R. J. Stove has a delightful article on Mahler posted at the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation:
The Mahler symphonies … get me out of here. I keep surreptitiously cheering Kingsley Amis’s verdict “Mahler lacks talent even more spectacularly than he lacks genius.” …
The leap in Mahler’s stature from near-oblivion in 1960 (when, as Britain’s Spectatornoted on January 13, “[H]is impact on the general public was roughly the equivalent of, say, [Poland’s Karol] Szymanowski today”) to deification after that date, has little or nothing to do with musical merits and almost everything to do with external considerations.
And what might these external circumstances be?
Once it became widely known that Mahler had lamented being “a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian in Germany, and a Jew in the world,” his identity-politics credentials became the aesthetic equivalent of a nuclear warhead, lacking only homosexuality to complete his posthumous triumph.
With the exception of a few musicians enthralled with the challenge of playing his music, the people who love Mahler love him because of who he is, not because they enjoy listening to his music.
Mahler has been the subject of TOO articles by E. R. E. Knutsson and Elizabeth Whitcombe. Knutsson described the Jewishness of Mahler’s music in the context of the fin de siècle cultural scene of Vienna: “It has been arguedthat Mahler’s music has links back to the Hasidic music of Eastern European ghettos of the eighteenth century in which dance music is deployed as a remedy to misery.” An anti-Jewish critic at the complained, “What I find so utterly repellent about Mahler’s music is the pronounced Jewishness of its underlying character. … It is abhorrent to me because it speaks Yiddish. In other words it speaks the language of German music but with an accent, with the intonation and above all with the gestures of the Easterner, the all-too-Eastern Jew.”
Whitcombe links Mahler to T. W. Adorno: “Adorno claimed that the bourgeois musical world was repressing Mahler’s work because Mahler shunned ‘moderate peacefulness.’ In Adorno’s words: ‘The genuine significance of Mahler that can be discovered for today lies in the very violence with which he broke out of the same musical space that today wants to forget him’ (Mahler Today,” 1930).”
Stove’s comment does not get into the details of how Mahler became so important. I suspect that an argument can be made that Mahler’s incredible success since the 1960s has to do with ethnic networking and with peculiarly Jewish attitudes toward culture. The topic deserves a full treatment.
Mahler’s visibility these days is truly phenomenal. Leon Botstein labels Mahler “the most visible figure from the high-art classical music tradition since Mozart.” Whereas in the 1930s Adorno complained that Mahler was on the verge of being forgotten, by the 1960s the intellectual landscape had changed dramatically, bringing to the fore the intellectual movements discussed in The Culture of Critique, including Adorno’s Frankfurt School. By several accounts, the two most important advocates of Mahler during the 1960s were Adorno and conductor Leonard Bernstein. Adorno’s campaign on behalf of Mahler did not bear fruit until his influential 1960 book Mahler: A Musical Physiognamy. An historian notes, “The effect [of Adorno’s book] on the cultivated, on many musicologists, on composers, has been immense.” The Culture of Critique shows that Adorno had a strong Jewish identity and a hostility toward traditional Western culture (viewed as inevitably leading to fascism and anti-Semitism) that colored all of his writing. In his view, Mahler was attractive because he was the antithesis of the traditional muscial culture of the West. (The same can be said of Adorno’s attempt to promote Arnold Schoenberg; see TOO’s Knutsson and Whitcombe.) Re Bernstein, Botstein notes that “Bernstein was Mahler’s most prodigious advocate in the seminal 1960s…. Bernstein implicitly set Mahler’s ambivalence to his fate as a Jew alongside his own proud assertion of Jewish identity and faith.”
The result was that Mahler has become a sainted icon of the new culture — another example of Jewish genius. Even if no one really enjoys listening to his music.
Facing the Future as a Minority
Was the Immigration Act of 1924 Illiberal?
Like Stravinsky, Mahler and so many others need to be given the oppurtunity to redeem themselves posthumously. The dissonance needs to be harmonized. Someone here should create a blog called “The Song of the Earth” — when you do, shoot me a link. :)
susserstien wrote that lebowitz says that Mahler is the greatest musical genius – just like Einstein is the greatest scientist, and Gehry the greatest architect bellow the greatest writer (easily surpassing the anti semtic shakespeare and dickens)…
yeah, same old same old..
Identity politics plays a role, but Mahler is simply the highest-class example of a more general phenomenon: music [and books, and buildings, etc.] thought highly of simply because “the Nazis tried to stamp it out.” Ipso facto, must be good.
In fact, everyone really hates what the Nazis hated [they were after all a mass movement, ja?]. Modernist building? Jazz? People who would never listen to Bix Biederbecke go into swoons over Ute Lemper singing “decadent” cabaret songs {“Divine decadence!” — Sally Bowles]. Decca/London marketed a whole series labeled “Entartete Musik” — I don’t know how many NPR-types got past the first offering, the “opera” Jonny Spielt Auf” after they saw the booklet and discovered it was really a bunch of Germans prancing around in blackface; “The Nazis hated it because they thought it was jazz, but we hate it because it’s a minstrel show!”
Contrary-wise, there’s a whole slew of composers and conductors forgotten now due to their too, too Aryan nature. Mengelberg, Pfitzner, etc. I recently picked up a cheap used copy of Franz Schmidt’s Book of Seven Seals from 1939, since it apparently was the model for one of the fictional compositions in Mann’s Doktor Faustus. Schmidt simply ignored Schoeberg’s self-interested nonsense about “the end of tonality” and sailed on. Parts of it struck me as very Mahler-ish, but, in terms of this post, “without the Yiddish accent.”
Mahler – The Conversion scene:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tYcdInx5LnM
Mahler may well benefit from Jewish networking and promotion, but that alone does not explain his status today. What does? The fact that Mahler really was a great composer. And if his music really were not great, then he would enjoy no greater status than Schoenberg, Berg, Bloch, Zemlinsky, Glass, Reich, Nyman, Meyerbeer, Halevy, and a host of other Jewish composers, all of whom have the same ethnic advantages as Mahler but who lack Mahler’s musical talent.
Thanks for this post. I thought that I just didn’t really “get” Mahler, unable to realize the emperor was naked.
@Greg Johnson: But the same is true of people like Einstein, Levi-Strauss, John von Neumann, etc. There were other Jews who could have filled the role of “greatest genius the world has ever known”, but their establishment had to settle on one likely candidate.
I should think that a criterion of being a great composer is that classical music fans actually like to listen to him. If Stove is correct, then people don’t actually like to listen to Mahler. If he is wrong, then I can accept that Mahler is a great composer. I have a Mahler CD given to me by a Mahler enthusiast, but couldn’t get into it. And I notice that the classical music station I listen to quite a bit (KUSC in LA) has never, so far as I recall, played Mahler. They are listener-supported. They do play Copland and Gershwin — both much more listenable IMO. Kevin M
@Greg Johnson again: There’s a whole book by Cudihy, which I have not yet read, about this phenomenon of the manufacture of Jewish “geniuses” and the motives behind it.
It seems to me that they have some sort of project or goal of replacing every giant of classical Western civilization with one of their own. Newton has been replaced by Einstein, Gauss by von Neumann. Now I notice they are claiming that Paul Erdos has the “greatest number of publications in the history of mathematics”. The significance of this claim is that, previously, this was the laurel of Leonard Euler, the great 18th century Swiss mathematician, considered by some the greatest mathematician of all time. I think the comparison is ludicrous, since many of Erdos’s publications were collaborations, while Euler was lone titan working in relative isolation, but the general public will never realize this, of course.
In the next century, I wouldn’t be surprised if we see fevered arguments that Stephen Jay Gould is really greater than Darwin.
Diversity is death:
“Among the idiosyncrasies of Xalisco dealers is that they generally do not sell to African Americans or Latinos. Instead, they have focused on middle- and working-class whites, believing them to be a safer and more profitable clientele, according to narcotics investigators and former dealers. “They’re going to move to a city with many young white people,” Chavez said. “That’s who uses their drug and that’s who they’re not afraid of.”"
Immigrants from an obscure corner of Mexico are changing heroin use in many parts of America.
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-me-blacktar14-2010feb14,0,2111153,print.story
Vienna was the last stop before Asia in Mahler’s day. How many times had the Moslems been stopped at the gates of Vienna, or on the Hungarian plain?
I played a little Mahler last night to refresh my memory, and I couldn’t help, but, think of the Berlin to Baghdad Railroad that played such a big part in pre-WWI politics. Mahler was almost a musical trip along that mythical, and now abandonded route.
Does anyone know the name of the Near Eastern musical theme that was used by an American cigarette company as backgroung music for a radio show & advertisments? Anyone have a clip of it? It has definite Semite origins.
Well, Tom Watson, what would you suggest as the best, most accessible composition by Mahler? I am not biased against him. Even Hitler loved Mahler! Hitler reportedly said, after seeing Mahler conduct a Wagner opera: “There are some Jews, such as Herr Mahler, whom I can definitely admire.”
Julian Johnson (Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies, Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 2009) also emphasizes the marketing strategies promoting Mahler as a Jewish cultural icon in the post-WWII moral economy.
Talia Pecker Berio has suggested that irony (a prominent element in Mahler’s music) has been a hallmark of Jewishness in the arts. The capacity to hold together contradictory attributes, she suggests, is a Jewish trait, one manifest in Mahler in the coexistence of pathos/banality, sentimentality/irony, Wagnerian harmony/Viennese dances. She relates Mahler’s self-conscious borrowing of materials (i.e. “bricolage”) to his Jewish background (cf. Johnson 2009, 259).
Even if there’s no accounting for taste, Mahler is obviously more of a transitional figure than an ingenious innovator in the history of Western music.
The late Humphrey Ireland aka Wilmot Robertson wrote a devastating critique of Mahler 30 years or so ago. I just find Mahler discordant, but then again I’m not Jewish.
@ Geiseric
“Transitional” is a well chosen word. GM was a very palatable step down the road to an extreme rejection of the Western musical heritage. Schoenberg pushed the envelop that much further.
Mahler often makes use of more traditional musical elements interspersed with the occasional “ironic” (or “absurd”) embellishment. It’s not ingenious, it’s gimmicky.
Schoenberg pushed gimmickry to new lows. Taking anything to the extreme irrespective of it’s relation to its audience is not genius- it’s a very cheap form of sensationalism. AS’s musical sensationalism was just a form political protest. And one that he eventually had to abandon.
Perhaps the word that Berio is searching for is not “irony” but “mockery”- the sour grapes of a child staring in at a party he can’t be a part of.
Thanks especially for the Johnson reference.
@ Finrod
How about Mahler’s Symphony No. 1. Mahler’s stuff is all over the place for free just Google Mahler. LOL.
@ Shiva
How could you capture a Semite sound without being discordant. Let’s say you wanted to musically portray the Balkans, Turkey, Syria the Levant in the 1880′s, how else would you do it without using Semite sounds?
It is no secret that Mahler was dreadful. They even made fun of him on the sitcom Frasier:
Niles: “… Or here, where I sit Sunday mornings playing Mahler while Maris dabs at her watercolors?”
Frasier: “But you hate Mahler.”
Niles: “Besides Maris, who doesn’t?”
http://74.125.113.132/search?q=cache:BOMQJt6M7asJ:www.wcfcourier.com/lifestyles/article_e1c61592-cb0e-11de-ab9c-001cc4c03286.html+mahler+frasier+niles&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us
@Evo:
You’re right about the Mahler-Schoenberg connection. Perhaps Mahler also was transitional in the sense that he symbolizes the transition from art (emphasizing uniqueness/originality) to fashion (resirculation and “bricolage”)?
I have a feeling that many of Mahler’s critics here have never listened to him.
My introduction to Mahler was his short song cycle “Songs of a Wayfarer,” which turns out to be the best introduction. It also contains some of the elements that were incorporated into the first two symphonies. Check out these videos:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qU-g6DeFMm0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKtRombx5DM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jPC6zw13pSk
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JogLZslmoEI
Mahler’s songs from “Des Knaben Wunderhorn” are also wonderful.
Of the symphonies, number 4 is probably the most immediately likable. Unfortunately the only YouTube video is with Leonard Bernstein, who is repulsive to watch.
Symphonies 1 and 2 are my favorites, along with 6. I would recommend the following videos of their first movements:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIweGXA-zF0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGyvl9McMGs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7c5SLbRkTxg
Symphonies 3 and 8 are my least favorite, and I would not recommend you start there or with 5, 7 and 9.
Mahler’s ethnically Jewish defenders have a hard time dealing with his conversion to Christianity, which they prefer to see as insincere. (“Mahler was a good Jew. He was just being insincere for the sake of upward mobility.”) They tend to interpret the elements of parody of popular music forms as Jewish alienation and irony, whereas the truth is closer to the Christian notion of the vanities of the world. Mahler’s symphony #2, “Resurrection,” is certainly not ironic. It is a beautiful expression of the Christian worldview. I do not accept that worldview, but I can certainly understand Mahler’s preference for Christianity over Judaism.
Mahler’s music has a certain affinity with Wittgenstein’s philosophy. It is “decadent” in the sense that it is “skeletal”, it radiates fatigue, exhaustion. Those who enjoy that kind of music will probably benefit more from listening to Richard Strauss (his melancholic “Vier letzte Lieder,” for instance).
One of the conceits of anti-Wagnerians is the idea that they can draw a line from Wagner to Schoenberg’s serialism, then convict Wagner of being a slippery slope to musical nihilism.
It is just a post hoc fallacy. The fact that Schoenberg started out composing derivative Wagnerian late Romantic music before he invented serialism does not imply some sort of organic development.
Serialism is a brutal interruption of the ugly and arbitrary into music. Looking for antecedents and development is just an attempt to spread the blame.
The same “transitional” conceit is being trotted out here with Mahler. It is just rubbish. If Mahler had lived to his seventies, he never would have descended into serialism. Its arbitrariness and aesthetic vacuousness would have horrified him even more than jazz.
This whole discussion is so abstract, and so driven by the lowest prejudice, that the participants might as well all be deaf.
GJ: Mahler lived long enough to know Schoenberg personally as well as the latter’s atonal music.
Mahler’s music is horribly ugly trash. However, by all accounts he was an excellent conductor. Brahms praised his conducting (particularly of Mozart) and they knew each other. Re Schoenberg: jews often cite the story of Mahler’s presenting Brahms with an early (tonal) Schoenberg composition which Brahms approved. This may be a lie, or maybe not. It is (or was) certainly useful for propaganda purposes. On the same line: Schoenberg later wrote an article attempting to show that his atonal system was logically inspired by the music of Brahms! Good with words, he was; but with notes, not so much.
Re Wagner and chromaticism: many non-Jews held the idea that the disintegration of tonality started with Wagner. Rachmaninoff did (but he also claimed Rimsky-Korsakov, a later composer, started it).
It’s true music can be written and performed with a Jewish accent. A startingly though of course subjective example is Arthur Rubinstein’s stereo recording of Chopin’s First Ballade. Compare it with any other performance….remarkable.
Back to Mahler: another advocate of his music was the Jewish conductor Bruno Walter, who was Mahler’s assistant. He left some particularly authentic recordings.
I am interested to know the cite for the Hitler quote about Mahler. Mahler died in May 1911; was Hitler referring to his music or his conducting? Hitler was more of a Bruckner man for music.
Finally, regarding Finrod’s comment — “It seems to me that they have some sort of project or goal of replacing every giant of classical Western civilization with one of their own” — it seems quite true. The most recent Time/Life series of classical music had peculiar cover art: portraits of the composers in which their features were distorted (without caricature) into Jewish features, including Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Chopin, Schumann, Schubert, et al. This recalls the homosexual campaign to claim every major historical figures for their own, e.g., Julius Caesar, Lincoln, and others. Everybody is Jewish! Everybody is gay!
The latter urge to remake history in the image of one’s ethnic group was long parodied in regard to Germans, the best saw being some German’s saying, “Shakespeare is much better in the original German.”
It is most pleasant to have read Greg Johnson’s input. Sure, he’s promoted because of ethnic nepotism, but don’t blame Mahler for that and don’t use that as an issue to obfuscate his talent. I think the majority of people here are “Jewing” down Mahler without a modicum of knowledge concerning classical music.
Although I’m unfamiliar with his lieder or song cycle, I’m a big fan of his first symphony: the “Titan”. It’s a powerful, expansive, and attractive work. Yes, there is a march movement that is very klezmer-ish. I don’t blame him for that. Indeed, if I were a composer (wish that I were!) I would infuse Iranian tunes (at times similar to klezmer) into some of my compositions, as I am Iranian.
Here’s an example of “Baba Karam”: a hugely popular Jewish-like Iranian piece:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMUZoAOa-Fo
Go ahead and watch this too:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KezqcUgyGo4&feature=related
You’ll be thinking that you’re watching Hasidim! It’s unctuous and fatuous.
Ali
“At the fin de siècle, Beethoven’s work became a battleground in which Mahler, Heinrich Schenker, and Arnold Schoenberg all played particular roles. The post-Debussy anti-Beethoven sensibility became cloaked in an antiromantic aesthetic skepticism and, after Debussy’s death, in a novel neoclassicism (particularly through Stravinsky). … Although Mahler has become the twentieth century’s Beethoven, the contrasts are as instructive as the surface similarities. The Beethoven idealized and popularized initially in the mid-nineteenth century by the generation of Liszt and Schumann was a heroic figure. By the fin de siècle and well into the early twentieth century, the incarnation of Beethoven as hero had shifted away from the image of the romantic hero as artist to that of defiant egalitarian revolutionary hero, a trajectory sustained by the increasing popularity of the middle-period works and the revival of his late quartets and last piano sonatas. … [Mahler] was, after all, in manner, gait, and habits appropriately intense and neurotic. Neither his music nor his personality qualified him for a romantic, larger-than-life, triumphant, or defiant hero status. The legend of Beethoven’s death included a final shaking of his fist against the heavens; Mahler’s passing was seen as that of a forlorn and isolated invalid. This image of Mahler as the emblematic artist of modernity … also coincided with a post-World War II romanticization of the acculturated European Jewish cosmopolitan intellectual and artist.” (Leon Botstein in Karen Painter (ed.), Mahler and his World [available online]).
For several weeks, I’ve believed that I was detecting a major effort by several classical music stations to push Jewish musicians to the forefront. Several years ago, I had already been wondering if there was a quota system at work, something on the order of a Jewish composer every hour. At this time, that quota has conspicuously increased.
Revealing myself as a “Jew-obsessed” “Judeophobe,” I took a turn for the worse when Boston’s WGBH bought neighboring WCRB, which was still all classical, without the Jewish propaganda and all that jazz. The decline was noticeable from the very first day.
Searching for a new station (WCPE had become unreliable, too, except for Sunday Morning’s Great Sacred Music), I found myself at the station I’d listened to throughout my childhood and young adulthood many years ago: New York’s WQXR–and when I started listening over the Internet, I thought, Wow!, this is great–not only are they playing traditionally great classical music, but they’re playing the best of the best recordings.
But I had just hit a great day and time slot. Over the next couple of weeks, I became obsessive, I admit it. Every single artist whose name I didn’t recognize and music I didn’t like, I looked up. Sure enough–the majority were Jews, many minor composers of few works. Of those that weren’t Jewish, the majority were French. I saw a clear pattern of words and associations: birds of a feather flocked together as teacher/pupil, friends, mentors. The majority shared a preference for “minimalism,” modernity, dissonance.
I also think I’ve seen that when a German classic is performed, the conductor and performers are Jews, and that one or two Jewish pieces follow. I don’t think I’m exaggerating when I say that the portion of each hour given over to Jewish composers has doubled or tripled. As a sidenote, I came across one biography in which it was reported that “??” had cleverly included a piece in the concert program written by “?Jewish composer?” which had guaranteed that the town’s Jewish community would attend.
We’re probably all familiar with the live performance fact of life, that there’s always a clunker in the lineup. A Chopin birthday concert this week includes Bartok and Stravinsky. I had always thought of this as forcing us to take their schlock along with the good. I wonder if the music-loving Jewish community would refuse to attend if composer, conductor, and soloists were all non-Jews.
Geiseric: Mahler lived long enough to know Schoenberg personally as well as the latter’s atonal music.
And?
… and there’s no indication that he rejected atonality. On the contrary, he was one of Schoenberg’s benefactors (cf. your contrafactual speculations about Mahler’s “posthumous” rejection of serialism).
Btw, your hagiographic portrait of Mahler as a Christian conservative does not fit very well with his famous dictum that tradition is “Schlamperei”.
Well, having listened to Mahler’s music, I find no sign that he embraced atonality.
Beyond that, the biographical data indicate that Mahler, like Richard Strauss, praised Schoenberg based on his early late Romantic works. But Mahler found the atonal music unintelligible. He continued to be Schoenberg’s friend, but he worried that he had no future as a composer.
And wasn’t the thesis that he was somehow a “transitional” figure to Schoenberg?
I have an idea. I will go back to listening to music and leave you all to writing about it.
@ Geiseric
RE Mahler symbolizing the transition from art (emphasizing uniqueness/originality) to fashion (resirculation and “bricolage”)?
Yes maybe- or Mahler symbolizes the transition from art to what Kant called “charming”- things that excite underdeveloped tastes but are a poor substitute for real beauty.
A few commenters above bring up Einstein.
Special Relativity was worked out in its entirety by French mathematician Henri Poincaré before Einstein published on the subject. Poincaré took around fifteen years or more of deep thinking to do this, building especially on a foundation laid by groundbreaking Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz. Einstein was a johnny-come-lately to all of this. A book-length monograph by Russian physicist A. A. Logunov published in 2004 goes into lots of technical detail:
http://arxiv.org/PS_cache/physics/pdf/0408/0408077v4.pdf .
Einstein was responsible for several profound triumphs in physics, including General Relativity. But Special Relativity was Poincaré’s. One reason Einstein got all the credit may have been his fame that came with Eddington’s verification of General Relativity after World War I: journalists and others, unable to understand where one left off and the other began, tended to lump both Relativities together and attribute both to Einstein.
@GJ: The fact that Mahler’s music itself is not atonal, does not imply that he rejected Schoenberg’s atonality per se (as you suggested). Do you have a source corroborating your assertion that Mahler “praised Schoenberg based on his early late Romantic works,” and that he “found the atonal music unintelligible”?
The thesis that Mahler was a transitional figure to Schoenberg (from tonal irony to atonality) is a mainstream one in contemporary historiography. If you want to challenge that, you’d better start coming up with some solid counter-arguments.
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Excuse, but this outrageous. Mahler rightfully deserves a place among the greatest composers of the late 19th century. Who says otherwise doesnt know anything about music.
Except from an OD of moral and emotional indignation from the Mahler lobby here, any attempts of rational argumentation have so far been strikingly absent.
It is ridiculous to condemn Mahler because he may have included foreign elements in his compositions. After all, Brahms incorporated gypsy music and Mozart integrated Turkish melodies into several pieces, including the opera, “The Abduction from the Seraglio.”
Incidentally, Mahler’s song cycle, “Das Lied von der Erde,” is a most sublime work.
Fine, Greg. Go kvell to Gustav while you plot the pinking of WN. I will be listening to Beethoven quartets tonight.
@Eva: Nobody here condemns Mahler. His Jewishness (according to mainstream historiography) constitutes a major element/leitmotif in his compositions. Mozart and Brahms did not identify with Turkish or Gypsy music. You’re emphasizing exceptions to the rule, thus committing the so-called continuum fallacy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuum_fallacy
Most excellent thread…KM certainly lit the fuse. As for as Hitler “liking” Mahler’s music….not quite. Somewhere in Goebbel’s DIARIES he recounts a conversation he had with AH about Mahler’s symphonies. Both admitted the music to be “formidable”, “something to be reckoned with”, and on like that. I also find some of Mahler’s symphonies to be formidable. #1 is a solid, late 19th century Germanic work…and that “sickly”, “klezmer-like” 3rd movement is actually a vicious parody of the French “Frere Jacques”. Mahler not only tried to be an Austro-German nationalist, he succeeded. At least here. Mahler’s Second – “Resurrection” – symphony is an awesome piece…I don’t care if a Jew wrote it. Great is great. True, his conversion to Christianity was a failed machination aimed at keeping his conducting job in the face of opposition from Vienna Jew-haters…but this music, somehow, came from the soul. Just turn the lights out, and listen. To Klemperer’s version. #’s 3 and 4 are dogs, but the Fifth, at least in the first two movements, scales the heights again. #6 I don’t know what to make of; #7 is a vast and fairly effective nocturne; #8 is a mostly an unsuccessful effort to re-attain the heights he achieved in the Second; and #9 is a turgid snoozer. What to say about Mahler overall? Certainly not the greatest symphonist, maybe not even one of the greats. Among the Romantics, I’d rate Beethovan, Brahms, Sibelius, Vaughn Williams, Bax, Rachmaninoff, and a few others much higher. Insofar as Mahler is currently rated as one of the “Greats” by the pointyheads, well, that indeed is the Jewish Connection.
Kevin,
Well, there may be those who like Mahler because he is jewish. But there are others like myself who like Mahler’s music. I don’t see how you can like Bruckner and Wagner, but not Mahler. Do you like Richard Strauss–his music is the most like Mahler’s. I don’t hear any jewishness in his music. I hear harmonies that are from bohemia (czech) where he was born. (hmmm.. I recall some other fellow was born in that are of the world as well.)
Maybe those who don’t like Mahler, don’t like him because he is jewish.
I can’t say anything about Mahler because I’ve never heard any of his music. Jazz certainly sucks though. Other than a couple of Chuck Mangione songs, I can’t think of any Jazz I like.
After reading this article I took the time to listen to Mahler’s 1st and some of the Songs of the Wayfarer.
A striking feeling of rhythmic disjointedness. There are little islands of melody rising morosely from a dark sea; half hearted launches that dissipate into limbo. This is driven by a powerful, integral hesitancy; he’s not really sure what to do. Like many 2nd rate professional composers he combines trite melodies with excellent orchestration. There are some great moments but they’re erratic, scattered flashes of brilliance. They do not come together in a whole.
I then listened to a variety of classics such as Brahm’s Alto Rhapsody, Beethoven’s 5th piano concerto, Liszt Hungarian Waltzes.
I finished up with Chopin’s 1st Piano Concerto. Despite the weak orchestration it’s far above Mahler’s symphonies, both melodically and rhythmically.