Word: mahlers
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Save Your Fury. Mahler's widow, now in her sixties, was a 20-year-old counterpoint student when she married the slight, 41-year-old opera conductor. His ferociousness in the orchestra pit was already a legend. By abolishing the claque and ordering latecomers toa special box, Mahler had angered performers and audiences alike. Once the musicians stubbornly refused to rehearse another note, and Mahler barked: "Gentlemen, keep your fury for the performance. Then at last we shall have [it] played as it should...
...only other Austrian of Mahler's musical stature was Richard Strauss. The Mahlers and Strausses shared a box at the opening of Strauss's opera, Feuersnot. Writes Alma Mahler: "Strauss thought of nothing but money ... the whole time he had a pencil in his hand. . . . [He] calculated his profits to the last penny." Strauss's formidable wife, Pauline, said to Mahler: "My God, for a million-well no, that's not enough-five million! And then Richard can stop manufacturing music...
...Mahler had few good words for his contemporaries. Of Puccini he said (after a performance of Tosca): "Nowadays any bungler orchestrates to perfection"; of Sibelius: "The most hackneyed clichés were served up with harmonizations in the 'Nordic' style"; and of Strauss: "A heap of slag...
Unlucky Nine. In 1907 Mahler came to New York to conduct the Metropolitan Opera. With such great singers as Enrico Caruso, Marcella Sembrich, Geraldine Farrar, Feodor Chaliapin and Emma Fames he conducted Beethoven's Fidelia, Mozart's Marriage of Figaro and the Met's first performance of Smetana's Bartered Bride...
...superstitious mystic, Mahler brooded over Beethoven and Bruckner, each of whom died after finishing his ninth symphony. When Mahler had written eight, he tried to dodge the unlucky number nine by titling his greatest symphonic work Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth...