Word: mahlers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...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...
...Gustav Mahler is unquestionably one of the most important figures in the musical history of the last hundred years. On this fact most critics agree, but when they attempt to go beyond the fact to determine exactly wherein his greatness lies or squeeze the amorphous mass of symphonic hodge-podge that he left behind into a coherent critical straight-jacket, then there is a great variety of opinion. The Mahler cycle which is being broadcast every alternate Sunday at 12:30 by the Radio City Music Hall symphony orchestra is a very courageous and worthwhile undertaking, but the interpretations dispensed...
...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...
Brooding, world-weary, Mahler had most to say in the poignant phrases, the long farewells of his last symphony and Das Lied von der Erde (Song of the Earth, a cycle for two voices and orchestra). One of his grandiose symphonies was feelingly described by Sir Donald Francis Tovey: "A musical phantasmagoria in which all the elements that have ever been put into a symphony before are conglomerated with all the musical equivalents of a picaresque novel and a Christmas pantomime. . . . On internal evidence it was written during a holiday at Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch...