished sunlit work composed of Waltz, song, marc, and chorale. The earliest critics heard in it only a concertinos...
What they usually is that Mahler's music is flawed by self-parody and sentimentality. But the cry of self-parody is usually only disguised condescension, and the accusation of sentimentality is humorous in how it reveals the insular bathos of the critic. Mahler's art was really a plea for intensity, and compellingly recalls a similar plea by T.S. Eliot...
...Romantic art's goal is less to depict fixed and formal qualities tan to dynamic fluctuations, the fluid reality of Nature...
...revelation which may eventually carry him away from his cherished devices of stagecraft and the Cambridge audience which applauded its more conventional manifestations. The other is that Mayer's visions and his struggles with them are worth seeing. For the sake of the man, for the sake of his art...