Pablo Massa wrote:

>Right, but Schoenberg, Webern and Berg were expressing much deeply the
>wreck of the "assumed social relationships that held up the 19th century",
>and they made it shaking directly the roots of established musical
>language, an attempt which Mahler only *seemed* to do.  That's what I meant
>when I wrote: "as a parody of cultural history the Ninth symphony was
>already *impotent*.  What kind of parody are we going to perceive in a work
>which musical history, by those times, had overpassed?".

So why does the Ninth Symphony still live? Why do many of us still value it
and listen to it? Why does Boulez bother to record it? Perhaps music is not
identical with sociology, and the Ninth Symphony is not just about "the
wreck of the 'assumed social relationships that held up the nineteenth
century' ".  Which brings up another point.  The early twentieth century
was a time of enormous changes in music, literature, art, in physics as
well, for that matter.  In contrast the nineteenth century is often
implicitly thought of as a stable time.  It was in reality a time of great
change - just consider music.  The century started with the death of Haydn,
followed by the last 30 years of Beethoven, followed by Schubert perfecting
the art song, followed by Chopin finding new ways of expression on the
piano, followed by Berlioz, Liszt and the tone poem, followed by Wagner
with all that implies, Bruckner and the Wagnerian Symphony, and the great
romantic neoclassicist Brahms, then onto the young Sibelius and Strauss,
and the first half of Mahler's career.  And that's just a few highlights*.
All this seems obvious and trite, but IMHO, it is worth keeping in mind.

* For example, I left out Italian opera.

Bernard Chasan