Word: mahler
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...most of Shostakovich's later music, there are traces of Beethoven, Berlioz, Rimsky-Korsakov, Mahler, moderns like Poulenc and Busoni. The Seventh Symphony has been described by those who have already heard it as a modern Russian version of Berlioz' Symphonie Fantastique. It has also been called a sound-track for a psychological documentary film on Russia today...
...fairly penetrating essay entitled "The Emotional Essence of Brahms," written by none other than Dr. Koussevitzky, which appeared in the May Atlantic, should be a telling blow on behalf of its author in our current Battle of the Conductors. Besides being, with the exception of Walter's book on Mahler, the sole piece of intelligent prose published by a major American conductor on musical history or theory for the last ten years, it reveals Boston's Bayard as a keen historical analyst with broad-based Van-Wyck-Brooksian sympathies. This may seem like the introduction of strange standards...
...transcended mere structure to have given structure its highest significance. As a matter of fact, when faced with the originality of the ideas in the Ninth and the splendor of their execution, discussions of "form" tend to become meaningless. Only in the case of such composers as Bruckner or Mahler who try to imitate the Ninth and fail through lack of sustained inspiration, do you begin to worry about form, and notice how the composer has to prop up his sagging material by orthodox sonata devices which often retard the music rather than help it. Beethoven in the Ninth, however...
...picture which the Mahler popularizers paint of a genial pantheistic pagan who has achieved complete harmony within himself is entirely false. Mahler lived in a confused time and was himself a mass of contradictory tendencies. You have in him the paradox of a composer who, in contrast to the tone-painting and theme-overlapping of Wagner and Strauss, wrote in the classical symphonic form with a sound knowledge of counter-point, yet one who was essentially homophonic in style and never attained the balance and integrated development that the classical forms imply...
Romain Rolland called Mahler "an egoist who feels with sincerity," and it is probably his unmistakable earnestness and depth of feeling rather than surface skill that will keep him from becoming a fantastic museum-piece. He was most effective in lyrical passages where his braggadocio and forced climaxes could give way to mood-painting and color. In this respect and several others he resembled Schubert. Despite his strivings for power and long-winded reiterations, he might well be called the Heine of music with a dash of Buddha thrown in, the nostalgic life-affirmer and the world-weary philosopher rolled...