Word: mahlers
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...ONLY when speaking of great manifold spirit such as Gustav Mahler, Whose preoccupations so forcefully resonate through our own anxieties and reflections, that the music reviewer feels other than epiphenomenal. Only ten does the luckless effort of describing music with words seem somehow more than a vain habiliment of inevitable failure, more than the prose effulgence Reuben Brower meant when he said that "belief in nonsense depends only on suggestive repetition." Perhaps just a half dozen years ago most of us had never heard a note of Mahler's music; I remember my music teacher telling me at age fifteen...
...prelapsarian receptivity was precious because it removed us from the somewhat distasteful contemporary situation with Mahler. America, in her inimitable megalomania, most recently exhibited for the world's amusement when man's (Americans) first sentence on the moon included the inevitable word "giant," fancies se as rediscovered Mahler, where in fact she only reestablished her own tanuous appreciation of great music. The best biography was written in 1913, two years after his death; the finest single essay was written in 1939 by the excellent English critic Donald Tovey; and all of the great Mahler conductors are either dead, such...
...MAHLER is always referred to as a post-romantic composer, which provides a beneficial point of departures but constantly lead to distortions. The traditional image of this period, which corresponded almost exactly wit his lifetime (1860-1911), is of a lavishly talented collection of artists, aesthetically stranded in the shadows of their majestic predecessors-especially Beethoven and Wagner-struggling miserably with their grandiose inheritance but succeeding only in repeating the great men's first thoughts, and eventually making a cult of lamentation out of their own shortcomings. Thomas Mann described this period of apparent artistic desperation and extravagance...
...MAHLER comprehended life and therefore his music as spiritual dramaturgy. His genius resides in the incorporation of every conceivable human mood and impulse, short of mordancy, into an art of the highest technical integrity. Anguish and exultation resonate with equal energy throughout his entire symphonic cycle. His dramatic frescoes are now disconsolate, now ebullient, momentarily morose, exploding with dance, suddenly peaceful, dreaming. The First Symphony furnishers a splendid example of his multitudinous and mercurial temperament. It is a sepulchral, reflective, affirmative, anguished sunlit work composed of Waltz, song, marc, and chorale. The earliest critics heard in it only a concertinos...
What they usually is that Mahler's music is flawed by self-parody and sentimentality. But the cry of self-parody is usually only disguised condescension, and the accusation of sentimentality is humorous in how it reveals the insular bathos of the critic. Mahler's art was really a plea for intensity, and compellingly recalls a similar plea by T.S. Eliot...