Word: mahlers
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...nine symphonies of the late Gustav Mahler are colossal, brooding, heaven-storming, seldom-played. This week,* the Radio City Music Hall symphony began to play them all, conducted by Erno Rapee...
Last of the great line of Central European symphonists, Mahler, a Bohemian Jew, has been dead for 30 years, but among musicians his name is still good for a dogfight. In Vienna, for Nazi reasons, Gustav Mahlerstrasse has been renamed Meistersingerstrasse-rendered Gustav Meistersingerstrasse by subversive Viennese. In the U.S., Mahler partisans are organized as intensely as movie-fan clubs. One group awards a Mahler medal to outstanding torchbearers (Philadelphia's Conductor Eugene Ormandy, Boston's Sergei Koussevitzky, German Exile Bruno Walter-Mahler's disciple). Commentator at the broadcasts is Czech Author Franz Werfel, third husband...
...although harmonically Pierrot stands on the threshold of a brave new world, in spirit it takes its source from the work of Mahler. It is Post-Romantic, not as Verklarte Nacht is Post-Romantic, a jumble of Wagnerian cliches; but as Das Lied von der Erdeis Post-Romantic, lamenting a dying culture. The formal resemblance between Pierrot and Das Lied (they are both song cycles) goes deeper than mere coincidence. It links together in a fundamental way two works essentially decadent--where structural unity has been replaced by a series of separate emotional patterns, where the medium is over-refined...
Emotionally, too, Pierrot Lunaire stems from Mahler. It expresses the same bitterness and heart-sickness, the same neurotic introversion, and it strikes that note of the deliberately bizarre and macabre that is one of the surest tokens of decadent art. The only other contemporary work of art that can be compared to it in this respect is Picasso's mural Guernica. That also embodies an incredible amount of pure horror, with the total effect bordering on hysteria...
...Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 1 in D Major (Minneapolis Symphony conducted by Dimitri Mitropoulos; Columbia; 12 sides; $6.50). Composer Mahler, who died in 1911, was the last and least appreciated of the great Central European symphonists. His fledgling work, songful and ironic (in a jocular funeral march on the round Frere Jacques), gets a rousing first recording...