Gustav Mahler—The Sadness of Horns

I can never hear the stirring of the brasses in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony without being overcome by the pure sadness of their voices. It is not the elegant sadness of Vigny’s Dieu! que le son du Cor est triste au fond des bois. Even in Berlioz, the sensibility of French sorrow can never quite forget Provence. Sorrow, in any case, is a categorical manifestation; sadness is vagrant. And sadness never quite leaves the music of Gustav Mahler. It edges through even in the wild dance passages of the later scores. The solid peasant mind of Bruckner could not comprehend or assert what was inherent in Mahler, for Bruckner was simply building an architectonic stairway to paradise; Mahler was consciously struggling in Purgatory.

Much has been made of those biographical factors in the Mahler history which fit the cliché of the tortured composer: he was an Austrian provincial and therefore ridiculous to Vienna; he was a Jew and therefore hated by all in an atmosphere which, to Franz Kafka “smelled of blood.” But this was nonsense. Vienna smelled of blood only to those whose naive good will called for the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the destruction of European unity. Today, they would smell blood in Washington—and with as little reason.

RT

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Ralph de Toledano

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I can never hear the stirring of the brasses in Mahler’s Fifth Symphony without being overcome by the pure sadness of their voices. It is not the elegant sadness of Vigny’s Dieu! que le son du Cor est triste au fond des bois. Even in Berlioz, the sensibility of French sorrow can never quite forget Provence. Sorrow, in any case, is a categorical manifestation; sadness is vagrant. And sadness never quite leaves the music of Gustav Mahler. It edges through even in the wild dance passages of the later scores. The solid peasant mind of Bruckner could not comprehend or assert what was inherent in Mahler, for Bruckner was simply building an architectonic stairway to paradise; Mahler was consciously struggling in Purgatory.

Much has been made of those biographical factors in the Mahler history which fit the cliché of the tortured composer: he was an Austrian provincial and therefore ridiculous to Vienna; he was a Jew and therefore hated by all in an atmosphere which, to Franz Kafka “smelled of blood.” But this was nonsense. Vienna smelled of blood only to those whose naive good will called for the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the destruction of European unity. Today, they would smell blood in Washington—and with as little reason.