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Beauty and Sadness: Mahler's 11 Symphonies
The Amazon No. 1 Bestseller
'A beautiful and important book.' — Marina Mahler
'Highly recommended' — Société Gustav Mahler France
'A book that sends you back to listen again to music you thought you knew, with fresh insight and understanding.' — Tim Ashley
'Masterfully paced, just the right balance of continuous narrative and individual essays, all framed in beautiful writing. Can’t recommend it highly enough!' — Brian McCreath, WCRB Classical Radio Boston
'One does not expect a book on music to be this philosophically erudite. [The] use of language is masterful. […] It's an enormous achievement. An essential book.' — Jeffrey A. Tucker
'This is an important contribution to the Mahler bibliography. David Vernon has written a perceptive, insightful and thought-provoking book. Mahler devotees will find much in its pages to enhance their understanding of these ever-fascinating works in which we can always find something new to excite us. […] Vernon has a deep knowledge of the symphonies – and a great enthusiasm for them. His descriptions of the works are detailed and, clearly, the product of extensive and careful listening – as well as wide reading around his subject. He can bring the music to life through vivid and enthusiastic turns of phrase.' — MusicWeb International
Gustav Mahler wrote some of the most challenging and cherished music of all eleven extraordinary symphonies that continue to fascinate, intrigue and infuriate music lovers around the world.
In his dazzling new book, David Vernon — author of Disturbing the Wagner's Musikdrama — celebrates these vast but often very private works of art. In stimulating prose, he investigates their theatricality and grandeur, as well as their poetry and intimacy, examining the personal, philosophical and musical influences which shaped their creation.
Each symphony, including Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished Tenth, is given its own chapter, which also includes a detailed guide to the music, movement by movement.
Above all, this is a book that recognizes the importance of Mahler in musical and cultural history and takes us far into both his creative processes and the works themselves.
WITH A FOREWORD BY MARINA MAHLER
'A beautiful and important book.' — Marina Mahler
'Highly recommended' — Société Gustav Mahler France
'A book that sends you back to listen again to music you thought you knew, with fresh insight and understanding.' — Tim Ashley
'Masterfully paced, just the right balance of continuous narrative and individual essays, all framed in beautiful writing. Can’t recommend it highly enough!' — Brian McCreath, WCRB Classical Radio Boston
'One does not expect a book on music to be this philosophically erudite. [The] use of language is masterful. […] It's an enormous achievement. An essential book.' — Jeffrey A. Tucker
'This is an important contribution to the Mahler bibliography. David Vernon has written a perceptive, insightful and thought-provoking book. Mahler devotees will find much in its pages to enhance their understanding of these ever-fascinating works in which we can always find something new to excite us. […] Vernon has a deep knowledge of the symphonies – and a great enthusiasm for them. His descriptions of the works are detailed and, clearly, the product of extensive and careful listening – as well as wide reading around his subject. He can bring the music to life through vivid and enthusiastic turns of phrase.' — MusicWeb International
Gustav Mahler wrote some of the most challenging and cherished music of all eleven extraordinary symphonies that continue to fascinate, intrigue and infuriate music lovers around the world.
In his dazzling new book, David Vernon — author of Disturbing the Wagner's Musikdrama — celebrates these vast but often very private works of art. In stimulating prose, he investigates their theatricality and grandeur, as well as their poetry and intimacy, examining the personal, philosophical and musical influences which shaped their creation.
Each symphony, including Das Lied von der Erde and the unfinished Tenth, is given its own chapter, which also includes a detailed guide to the music, movement by movement.
Above all, this is a book that recognizes the importance of Mahler in musical and cultural history and takes us far into both his creative processes and the works themselves.
WITH A FOREWORD BY MARINA MAHLER
- GenresMusicArtClassical Music
412 pages, Paperback
Published May 16, 2022
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
January 6, 2026
When I read The Waste Land a few weeks ago, T.S. Eliot sparked yet another of my wanton Mahler phases. I realise The Waste Land and Mahler may, in fact, be fairly disparate objects, but I’m more than willing to admit that the connection I saw between the two was almost certainly the product of my own overactive imagination (independent of anything tangible that may or may not be found in Eliot’s text or Mahler’s music). In any case, the real honest truth is that I need only the slightest push to be sent tumbling down a Mahler rabbit hole, irrespective of the influence of The Waste Land (or anything else, for that matter), because Mahler has always been — and let’s not beat around the bush — the greatest artist of my life. Equally, it’s been over a year since I last took such a Mahlerian plunge, so this latest relapse was long overdue.
Anyway, whatever the reason, T.S. Eliot sent me to my beloved 1985 Bernstein/Concertgebouworkest recording of Mahler’s 9th (a recording which has always meant more to me than the more widely respected 1979 Bernstein/Berliner Philharmoniker one), and, having become re-immersed in the 9th’s spell, I then found myself, one typically grim November night two weeks ago, sitting on the tube on the way into London, excitedly clutching tickets to see the Concertgebouw live, in the flesh: By sheer coincidence, they happened to be sitting a mini-residency at The Barbican Centre, playing a programme which included this exact same music. In the end, this excursion was a reminder that it’s always worth making the effort for these things, especially since the Concertgebouw played one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to: What an orchestra! — is all I can say. Since then, I’ve been repeatedly working through my recordings of Mahler’s remarkable symphonies and song cycles, rediscovering some of my favourite neglected tunes.
My view has usually been that while all Mahler symphonies are equal, some are more equal than others, and, for a long while now, I’ve found myself placing the 2nd, the 9th, and, more recently, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), on a hard-to-touch pedestal. With each of these three pieces — as with a whole lot of the rest of Mahler’s work besides — we comfortably enter Desert Island Discs territory: I name the 2nd because it is epic awesomeness incarnate from start to finish; Das Lied von der Erde because I’ve come to appreciate, with time and deeper listening, that its final song — the half-hour long Der Abschied (The Farewell) — is quite simply the most painfully beautiful and solitary life-and-death haunted thing ever written (especially when sung by Kathleen Ferrier); and, finally, the 9th, because it seems to have been blown into this world from elsewhere, rising out from the darkness that sits upon the face of the deep before gazing overhead towards some greater oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (When writing this I worried that invoking the opening of The Bible and Shakespeare in my little Goodreads Mahler book review might come across as excessively lofty and overblown, even by my standards, but I’ve decided, dear reader, that you’ll just have to deal with it.)
Below my special top three, and all sitting on roughly even footings (give a bit to the 6th and 10th or take a bit from the 5th and 8th) come most of the rest. The two anomalies are the 4th and 7th, which have never really “done it” for me. I’ve never felt like I properly understood these two symphonies, so they’ve always felt like gaps in my internal Mahler jigsaw puzzle. Wanting to eliminate these gaps was what finally led me to Vernon’s wonderful book — I wanted him to help me catch the two which got away.
Although I very specifically wanted to read the chapters on the 4th and 7th, I ended up reading the whole book from cover to cover. Vernon is full of insight and intelligence on a broad range of topics, particularly the wider arts, and he places each symphony in both historical and philosophical contexts. Most importantly, his love of the music made me quickly form a bond with his writing. Indeed, sometimes it’s not entirely clear where the facts end and Vernon’s imagination begins. Likewise, his passion sometimes lends itself to lengthy, slightly lofty passages which can feel repetitive and it’s undoubtedly true that this book could be shorter than its 400-pages. But look, if I had no patience for repetitiveness or loftiness and if I really cared about brevity I’d hardly be a big Mahler fanboy, would I?
The way Vernon paints a picture of each symphony with his words is what I found myself reading for, and I felt like he captured how each of Mahler’s symphonies feels like a great novel that presents a complete depiction of life, complete with ugliness and neurotic struggle and sometimes with only intermittent flashes of sublime beauty. He makes some compelling arguments that none of the symphonies is entirely one thing only but rather a complexly lifelike expression of something much broader and richer. The 6th, for instance, is not as purely tragic as it is often described; instead, it unfolds as a life lived to the full — its moments of joy are not to be retroactively dismissed by the inevitably tragic ending, but rather savoured all the more because of it. Vernon depicts how all 11 symphonies piece together like a tapestry or an ongoing anthology series, comprising the pieces of one large work of art that benefits from being listened through in chronological order — I personally believe these symphonies complement one another better than those of any other composer (with big dog Luddy Van B as Mahler’s only possible equal in this respect). Vernon points out the thematic material which binds these works into a cohesive whole, alongside the gradual evolutionary changes which mark Mahler’s artistic progression.
Reading this book also made me realise that Mahler’s life would make for a crazy emotional movie if done properly. I got emotional just reading the chapter covering Das Lied von der Erde. It goes without saying that the soundtrack of this hypothetical film would also be breathtaking. We need to get Terence Davies on the case ASAP.
I’ve come away with an enriched view of every single one of these amazing pieces of music, and, even though I still can’t pretend I particularly like the 7th all that much, I at least feel like I now understand what it is that other people see in its strange depths — so that’s mission accomplished. Well done, book.
---------
Naturally, I couldn’t not end this review without leaving a list of the eleven works discussed in Vernon’s book, ranked according to my preference (ordering subject to change at a moment’s notice depending on my whims and the weather):
1) Symphony No. 9 in D
2) Symphony No. 2 in C minor — “Resurrection”
3) Das Lied von der Erde — “The Song of the Earth”
4) Symphony No. 6 in A minor
5) Symphony No. 4 in G
6) Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp — (Posthumous/Unfinished)
7) Symphony No. 3 in D minor
8) Symphony No. 1 in D — “Titan”
9) Symphony No. 8 in E-flat — “Symphony of a Thousand”
10) Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor
11) Symphony No. 7 in E minor — “Song of the Night”
Anyway, whatever the reason, T.S. Eliot sent me to my beloved 1985 Bernstein/Concertgebouworkest recording of Mahler’s 9th (a recording which has always meant more to me than the more widely respected 1979 Bernstein/Berliner Philharmoniker one), and, having become re-immersed in the 9th’s spell, I then found myself, one typically grim November night two weeks ago, sitting on the tube on the way into London, excitedly clutching tickets to see the Concertgebouw live, in the flesh: By sheer coincidence, they happened to be sitting a mini-residency at The Barbican Centre, playing a programme which included this exact same music. In the end, this excursion was a reminder that it’s always worth making the effort for these things, especially since the Concertgebouw played one of the best concerts I’ve ever been to: What an orchestra! — is all I can say. Since then, I’ve been repeatedly working through my recordings of Mahler’s remarkable symphonies and song cycles, rediscovering some of my favourite neglected tunes.
My view has usually been that while all Mahler symphonies are equal, some are more equal than others, and, for a long while now, I’ve found myself placing the 2nd, the 9th, and, more recently, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth), on a hard-to-touch pedestal. With each of these three pieces — as with a whole lot of the rest of Mahler’s work besides — we comfortably enter Desert Island Discs territory: I name the 2nd because it is epic awesomeness incarnate from start to finish; Das Lied von der Erde because I’ve come to appreciate, with time and deeper listening, that its final song — the half-hour long Der Abschied (The Farewell) — is quite simply the most painfully beautiful and solitary life-and-death haunted thing ever written (especially when sung by Kathleen Ferrier); and, finally, the 9th, because it seems to have been blown into this world from elsewhere, rising out from the darkness that sits upon the face of the deep before gazing overhead towards some greater oblivion; sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything. (When writing this I worried that invoking the opening of The Bible and Shakespeare in my little Goodreads Mahler book review might come across as excessively lofty and overblown, even by my standards, but I’ve decided, dear reader, that you’ll just have to deal with it.)
Below my special top three, and all sitting on roughly even footings (give a bit to the 6th and 10th or take a bit from the 5th and 8th) come most of the rest. The two anomalies are the 4th and 7th, which have never really “done it” for me. I’ve never felt like I properly understood these two symphonies, so they’ve always felt like gaps in my internal Mahler jigsaw puzzle. Wanting to eliminate these gaps was what finally led me to Vernon’s wonderful book — I wanted him to help me catch the two which got away.
Although I very specifically wanted to read the chapters on the 4th and 7th, I ended up reading the whole book from cover to cover. Vernon is full of insight and intelligence on a broad range of topics, particularly the wider arts, and he places each symphony in both historical and philosophical contexts. Most importantly, his love of the music made me quickly form a bond with his writing. Indeed, sometimes it’s not entirely clear where the facts end and Vernon’s imagination begins. Likewise, his passion sometimes lends itself to lengthy, slightly lofty passages which can feel repetitive and it’s undoubtedly true that this book could be shorter than its 400-pages. But look, if I had no patience for repetitiveness or loftiness and if I really cared about brevity I’d hardly be a big Mahler fanboy, would I?
The way Vernon paints a picture of each symphony with his words is what I found myself reading for, and I felt like he captured how each of Mahler’s symphonies feels like a great novel that presents a complete depiction of life, complete with ugliness and neurotic struggle and sometimes with only intermittent flashes of sublime beauty. He makes some compelling arguments that none of the symphonies is entirely one thing only but rather a complexly lifelike expression of something much broader and richer. The 6th, for instance, is not as purely tragic as it is often described; instead, it unfolds as a life lived to the full — its moments of joy are not to be retroactively dismissed by the inevitably tragic ending, but rather savoured all the more because of it. Vernon depicts how all 11 symphonies piece together like a tapestry or an ongoing anthology series, comprising the pieces of one large work of art that benefits from being listened through in chronological order — I personally believe these symphonies complement one another better than those of any other composer (with big dog Luddy Van B as Mahler’s only possible equal in this respect). Vernon points out the thematic material which binds these works into a cohesive whole, alongside the gradual evolutionary changes which mark Mahler’s artistic progression.
Reading this book also made me realise that Mahler’s life would make for a crazy emotional movie if done properly. I got emotional just reading the chapter covering Das Lied von der Erde. It goes without saying that the soundtrack of this hypothetical film would also be breathtaking. We need to get Terence Davies on the case ASAP.
I’ve come away with an enriched view of every single one of these amazing pieces of music, and, even though I still can’t pretend I particularly like the 7th all that much, I at least feel like I now understand what it is that other people see in its strange depths — so that’s mission accomplished. Well done, book.
---------
Naturally, I couldn’t not end this review without leaving a list of the eleven works discussed in Vernon’s book, ranked according to my preference (ordering subject to change at a moment’s notice depending on my whims and the weather):
1) Symphony No. 9 in D
2) Symphony No. 2 in C minor — “Resurrection”
3) Das Lied von der Erde — “The Song of the Earth”
4) Symphony No. 6 in A minor
5) Symphony No. 4 in G
6) Symphony No. 10 in F-sharp — (Posthumous/Unfinished)
7) Symphony No. 3 in D minor
8) Symphony No. 1 in D — “Titan”
9) Symphony No. 8 in E-flat — “Symphony of a Thousand”
10) Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor
11) Symphony No. 7 in E minor — “Song of the Night”
December 1, 2022
Like a new set of ears, or at least an aural tune-up, David Vernon’s listening guide to Mahler is the best kind of music appreciation. Dr. Vernon decodes Mahler’s revolutionary strangeness as both “the last Romantic” and a “visionary modernist.”
August 17, 2022
A good introduction and companion to Mahler, but doesn’t offer much more than Cooke’s introduction, at three times the length
September 20, 2022
Vernon does an admirable job of describing Mahler’s symphonic intentions for the layman, advocating he is more than just neurotic as musicologist Harold Schoenberg derided him. He devotes a chapter to each symphony, shows Mahler’s dark tendencies set against an exuberant response to life. They fluctuate and contradict often within a symphony’s movements; many times, within the movements themselves. His was not stately music, but an assault on the ears his audiences couldn’t understand. In this post-atomic world, we can.
He makes extraordinary arguments for the fourth symphony’s ‘heavenly life’ as remote and darker, the ‘Tragic’ sixth symphony is not one evincing self-pity, but a heroic struggle to win until felled by fate, that the partially unfinished tenth has grounds to be a Mahler work, that looks further ahead to musical innovation and direction than his other symphonies.
Mahler put his life and loves into his work. There are dark moments, but the struggle is worth it.
He makes extraordinary arguments for the fourth symphony’s ‘heavenly life’ as remote and darker, the ‘Tragic’ sixth symphony is not one evincing self-pity, but a heroic struggle to win until felled by fate, that the partially unfinished tenth has grounds to be a Mahler work, that looks further ahead to musical innovation and direction than his other symphonies.
Mahler put his life and loves into his work. There are dark moments, but the struggle is worth it.
November 6, 2022
Dost thou wish to listen to the harmonies that charm the soul of man? Canst thou try the heavenly substance of powerful melody and harmony and emotion that is beyond the imaginings of most. Then perhaps you are ready for the music of the Master and this scintillating overview and analysis of the symphonies of Mahler. The author's insights provide depth and meaning for the brilliant innovative music of Mahler that is still astounding more than a century after its original composition.
April 21, 2025
I am not typically inclined to write reviews however I want to forewarn potential readers of this book that I found it very difficult to finish and enjoy due to very flowery and nonsense language. Here are some examples:
Describing the 5th symphony “If we try to imagine the movement as transporting us from a combat zone to the mass graves of dead children or soldiers, via several kinds of no man's land, it very quickly takes us even further than that, soaring to cosmic proportions. It is fear, dread and imagination run riot, loosed into infinite space and terror, simultaneously chaotic and meticulously organized.”
Describing the 6th “In this symphony, we can be viewing a mountaintop vista, recalling or anticipating a sumptuous summer amid the alpine peaks and meadows, or suddenly being flattened underfoot by the obstinate tread of a thousand spiteful boots - but still the symphony maintains its ruthlessly calm management and poise. We stagger and flounder from emotional crisis to happy revelation, poignant reflection to wretched emergency…Cowbells, earlier an emblem of escape, liberty and clarity, are cast as forlorn faith, desolate references to another world amid the howling emotional tornado and general ride into abyss. Yet, more positively, the cowbells also serve to spiritually link the movements together, showing how even the most remorseless angular existences can claim their smooth-edged calm, however forsaken and remote.”
“The scherzo's music often retains its dance spirit but is persistently traumatized by the march's influence, re-orchestrating parts of the first movement into satanic ghostly rituals and sonic torture chambers. The horrific nature of the movement plays with time: it seems both neoteric, a devilish child-killer teasing with his toys, and well as a depressingly Familiar, antiquated sense of brutality and abuse - Herod,
Nero, Fu Sheng.”
Describing the 9th: “Mahler's last completed symphony is a marvellously constructed network of agony and longing, mockery and veneration, resilience and resignation, inviting us, by its close, to experience the enigmatic space between sound and silence. Throughout, it maintains a revolving core of darkness and light, sometimes holding secrets invisible to others, but generally wearing its sincerity as a symphonic badge of honour. It induces both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, challenging us to locate meaning or stability amid its prisons and vistas.
It stares death in the face and refuses to blink, while searing suffering onto the inner ear. It yearns for lost time and lost love. It sometimes seems obsessed with the past, with memory with a fervid desire to project all history, both personal and universal, musical and non-musical, into infinity.”
If this type of nonsense appeals to you, you will really enjoy this book because it is littered with hundreds of examples of this type of writing. I could barely stomach it. It is unfortunate because between the authors diatribes such as the above, there is actually some useful and descriptive biography.
If this type of nonsense doesn’t appeal to you, fortunately the book is organized such that you can just skip the authors descriptions of Mahlers works and enjoy the biography in between.
Describing the 5th symphony “If we try to imagine the movement as transporting us from a combat zone to the mass graves of dead children or soldiers, via several kinds of no man's land, it very quickly takes us even further than that, soaring to cosmic proportions. It is fear, dread and imagination run riot, loosed into infinite space and terror, simultaneously chaotic and meticulously organized.”
Describing the 6th “In this symphony, we can be viewing a mountaintop vista, recalling or anticipating a sumptuous summer amid the alpine peaks and meadows, or suddenly being flattened underfoot by the obstinate tread of a thousand spiteful boots - but still the symphony maintains its ruthlessly calm management and poise. We stagger and flounder from emotional crisis to happy revelation, poignant reflection to wretched emergency…Cowbells, earlier an emblem of escape, liberty and clarity, are cast as forlorn faith, desolate references to another world amid the howling emotional tornado and general ride into abyss. Yet, more positively, the cowbells also serve to spiritually link the movements together, showing how even the most remorseless angular existences can claim their smooth-edged calm, however forsaken and remote.”
“The scherzo's music often retains its dance spirit but is persistently traumatized by the march's influence, re-orchestrating parts of the first movement into satanic ghostly rituals and sonic torture chambers. The horrific nature of the movement plays with time: it seems both neoteric, a devilish child-killer teasing with his toys, and well as a depressingly Familiar, antiquated sense of brutality and abuse - Herod,
Nero, Fu Sheng.”
Describing the 9th: “Mahler's last completed symphony is a marvellously constructed network of agony and longing, mockery and veneration, resilience and resignation, inviting us, by its close, to experience the enigmatic space between sound and silence. Throughout, it maintains a revolving core of darkness and light, sometimes holding secrets invisible to others, but generally wearing its sincerity as a symphonic badge of honour. It induces both claustrophobia and agoraphobia, challenging us to locate meaning or stability amid its prisons and vistas.
It stares death in the face and refuses to blink, while searing suffering onto the inner ear. It yearns for lost time and lost love. It sometimes seems obsessed with the past, with memory with a fervid desire to project all history, both personal and universal, musical and non-musical, into infinity.”
If this type of nonsense appeals to you, you will really enjoy this book because it is littered with hundreds of examples of this type of writing. I could barely stomach it. It is unfortunate because between the authors diatribes such as the above, there is actually some useful and descriptive biography.
If this type of nonsense doesn’t appeal to you, fortunately the book is organized such that you can just skip the authors descriptions of Mahlers works and enjoy the biography in between.
September 6, 2025
Vernon devotes each chapter of his high-spirited book to one of Mahler's eleven symphonic works - the nine complete symphonies, the unfinished tenth, and Das Lied von der Erde. His commentary can illuminate: I like Vernon's interpretation of the Fourth as "a critical, sometimes merciless, examination of childhood wonder [and] inexperience," although his conclusion that the Fourth is "probably the darkest of the eleven" displays Vernon's tendency to hyperbole and the "hot take."
But Vernon's commentary can sink into the nebulous, even fatuous. Vernon's claim that in the Fifth Symphony Mahler "expanded his scope to colder cosmic dimensions, creating an art seemingly born in the remoteness of space" (174) may help some readers feel nearer the music. For me, however, the statement is empty bombast. Likewise, the Third, he writes, is "not a Pastoral; it is not merely the 'feelings awoken on arriving in the countryside,' it is that countryside itself. It is not the emotion of looking at the mountain, it is the mountain" (113). Really? Vernon elsewhere describes the Third as "an overwhelming cultural certificate" (140) -- what? -- and writes of the "data-spawning neutrality" (?) of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies, whose "objectivity allows their sympathy a sincerity that subjectivity would distort" (187). Make sense of that if you can. The Seventh, meanwhile, "veers between styles, forms and techniques, in addition to taking the audacious, uncivilized step of referring to other people's music, with ease and an alarming sophistication" (240). Why "uncivilized"? Why is the sophistication "alarming"? How can something be at once uncivilized and sophisticated? Your guess is as good as mine.
The muddled nature of many of Vernon's ideas is matched by the prose. This is not always the case; sometimes, Vernon writes a sentence as good as this one, describing Mahler's composer's block while working on the Seventh Symphony: "He was alone with his bags, his empty staves, and his thoughts" (237). Or this sentence from a description of the last movement of Das Lied: "A wounded oboe cries out in anguish" (324). But a more typical sentence is this one: "The first movement [of the Third] was, in fact, the last composed, Mahler's trepidation in the face of the work necessitating that the fierce and distended opening forty minutes be composed only when the rest was secure" (123). Oof.
Too often, Vernon's prose is clumsy, imprecise, weighed down by superlatives, addicted to translating the music into garish and often clashing imagery, and overly reliant on the practice of tossing off grandiose and elastic words like "tragic," "cosmic," "sincerity," "love," "infinity," etc. without defining them. This results in passages that are at once extremely vague and tonally overwrought, like this about the Third Symphony's final movement: "The elusive, sublime nature of love requires a lengthy, benevolent and reflective final consideration via purely orchestral symphonic form to realize its progressive and expectant vision" (140). Or this, about Das Lied von der Erde: "Bitterness, abstraction and indignation mix with sweetness, decadence and delight, the two [?] forging a profound sadness as well as a deeper awareness of the rich splendor of the world" (292-93). Or this passage on the Sixth Symphony:
Perceiving what? The symphony? Its ending? Hope? Perceiving it what way? And is it the "cathartic bath" that helps us face reality, or making it part of our "mournful fabric"--and what does that mean exactly? Over 400 pages, such empurpled and unclear writing becomes exhausting to read.
This is not a book for those sensitive about English grammar. Misplaced and dangling modifiers, pronouns that are incorrect or lack clear referents, and other problems of sentence structure abound. Try parsing this sentence: "Many works reacted to the textural density and emotional intensity of the Romantics, the neoclassical and rococo trends which began around the turn of the century, for their own sake, seeking greater clarity and levity alone" (153). Vernon often seems to lose sight of the grammatical subject as adjectives, modifiers, and superlatives pile up. A good editor ought to have corrected such confusion, as well as the fact that in Chapter Three Vernon goes back and forth between "Dionysus" and "Dionysius" as the spelling for the name of the Greek god.
In part because of the book's structure (each chapter begins with an essay on the symphony, followed by a movement-by-movement description that goes over the same ground a second time), but also due I think to a lack of strong editing, there is a great deal of repetitiveness, both within and across chapters. Vernon's weakness for excessive alliteration is also a liability: from "intangible and indefinable, unclear and unpredictable" (150) to "concepts, customs and contexts" (260) to "quiz and question" and "doubt and darkness" (261) and on and on. This reaches a peak, or nadir, of absurdity on page 339, where we read of "startled sheep," "perturbed ponies," and "lachrymose llamas" in the space of a few lines.
These weaknesses kept me from enjoying this book as much as I had hoped to, despite the infectiousness of Vernon's palpable, one might even call it gushing, enthusiasm for the composer.
But Vernon's commentary can sink into the nebulous, even fatuous. Vernon's claim that in the Fifth Symphony Mahler "expanded his scope to colder cosmic dimensions, creating an art seemingly born in the remoteness of space" (174) may help some readers feel nearer the music. For me, however, the statement is empty bombast. Likewise, the Third, he writes, is "not a Pastoral; it is not merely the 'feelings awoken on arriving in the countryside,' it is that countryside itself. It is not the emotion of looking at the mountain, it is the mountain" (113). Really? Vernon elsewhere describes the Third as "an overwhelming cultural certificate" (140) -- what? -- and writes of the "data-spawning neutrality" (?) of the Fifth, Sixth and Seventh symphonies, whose "objectivity allows their sympathy a sincerity that subjectivity would distort" (187). Make sense of that if you can. The Seventh, meanwhile, "veers between styles, forms and techniques, in addition to taking the audacious, uncivilized step of referring to other people's music, with ease and an alarming sophistication" (240). Why "uncivilized"? Why is the sophistication "alarming"? How can something be at once uncivilized and sophisticated? Your guess is as good as mine.
The muddled nature of many of Vernon's ideas is matched by the prose. This is not always the case; sometimes, Vernon writes a sentence as good as this one, describing Mahler's composer's block while working on the Seventh Symphony: "He was alone with his bags, his empty staves, and his thoughts" (237). Or this sentence from a description of the last movement of Das Lied: "A wounded oboe cries out in anguish" (324). But a more typical sentence is this one: "The first movement [of the Third] was, in fact, the last composed, Mahler's trepidation in the face of the work necessitating that the fierce and distended opening forty minutes be composed only when the rest was secure" (123). Oof.
Too often, Vernon's prose is clumsy, imprecise, weighed down by superlatives, addicted to translating the music into garish and often clashing imagery, and overly reliant on the practice of tossing off grandiose and elastic words like "tragic," "cosmic," "sincerity," "love," "infinity," etc. without defining them. This results in passages that are at once extremely vague and tonally overwrought, like this about the Third Symphony's final movement: "The elusive, sublime nature of love requires a lengthy, benevolent and reflective final consideration via purely orchestral symphonic form to realize its progressive and expectant vision" (140). Or this, about Das Lied von der Erde: "Bitterness, abstraction and indignation mix with sweetness, decadence and delight, the two [?] forging a profound sadness as well as a deeper awareness of the rich splendor of the world" (292-93). Or this passage on the Sixth Symphony:
Mahler's Sixth is shattering, its ending as bleakly negative as King Lear or Oedipus Rex. Hope seems a waste of time -- worse, a false friend. Yet perceiving it this way is to make oneself a part of these dramatic and symphonic worlds, to take on their exposition of pain as our own. When we do so, we dangerously inherit the suffering depicted, making it a part of our own mournful fabric rather than using it either as a cathartic bath or an emotional instruction manual, to help us face reality. (221)
Perceiving what? The symphony? Its ending? Hope? Perceiving it what way? And is it the "cathartic bath" that helps us face reality, or making it part of our "mournful fabric"--and what does that mean exactly? Over 400 pages, such empurpled and unclear writing becomes exhausting to read.
This is not a book for those sensitive about English grammar. Misplaced and dangling modifiers, pronouns that are incorrect or lack clear referents, and other problems of sentence structure abound. Try parsing this sentence: "Many works reacted to the textural density and emotional intensity of the Romantics, the neoclassical and rococo trends which began around the turn of the century, for their own sake, seeking greater clarity and levity alone" (153). Vernon often seems to lose sight of the grammatical subject as adjectives, modifiers, and superlatives pile up. A good editor ought to have corrected such confusion, as well as the fact that in Chapter Three Vernon goes back and forth between "Dionysus" and "Dionysius" as the spelling for the name of the Greek god.
In part because of the book's structure (each chapter begins with an essay on the symphony, followed by a movement-by-movement description that goes over the same ground a second time), but also due I think to a lack of strong editing, there is a great deal of repetitiveness, both within and across chapters. Vernon's weakness for excessive alliteration is also a liability: from "intangible and indefinable, unclear and unpredictable" (150) to "concepts, customs and contexts" (260) to "quiz and question" and "doubt and darkness" (261) and on and on. This reaches a peak, or nadir, of absurdity on page 339, where we read of "startled sheep," "perturbed ponies," and "lachrymose llamas" in the space of a few lines.
These weaknesses kept me from enjoying this book as much as I had hoped to, despite the infectiousness of Vernon's palpable, one might even call it gushing, enthusiasm for the composer.
December 14, 2025
I’m not a musician so I can deeply appreciate a work of this kind which engages with the music on levels outside of pure musical analysis (which I understand has great value but is well above my pay grade)!
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