Tony Duggan in response to me:

>>There are many ingenuous people (among I count myself) who thinks that
>>Mahler didn't change his religion only -- or"ostensibly" at least-- due
>>to social and financial reasons.
>
>In another conversation, with Pfohl, he referred to his conversion as
>"changing a cloak."

Sure.  He could find the imposed "necessity" of changing the cloak
particularly offensive (who wouldn't?).

>He was not a devout Jew before his conversion and was certainly not a
>devout Roman Catholic Christian after it.

I don't think that Mahler was looking for the Christian Salvation in the
strict religious sense.  The matter of his conversion (I think) is related
to the problem of his cultural identity rather than to his personal
religious necessity.  After certain discussions about religion Alma used
to call him "ein Christglaeubicher Jude".  This is not evidence of nothing,
but shows that Mahler, at least, was very inclined to think about Christian
religion.  Less timidly, I would say that he was fascinated by many
features of the Christianism (or of the Catholicism specifically) and that
was a strong influential issue in many of his works.

>>The error of Russell (though he is not the only) lies precisely on the
>>absolute underestimation of the weight of Catholic culture and heritage
>>in Mahler's own simbolic mind-frame.
>
>I am tempted to ask for evidence of this.

There's a lot of it.  The problem is: do we want to read it as evidence?
The young Mahler at his Iglau years singing at the Saint Jakob Church, the
reference to the newborn Second Symphony (letter from June 30 1894): "It
has been baptized as "lux lucet in tenebris", the whole environment of the
4th Symphony, at least half the literary environment of the 8th Symphony,
the choose of many texts of the "Wunderhorn"...  Quirino Principe, in his
"Mahler" (Rusconi Libri 1983) points directly to this matter in a way that
I like very much (I quote and translate from the Spanish version, Javier
Vergara Editor, p 463):

   "The lesser is his (Mahler's) tendency to live into a confessional
   religion, the greater his tendency to the popular forms (of the
   Christian religion) revived in literature, and rooted in the
   civilization of the austrian-german catholicity".

>Though Mahler set Klpstock's Ressurrection Ode in the Second Symphony he
>excised any reference to Christ from it.  Strange.

However, he didn't excised any reference to the Holy Trinity at "Veni
Creator Spiritus":

   "Per te sciamus da Patrem
   Noscamus atque Filium"

Strange ain't?:-)

Pablo Massa
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