Word: mahler
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...last of the great middle European giants of the symphony was Gustav Mahler, a Bohemian Jew who lived most of his life in Vienna. Like Richard Wagner, whom he worshipped musically, Mahler was a complicated introvert. He made his living by conducting other men's operas. His own, seldom-played, gargantuan (90-minute) scores are full of funeral marches, Dante-like infernos and heavenly serenities...
...Mahler's musical pageants were not easy either for players or listeners. Though they sometimes required large choruses and offstage sound effects, no one but Mahler was ever quite sure what was going on. Mahler offered no-program notes. He once explained a particularly apocalyptic passage to his orchestra: "Here, gentlemen, is where the cow walks across the field...
Last week Mahler's widow, now living in Beverly Hills, Calif., published a biography of her husband (Gustav Mahler, Memories and Letters; Viking, $5). She first wrote her book seven years ago, published it in Amsterdam in 1940. Shortly afterwards she escaped to the U.S. with her third husband, Austrian Novelist Franz (Song of Bernadette) Werfelt† whom she met in 1917 when he was in the Czech army, married in 1918. Like many another Mahler partisan, Alma Mahler admitted that she wasn't always able to understand Mahler's music...
...York she heard her first husband's symphonies-banned by the Nazis -conducted by Viennese alumni like Bruno Walter, who is most responsible for Mahler's U.S. popularity. He has played Mahler every season for 23 years. Said he last week: "[Mahler] is gradually coming into his own in American life. In the fall I will go to London, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Zurich and I will play Mahler. I will go on with Mahler as long as God will permit...
While at Juilliard, she won the 1944 Naumburg Foundation competition, was given a free Town Hall debut last March. Conductor Fritz Reiner heard her later, in a private recital, got her to record De Falla's El Amor Brujo and Gustav Mahler's symphonic song, Eines Fahrenden Gesellen. It was actually Reiner who gave Carol her start, but Serge Koussevitzky's enthusiastic ' helping hand last week assured her future...