THAT MUSIC reached an apotheosis with Beethoven does not mean that what followed is unworthy of love and respect. Music continued, speaking to its times and giving voice to the values that inhere in all art. The phonograph record, which puts at our whim and disposal the product of every age since composers learned notation, creates a kind of democracy of listening. Until recently, a concert was a town meeting—and only the elitism of post-modernism has eliminated the listener in favor of the critic. In the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth, that town meeting considered an outpouring of music which still echoes for us, particularly as the compact disc increasingly brings the past to the present.
It is in this context that I have been listening to Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 8—the Symphony of a Thousand. Mahler, whose life and work bridged two centuries, was in many ways a tortured figure, representative of those Viennese writers and artists who sought in conversion to Catholicism an answer to their mortal indecisions. He was perhaps the greatest conductor of his time—and what he learned from translating a written score into living sound he took with him when he turned to composing. But like many other conductors who compose, he believed that what a hundred musicians could express, a thousand could express ten times more eloquently. He also dreamed that in one great work, he could distill all the essences of music.
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