Wormy Mahler

Some composers, like the late great Richard Wagner, draw hisses from their contemporaries but plaudits from posterity. Others, because of their immediate appeal or the complete lack of it, rouse no sparks in their own time or later. Very few continue to stir up quarrels long after they are dead. But Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler are still fighting words. Bruckner, Austrian composer of nine symphonies and a handful of other large-scale works, died in 1896. His disciple Mahler,

Bohemian composer of nine-and-a-half symphonies and several song cycles, died in 1911. No one is lukewarm about the music of Bruckner and Mahler: either he admires it fervently or it makes him sick. The anti-partisans are not organized, but the devotees are. Last week the Bruckner Society of America conferred their Mahler Medal of Honor upon Philadelphia's Conductor Eugene Ormandy for his services to the cause.

Occasion for this kudos-conferring was a performance by the Philadelphia Orchestra of Mahler's weird, nostalgic Das Lied -von der Erde, a symphonic song cycle for tenor, contralto and orchestra, based on Chinese poems. While Ormandy (with Charles Kullmann and Enid Szantho as soloists) was earning his medal in Philadelphia, slippery-skulled Conductor Dmitri Mitropoulos was introducing Minneapolis to the fantastic orchestral tints of Mahler's First Symphony. Critical Philadelphians applauded politely but 4,000 Minneapolitans sat on the edges of their seats, howled enthusiasm, left Northrop Memorial Auditorium in a daze.

Mahler, like his contemporary Dostoyevsky, had a strong sense of human helplessness and tragedy. Like Contemporaries Nietzsche and van Gogh, Mahler had a vivid poetic imagination. World-famous during his lifetime as a conductor (in Europe and, for a short time, at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House), Mahler knew his orchestra as few composers do, wrote for it with telling originality, getting new effects by combining instruments in novel ways. Like Bruckner, he had grandiose ideas, and often strove to get a whole apocalypse into a single symphony. His Eighth Symphony, introduced to the U. S. by Leopold Stokowski in 1916, is probably the world's largest symphonic work, demands an orchestra of over 100 musicians, a chorus of nearly 1,000, lasts over two hours. The brooding melancholy of his music gets many a listener down; a rude critic has declared that Mahler saw the worm in every apple. Those who feel that worms are natural and to be expected usually like him.

A Bohemian Jew by birth, Mahler studied music in Vienna, was converted to Catholicism, later evolved a pantheistic faith of his own. His childhood was spent in a little country town where bugle calls from a neighboring barracks gave him a curious affection for military tunes. He once stated his Freudian belief that only childhood experiences are useful to an artist.

As a conductor Mahler was of the same stripe as Toscanini. He was a tyrannical perfectionist, and his tantrums at Manhattan's Met are said to have brought on the breakdown which led to his death. Though his music is still infrequently performed in the U. S.,-and Adolf Hitler has forbidden its performance in Aryan Germany, most of his fellow-Viennese class him with Beethoven.

* Two of Mahler's large symphonic works are available for the phonograph, both recorded from concert performances: Das Lied von der Erde and Second ("Resurrection") Symphony.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.