Word: mahlers
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PARODY is at one irreverent and nostalgic; it cannot admit bitterness for it is essentially positive, calling attention to traduced ideals. When Mahler states a theme in the minor immediately after the major, or transforms a funeral march or song of anxiety into a waltz or scherzo, he is not saying, I believe, that life is little more than the distortion of the beautiful and pristine, but rather that irony is the tissue of man's life. His starkly juxtaposed Use of diatonicism and chromaticism prefigured the expressionists, especially Berg, who sought to express musically the complex of radically differentiated...
Thus one of the few antitheses which as any applicability to Mahler is his disciplined, complex response to diversity while believing in an irreducible, if ultimately unvoiceable permanency in life. The milieu of is world may be suggested by the names Eichendorff, Haupmann, Strauss, Kant, Sclegel, Mozart, the Mass, and Goethe: a weird assemblage which yielded a mind disposed to mystical and ironical visions, but always wit a resilient core of innocent he is accused of innocent simplicity. And this is almost certainly the reason e is accused of parody. As Tovey wrote...
...bitterness assaults a superfine intelligence too long, it will cause either impenetrable cynicism or childlike idealism too devout for despair. And it is at this point that we must speak of Mahler's religion, bearing in mind his statement tat "there is always the danger of an exuberance of words in such infinitely delicate and unrational matters." His religion seems to have issued from a vivifying fusion of the Christian mystery of redemption and German transcendentalism. Mahler must have felt like D.H. Lawrence, who said, "Give me mystery and let the world live again for me." His religion...
...lifetime afflicted by mockery, Mahler struggled toward the agonizing realization, perhaps attainable only through self-torture, that there is a divine harmony which dissolves strife in lucid order and makes the world intelligible. Schoenperg wrote him after heating the Second Symphony...
...assimilation of nature's pulse as his own; his personal faith which will forever remain incomprehensible to us, which means we shall never be able to fashion him in our own image; his quintessential humanistic compassion, can all be felting a moving anecdote concerning him and the aged Brahms. Mahler and Brahms were walking at Bad Ischl. They came to a bridge and stood silently gazing at the foaming mountain stream. They had been heatedly debating the future of music, and Brahms had had harsh tings to say about the younger generation of musicians. Then they stood fascinated...