Mahler Quotes

“Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire”
― Gustav Mahler

“Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.”
― Douglas Murray, The Strange Death of Europe: Immigration, Identity, Islam

“Too bad Mahler never saw a Morley wah-wah pedal, he thought, or he would have scored it into one of his longer works.”
― Philip K. Dick, The Divine Invasion

“Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His voice cracks, like Nietzsche’s, when he proclaims values, speaks from mere conviction, when he himself puts into practice the abhorrent notion of overcoming on which the thematic analyses capitalise, and makes music as if joy were already in the world. His vainly jubilant movements unmask jubilation; his subjective incapacity for the happy end denounces itself.”
― Theodor Adorno

“Mahler; you cannot go back after listening to him. He is the future!”
― Orkhan Mirzesoy

“Most of the people around me yesterday were middle-aged or old. I am used to it, but it never ceases to surprise me how easy it is to leave the hybridity of the city, and enter into all-white spaces, the homogeneity of which, as far as I can tell, causes no discomfort to the whites in them.”
― Teju Cole, Open City

“You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.”
― Sydney Smith

“La vita è una sinfonia di Mahler, non torna mai indietro, non ricomincia mai daccapo.”
― Mathias Énard, Compass

“When a man, filled with a mixture of reverence and bewilderment, asks, “What on earth does this all mean?”, a child will answer him with the fourth movement [of his Fourth Symphony]: “This is the life of the Kingdom of Heaven.”
― Gustav Mahler

“I am dead to the world’s tumult,
And rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love, in my song!”
― Friedrich Rückert