Status Updates From Gustav Mahler, Vol. 3: Vien...

Mahler on Schoenberg: "I do not understand his music, but he is young. Perhaps he is right. I am old, and perhaps I no longer have the ability to understand his music." This is quoted from Alma's account of the premiere of Schoenberg's Kammersymphonie.

The Viennese critic Hedwig von Friedländer, of the Montags-Revue, wrote of Mahler's Sixth Symphony, "Who can pronounce a judgement when he is about to be submerged in a stream of incandescent lava?" Incandescent lava! I love that!

This is great: "In the Leipziger Zeitung Arthur Smolian described Mahler as one of several modern 'orchestral magicians, sound-hypnotists, and vocal and instrumental mass murderers' ". Seems a little excessive, no?

Hans Joachim Moser on Mahler the conductor: "...a small ecstatic man, thin, driven by a powerful, tightly sprung will, a sovereign technician of conducting, acutely responsive to the sound being made."

Mahler conducted performances of his Fifth Symphony in Trieste in December 1905. Local critics found "unpredictable and unusual dissonances, the most contrived counterpoints, and sudden blasts of the brass instruments which threatened to drown out all the other instruments with their tumult!"

Starting in August of 1905, Mahler struggled to get Strauss' Salome approved for performance by the Viennese censors. No dice: the censor wrote, "I can only repeat the staging of events which belong to the field of sexual pathology is not suited to our Imperial stge." They had standards then, you know.

The New York Musical Courier on the 1904 performance of Mahler's Fourth Symphony "... one hour or more of the most painful musical torture to which he [the critic] has been compelled to submit."