Stirling Newberry (about Mahler's 9th):

>The third movement is neighbor to Strauss and Berlioz - the criticism of
>the critics by making a joke of their sacred form - the fugue.

When was the fugue the "sacred form" of XIX century critics?. It could be
"sacred" to conservatoire professors, and only for pedagogic purposes
(Bruckner is an example of this), but not indeed to musical critics.
Criticism and academicism were not exactly the same thing. Hanslick's
thoughts about musical coherence were far beyond the reverence of a single
musical form.

>Here, however, Mahler's comment is also socially relevant. Having attacked
>the first pillar of the Victorian/Bizmarkian age, the genre of the peasant
>romance - he now attacks the second - academicism. The academicism which
>had classified languages and discovered the idea of Indo-European, which
>had classified plants and discovered evolution, which was classifying
>dreams and discovering the unconscious, which classified symphonies by a
>particular format.

An easy view of Mahler. The problem is that it's not only easy, but false.
He was deeply bound to that "peasant romance" (see all his lieder output),
and it's deformation is a matter much more complex (and rich) than a simple
attack. Concerning academicism and criticism (which were not the same
thing, I repeat), Mahler did not intend a revolution against it. His
problems with the musical world of its times were not the criticisms on
his particular symphonic wiew, but the silence about his work. The second
part of this paragraph suggests a "deconstructive" Mahler. This could be
interesting to some modern intellectuals, but is far from historical
reality (Actually, this is an unelegant way to say that a deconstructive
Mahler is not interesting to me).

>For make no mistake, it is history that is the main actor in this
>symphony. Cultural history, clearly alluded to by genre in both the middle
>movements, and by reference to song melody in the first, and by reference
>to the genre of soft string music in the last.

Hummm... that's partially true. A strong feeling that one can get hearing
Mahler's last works is that his personal history (Mahler as an individual)
is the main actor of its symphonies. His "deformed" waltz is less a matter
of cultural history than of personal memories. Maher usually makes of his
own personal memory a parody of the entire cultural history, but that's a
quite different problem.

Pablo Massa
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