Stirling Newberry "sehr hervortretend", writes:

>Mahler had been, indeed, bound up in the peasant romance genre, and even
>arranged many of the details of his life and working method around
>it.  *But not in the 9th symphony* -

I'm not sure about this.  Of course, there are no self-quotations at the
ninth as clearly as in the first symphony.  Someone, however, --I don't
remember who-- found a quotation of the last bars of "Der Abschied" at
the main theme of 1st movement, and a quotation of Beethoven's op.  81
(Lebewohl) --a Mahler's favourite-- at the finale of the same movement.
Those are, indeed "details of his life and working method".

>I never claimed that Mahler's so value was for his deconstructions of his
>own age - indeed if it were we wouldn't be interested in him except as a
>kind of musical Spengler - but it is part of his value, and part of the
>engine which drove him.

My point is the following: as a deconstructive work or a parody of cultural
history Mahler's ninth is, in 1909, already *impotent*. A "tragic" fate,
indeed.?What kind of parody are we going to perceive in a work which
musical history, by those times, had overpassed?.Webern had begun to
suspend tonal functions at least four years ago, and Mahler knew very well
those attempts. Actually, there's a great self-irony in hs famous words:
"mein zeit es noch wird kommen".

Pablo Massa
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