Pierre Paquin ([log in to unmask]) wrote:

>...  Furtwangler did not care that much for Mahler's music.  (Toscanini
>hated it.) Seem to be common sentiments.

OTOH Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Jascha Horenstein, Charles Adler, Oskar
Fried all cared enough to make recordings.

>I don't care for it either except for the 3rd symphony, and only with the
>Czech Philharmonic/Neumann recording.

Among my least favourite...

>I would much prefer to listen to a Furtwangler Symphony...At least it
>would not be dripping over the edge with "See how much I'm suffering?"
>Mahlerian sentimentalities.

This sentence makes it sound as if you've never heard much mahler, only
read the kind of misinformed commentaries which I can recall from my own
childhood 40 years ago.

>Thank God I can count myself NOT a member of the sorrow sector among music
>lovers which seems to drift aimlessly and headlong towards Mahler's music
>for some reason(s).

Where does this suffering nonsense come from? Of course there's suffering
in a Mahler symphony - he said the symphony must be like the world and
contain everything, so how could he leave out suffering?

But consider: symphonies 1, 2, 5, 7 and 8 end in blazing triumph; 3 and 4,
in their very different ways, with love - intense and all-consuming, in the
case of 3, simple and deliberately childlike in 4; Das Lied, 9 and 10 all
composed after his heart malady was diagnosed - and 10 while his wife was
having an affiar with Walter Gropius - end in acceptance and even (10) a
renewed affirmation.

The only Mahler symphpny which ends bleakly is 6.

deryk barker
([log in to unmask], http://www.camosun.bc.ca/~dbarker)