Word: mahlers
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...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...
...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...
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...
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...