Word: mahler
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...front pages the next day, and ever since he has been one of the most prominent figures on the American musical scene. Familiar to millions from his lectures and performances on television, renowned as the composer of West Side Story, hailed as a formidable interpreter of Beethoven and Mahler, Bernstein may be the most protean talent and the most celebrated conductor America has yet produced...
Johannes Brahms deserves special mention as a Romantic who continued the symphonic tradition of Beethoven. Other Romantic symphonists include Bruckner and Mahler, who both wrote works of great beauty and very great length. Richard Strauss and Richard Wagner are other well-known composers of about the same time period...
Cellist Yo Yo Ma, at the ripe old age of thirty-some-odd years, is already considered one of the greats of the century. Leonard Bernstein, an acclaimed Mahler conductor, recently inaugurated a cycle of that composer's symphonies. Conductor Andre Previn's Rachmaninoff, it is widely said, is the most sumptuous and melancholy. And the list goes...
Late in the century the flood of European immigrants for the first time brought the standard orchestral and instrumental repertoire to American ears. When Austrian composer and conductor Gustav Mahler came to New York to head the Metropolitan Opera, he found a musical public "in contrast to 'our people' in Vienna...-- unsophisticated, hungry for novelty, and in the highest degree eager to learn...
Soon afterward, Toscanini settled in New York and robbed Mahler of his pre-eminence. More than that, Horowitz argues, Toscanini contributed to the historical circumstances that deprived America the chance of developing a vibrant, unfossilized musical culture...