A Quick Meditation on Gustave Mahler (born July 7)

Wittgenstein dismissed Mahler’s music, but he conceded
that "very rare talents [were needed] to produce this bad music.”
Leonard Bernstein as conductor of the New York Philharmonic
sparked the Mahler boom of the 1960s. In Visconti's Death in Venice,
you can hear the slow fourth movement of Mahler's fifth in C Sharp minor,
which Mahler conducted in Cologne in 1904. In the movie,
a heavily made-up Dirk Bogarde played himself as a repressed homosexual
with a death wish. Visconti cast Bogarde for the role because he had done so well
as a Nazi in a black shirt with a smirk and an SS symbol on his collar
in The Damned. So I, on a day dominated by Mahler’s Fifth,
thought of the composer who spoke Yiddish as a boy,
"a Bohemian in Austria, an Austrian among Germans,
and a Jew all over," on his birthday, July 7, 1860.

--  David Lehman

Comments

[Emily Fragos]

The film, Death in Venice. I saw it so long ago, yet I can still vividly remember scenes. And Mahler's adagio, pouring out! Wittgenstein got it wrong.

[David Lehman]

Thank you, Emily. What superlatives can we find for a composer who could write a resurrection symphony in C minor and make us feel that heaven was just a gate away?

[Thomas Moody]

Simone Young's returned home to Australia this year as Chief Conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra—opening night, what else but Mahler's 5th!