[log in to unmask] writes:

>I Steven Martine wrote:
>
>>Do you deny that his last three works were written after he got the bad
>>news? Or are we supposed to believe that knowing that you have only months
>>to live will have no effect on the music that a composer writes.
>
>But he *didn't* have only months to live, nor was he told that.  He did in
>fact live almost 4 years after the diagnosis of the defective heart valve
>and it was an infection which carried him off, not a failure of the valve.

OK this is clarification that I was unaware of.  But I think you may be
missing the forest for the trees.  When he wrote Das Lied the words to
the Der Abscheid are literally saying farewell.  Could he perhaps maybe
possibly be talking about Death? This coming from a man that was just
told of a heart condition.  Methinks this is one whale of a coincidence.

Saying that Mahler suffered many tragedies in his life and seemed to deal
with Death and the afterlife in his compositions does not strike me as an
unreasonable conclusion for people to reach looking at the man and his
music.

If Mahler was nothing but doom and gloom, it would get pretty dull after
a while.  My point was that Mahler had already stared into the abyss so
many times before that, in a way, it would make sense for him to write a
Requiem.  Of course as a conductor of Operas it might make sense for him to
compose an Opera as well.  Perhaps the libretto would be about a conductor
who is sacked for being Jewish but it would all be a coincidence and have
nothing to do with the composer's life.

Steve M. (Northern Virginia)