Keep it up Tony Duggan and Deryk Barker!  These professional mourners are
too much.

Maybe Bernstein was obsessed with death.  Surely Freud was.  But we have no
reason to believe Mahler was.  He apparently had a good, healthy sex drive,
strong enough for him to want Alma, who was quite a beauty and must have
been physically quite demanding.  Talk about "Too Many Babes," Mahler
apparently never had too many.

Mahler worked all year so he could enjoy the outdoors hiking in the summer.
Much of his music is folk-like and full of the hurley-burley of life.  His
Fourth and the final movement of his Fifth symphony are two of the happiest
compositions.  For every Kindertodtenlieder there is a Youth Magic Horn.
The last movement of the Ninth can just as easily be heard as a mystic's
sublime joy, a "muss es sein, es muss sein" as the Beethoven last quartets.
There is a quietude, a peacefulness that passes all understanding, not
necessarily a resignation.  While he had no particular religious belief,
there is a sense in the last movement of that symphony that "even if I make
my bed in hell, behold thou art there also." It does not mean he invites
death or is anymore afraid of death than the average person.

Too many music critics have seen too much Grade B art cinema.

That is why the farther one moves from Walter and Bernstein, who had their
own angst, the brighter Mahler becomes.  Perhaps the flock ought to listen
to Klaus Tennstedt's Mahler cycle.

Andrew Carlan
"Standing Up For Nielsen"