Tony Duggan writes:
>Even Adolf Hitler himself admired Mahler as a conductor of Wagner. The
>young Hitler attended performances at the Vienna opera in 1906 where Mahler
>was in the pit and was very complimentary. In a letter Hitler wrote of
>seeing Tristan und Isolde "recreated under the magnetic baton of the Jew
>Mahler."
In Brigitte Hamann's _Hitlers Wien_, a standard work on Hitler's Vienna
years, the author plays back a section of memoirs written at the direction
of the Nazi party by one of Hitler's friends. Hitler is shown as having
been a Mahler partisan even at a time when Mahler had come under heavy
fire from anti-Semitic jingoists. But he liked Mahler for the way he did
Wagner, not for his own works. The Nazi-beholden book of course made sure
to add that the Fuehrer had been pro-Mahler despite his fundamental
distaste for "Israelites... with bent noses"
Denis Fodor