"Mahler broke every so-called classical form, It's a symphonic poem, if you want, a creation of the world there."
"His music is a never-ending cornucopia of magic. It goes on expanding and growing, like the expanding universe."
"You can't listen to Gustav Mahler's music and not confront the question of music as an expression of life."
Gustav Mahler was born on July 7th, 1860, in Kaliste, Bohemia, a Czech province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He was the son of Marie and Bernard Mahler, a Jewish innkeeper. Gustav was the second of 14 children, Soon after his birth his family moved to Iglau, now Jihlava, in the Czech Republic. It was here, in this garrison town, on the road from Prague to Vienna that Mahler's early childhood experiences had a profound influence on his musical life.
"Mahler grew up in a small village and he must have as people in villages too, have very strong appreciation of the purposes for which music is most fundamentally used in society: to march off to war, to mourn the dead, to serenade loved ones, to sing when the crops are brought in, All of these basic primal reasons for which every culture develops music."
"He knew songs very early on, and he had a little accordion. and he used to go round the town and play these songs. One day he's supposed to have followed the soldiers with his accordion. and this is how one realised he was so gifted musically. His father understood that he should not contradict this tremendous vocation Mahler had. and that he must allow it to develop."
Mahler was Jewish, but his musical education began in Iglau's Catholic church, and he was given piano lessons by the choirmaster. Tragically, his musical growth was accompanied by the deaths of many of his brothers and sisters. In all, nine out of 14 children died during Mahler's early life. At the age of six he attempted his first composition - ironically, a polka with an introductory funeral march.
"He saw much-loved brothers and sisters being taken off - carried out of the back door and lost forever. Meanwhile, through the front door came people for merriment and drink. So the experience of death is casualised, trivialised and at the same time intermingled with a bizarre, macabre jollity that is quite clearly heard within his music."
"Mahler learnt about irony, before he learnt about life. The omnipresence of funeral marches in his music in every symphony there is a funeral march of sorts. He was surrounded by death, He was near the military barracks where he heard the bugle calls and that was a kind of symbolism of war, of conflict."
At home, Mahler's father had a reputation for violence, and the boy often witnessed brutal scenes between his parents. One incident left an indelible imprint on his memory, During one row he was so frightened, he ran out on to the street where an organ grinder was playing a popular song, Ach, du lieber Augustin. This contrast between the tragic and the banal would become a hallmark of Mahler's musical style. Meanwhile, Bernard Mahler, despite his irrational behaviour was astute enough to encourage Gustav's talents, rather than force him into the family business.
"He allowed his son to start a life as a musician which was not the best way of making money. So he knew what art was, and he knew that only in the Vienna Conservatory could this gift be realised."
The Piano Quartet is Mahler's only surviving student composition - inspired by Brahms and Schumann and written when he was 15. At the Vienna Conservatory, Mahler fell under the spell of the then controversial Richard Wagner. As a piano student he won several prizes, but realised his dream was to compose and quickly acquired a distinctive style of his own.
"The very early works have in them already manifest the Mahler we meet throughout his life, A case in point is the Klagende Lied - that early cantata - which if you study it has so many of the fully developed features and some of the most original features, which we value most of the Mahler of his maturity."
"It's music from the forest - hunting horns, military music, folk songs, and Klagende Lied presents that music almost unadorned to us. You have this echo of hunting horns at the beginning... Normal horns would have gone... But Mahler's horns go... in the cracks between the harmonies. Where do I belong? In the major side of things... or the minor side of things? That was his question for his entire life."
Mahler entered Das Klagende Lied for the Beethoven Prize in Vienna in an attempt to launch a composing career, but the jury failed to appreciate its originality and, devastated, Mahler had to consider a career as an opera conductor.
"He said to friends:"If I had got this reward, I would not have been compelled to go to the theatre". But I think that's nonsense, because a reward of about 500 or 600 gilders cannot nourish him for so many years, and it would not have influenced his career as a composer. He learned a lot about the orchestra when he was conducting. This was an excellent school for him."
Mahler worked at leading opera houses such as Budapest and Prague. He also gained a reputation as a womaniser, including a string of affairs with leading sopranos. In 1886 he started his 1st Symphony conceived as a symphonic poem called The Titan. It's the story of a hero, Mahler himself, and his journey through life to death.
"It's extraordinary to me that Mahler started exactly as he meant to go on, At 29 he created a symphony that was a manifesto of his intentions. And the very opening bars where this extraordinary character emerges from a brave new dawn, to face this uncertain future is hypnotic. At first it's almost imperceptible, the sound we hear, this hazy, dewy harmonic. It's only when your ear becomes attuned to it, that you realise it goes down through the orchestra, through many octaves, then you get these parched woodwinds, little flurries of fanfares, and little bird-calls high in the oboes. I can't imagine how this music must have sounded to audiences in 1889."
"The first movement is as long as a Mozart Symphony. Mahler had the first idea from here, how to break the classical symphony. Maybe it's outrageous to say that, maybe he hadn't thought of that. Maybe he wanted to write a classical symphony but he broke the length. A Mahler symphony is much bigger than any classical symphony."
While Mahler was director of the opera at Budapest, he gave the premiere of his 1 st Symphony. It was a disaster. The orchestra found it too difficult, the critics hated it, and the audience were baffled.
"It's obvious that a work as original as the 1 st Symphony, which included a very strange movement based on the folk song Frere Jacques, and which is treated as a grotesque funeral march could not possibly have been understood by the public. Mahler himself said that he walked, for several days after the performance around Budapest, with everybody thinking he was a madman."
While writing the 1st, Mahler also composed his first major song cycle: Lieder Eines Fahrenden Gesellen, or Songs of a Wayfarer, inspired by the lure of nature. He integrated some of this music into his 1st Symphony.
Isn't it a beautiful world?
"The relationship of this to the 1st Symphony is obvious. The themes are wandering in and out. I think that it was his first major work and first germination of a major thought process, where bounding from song to symphony, and symphony to song starts its gestation."
The Gesellen Lieder were inspired by an anthology of folk texts - Des Knaben Wunderhorn, or Youth's Magic Horn - which Mahler had known since childhood. They encapsulate many of the experiences of Mahler's early life, and he used the text in his next three symphonies.
"These poems captured his imagination. They were full of whimsical and fairy-tale charm, and a grim irony which Mahler immediately latched on to. These songs are an enormous influence on his early symphonies, and they formed an emotional climacteric of these pieces. Anyone who cannot sing this song can whistle it! Yes!"
Mahler had developed a fantastic reputation as a conductor, but gained notoriety for insisting on long rehearsals to achieve perfection. He had to leave Budapest because of nationalist intrigues, and secured a post at the Hamburg Opera as Music Director. Mahler decided to devote his summer holidays entirely to composing. The stunning scenery at Steinbach by the Attersee in Austria was the perfect spot to stimulate his creativity. So it was here in 1891 , at the age of 30, that he built his first composing hut.
"The result of these summers of the Hamburg period, are the two biggest symphonies he composed - the 2nd and the 3rd - and these were composed largely in Steinbach am Attersee, where he was able to find the peace and quiet to compose what he called "symphonic universes""
In his 2nd Symphony he tried to come to terms with his religious convictions. An agnostic, he struggled with notions of immortality and salvation. He expanded these ideas in the 3rd and 4th to celebrate all creation.
"This hut here in Steinbach is the first one that Mahler had built for his summer composing. He composed two or three of the Knaben Wunderhorn songs here, and also worked on the 2nd and 3rd Symphonies. It's a fantastic place. To think - out of this hut comes this incredible natural universe that explodes into the 2nd Symphony."
"The 2nd Symphony turned symphonic composition on its head. It came off the 1st in the sense that the hero of the 1 st Symphony, the Titan of the 1 st Symphony was being borne to his grave, amidst all kinds of questions about why he had lived. And, of course, the hero was Mahler himself. What was the meaning of life? Would it be revealed in death? Was it all some kind of joke? All these inner uncertainties which he was wrestled with all his life. The agnostic in him really came to the surface."
"Mahler's music is incredibly emotionally charged in so many different ways, Not just in a sad way, but also in a fantastically beautiful, hopeful way. When I sing Mahler's music or even just learn a piece. I haven't done before. I go through a whole emotional period of discovering. He finds true beauty, which is that ugliness is sometimes beautiful in its reality. And even his key relationships - he sometimes never returns to a key. But that's like life, it evolves, and his motifs that he works with in symphonies and songs, they evolve. That's what he said himself. It's nature."
Man languishes in great need! Man languishes in great pain! I wouId rather be in heaven!
In February, 1895, Mahler received the tragic news, that his favourite brother, Otto, had shot himself. Mahler was profoundly shocked, and had always considered Otto a more talented musician than himself. At the same time, the financial restraints of Hamburg gave Mahler fewer opportunities to achieve his ambitious artistic goals. He tried to manoeuvre himself into the most prestigious musical post in Europe: Director of the Vienna State Opera. Only one obstacle stood in his way: he was a Jew. If he wanted the job he would have to adopt the official State religion.
"Mahler's conversion to Catholicism, as he made clear at the time, was purely to get the job. When he came out of the church in which he was baptised, he bumped into an acquaintance, a critic called Ludwig Karpath and said:"I've just changed my coat", the person inside remains the same. He did not subscribe to any particular religion. He had a very sincere belief in God, the creator of the universe, but wasn't going to be pinned down to any canon or any credo. He was going to continue searching for what he felt was the true belief."
In May, 1 897, at the age of 36, Mahler was appointed Music Director of the Vienna Opera with limitless powers to hire and fire whom he wished. Within a few months, he had won huge critical acclaim, but these results were not achieved easily.
"His relations to the orchestra were very complicated. He dismissed many musicians and engaged new ones, especially in the brass and the woodwind. And I think many musicians hated him, because they feared him."
"As well as conductor, he was producer, stage manager, lighting and everything. He knew exactly what he wanted with these operas. He was a dictator and totally ruthless too. As far as sacking people was concerned, he got rid of incompetent stage hands. He was a terror, from all accounts, and yet the results were fabulous."
Mahler arrived in Vienna at the most exciting moment in its cultural history. A new and adventurous group of artists led by the painter, Gustav Klimt had broken away from the conservative Vienna Academy of Arts. forming the Secessionist Movement. Mahler supported them by using one of their designers, Alfred Roller, to create new stagings for his productions. Mahler's ideals also inspired a young avant garde group of musicians who gathered around the composer, Arnold Schoenberg. Mahler now began his 4th Symphony, the last to be linked to the Wunderhorn texts. He also searched for a new summer refuge where he could compose in the same peace and tranquillity he had enjoyed at Steinbach.
"In 1901 , he decided to build a house of his own, and for this he selected Carinthia, the sunniest part of Austria, and he built a house on the edge of the Worthersee. There was a forest down to the lake, where the house was built, but there was a path up to this little Hauschen in which he composed all the symphonies from the 4th on."
"He came here at six in the morning. He had a little piano in here, and a bookshelf with works by Kant and Goethe, and notes by Bach. The cook had to bring up the coffee in the morning. She had to take another path, because he didn't want to see anybody."
"When you've got these sounds in your mind. I mean, to actually get them down on paper - how do you do it? It's the most extraordinary sort of magical process, and anything that interferes with it. Imagine, any moment in any of the symphonies, someone saying ''dinner's ready!'' It would be gone, you'd have to get it back again. And I think he lived in a world of amazing sounds no one had heard before. And anything - a child crying or a bird singing - would freak him out."
"He's always been made out to be a self-obsessed megalomaniac, but he was an extremely practical man. You don't run opera companies, like Hamburg and Vienna, unless you're very practical and a superb businessman."
Mahler had had little critical success with his own music, but he was at his creative height, forging ahead with his 5th Symphony. His work at the State Opera made him the most famous, and after the Emperor, the most revered man in Vienna. His machinations at the opera were recounted daily in the newspapers. Even taxi drivers would point him out in the street. In November, 1901 , when he was 41, he was introduced to Alma Schindler, She was an accomplished pianist and composer but more importantly, at 22, she was one of the most alluring women in Vienna, and had already attracted the attention of the city's most famous artists. It wasn't long before Mahler fell under her spell.
"He was entranced by Alma who was an extraordinarily beautiful woman. Mahler was no oil painting and was about two feet shorter than she was. so he looked up to her in all sorts of ways, But he was jealous of her and there were men in her life that he took exception to."
"She ensnared Gustav Klimt, the finest artist in Vienna before she was 18 years old. She then had the young composer Alexander von Zemlinsky, but left him for Mahler and thought "I've got the greatest man in Vienna"."
"The exciting thing about Alma is all those famous men. How did she do it? Who was she? But it happened to her quite naturally, they were all in her milieu. these wonderful men at this wonderful time. She had something which is very difficuIt to describe. She had a luminosity, and she was interesting herself."
"For a man of provincial origin, all these things were fascinating, and she was also fascinated because she had an instinct for genius. She knew he was the greatest musician, and most famous person in Vienna, and being the wife of a famous man was obviously her mission."
Within four months of their meeting, they married in Vienna's Karlskirche. This was the happiest period of Mahler's life, and Alma assisted him in the composition of his 5th Symphony.
"Perhaps the most famous part of the 5th Symphony is the Adagietto, primarily because of its appearance on the soundtrack of Visconti's Death in Venice."
"When Death in Venice was first shown at a private screening in Hollywood, the producer said:"Hey, who wrote the music for this thing?" Someone said:"Oh, Gustav Mahler" and he says:"Can we sign him?"
"The piece is very spiritual and very spare, and very simple in many ways. Many people describe it as a love song or a love letter to Alma, but I think it's as much about Mahler, his solitude, his inwardness."
During his most blissful period, Mahler wrote some of his darkest music. From the 5th Symphony onwards there is a shift in his artistic perspective. His symphonies are no longer a search for a spiritual existence. they are about the tragedies of human experience.
"The premonition of the trilogy of his three internal symphonies, the 5th, 6th and 7th, for whatever reason each one starts with the Marche Funebre, Trauermarsch - and is a premonition of death, which started so early in his life. Because one is.. And the other one.. is a march of the 6th. If you analyse the mood and spirit of the music, it's a Trauermarsch, And then look at the beginning of the 7th.. and again the same rhythm, then the big trombone melody starts. I think there is something in those three symphonies which makes such a unity in the sense of the development. One symphony from the previous one, certainly, but also moodwise, they need to elaborate a concept of the Marche Funebre, Trauermarsch. I think this was a premonition for the tragedies which would follow in his life."
In his next symphony Mahler tried to cope with the idea of his own fate. The 6th is a psychological study of Mahler's emotional responses to his own impending sense of doom.
"What a person is thinking shows in the music, and he develops out of that his marvellous Freudian idea, that not what you see in him, but what he thinks, what he feels."
"He had these black moments of despair:"Everything is going to turn out badly, the musicians won't like me, they won't like my piece, I'll have to leave town again, they'll say I'm a Jew again" - that was certainly part of his nature. He had to really set down what that was so that he could be free of it."
The last movement of the 6th, includes some of the most emotional and frightening music he'd ever write.
"I've for a long time found the 6th Symphony the one work that I really don't want to hear. If I went to a live performance, it would almost give me a heart attack, the finale is so overwhelming. I haven't listened to it either live or on record for about 20 years. But I can still think the whole piece through - which is enough."
With the arrival of their second child, Alma began to object to Mahler spending so much time away, particularly during the summer while he was composing. Even when he wasn't composing, he would set off on his own in pursuit of nature, going for walks in the mountains, cycling, as well as swimming or rowing on the Worthersee. During his scarce moments at home, their interests would rarely coincide.
"He was a very intellectual, well-read man, Plato, Goethe, all the German philosophers, and you can feel sorry for Alma, because his idea of a cosy evening was to sit down and read aloud when she would like to have gone to a party. So in the end, things didn't go too well in that marriage."
"He was a very highly strung, nervous character. Fond of children but wouldn't want them around all the time, and slightly at odds with his wife - loved her, but didn't want her stealing his thunder - she was a composer too - and kept her under his thumb."
"There must have been a lot of resentment. After all, she was deeply temperamental. It took her a long time to understand how great Mahler was. He was a great conductor, he was a great personage. She felt the power of his personality, but his music didn't, until much later, really move her. So she felt this was a beautiful thing she was doing, to give herself to his music, rather than her own. But I think it took its toll on her from inside."
Alma also objected to Mahler composing the Kindertotenlieder, or Songs on the Death of Children, based on texts by Ruckert. With two children of their own, Alma found the songs distasteful, But Mahler had begun the cycle before his marriage, and he strongly identified with Ruckert's moving poetry.
"If there's a personal element to this cycle it's from Ruckert himself. He wrote 400 songs on the death of children, but he wrote poetry in the first person, and Mahler writes in a letter why Ruckert's poetry. Because after Des Knaben Wunderhorn, which was a collection of poetry that he could use from first person experience, as a literal narration of "this happened to that person", The only poet he felt he could go to after that was Ruckert."
"The Kindertotenlieder focus on the raw emotion of dealing with death, and even worse, your children dying. In this weather, in this storm. Each song looks around at the world, and sees nature in every image. And also the anger, like in the last song - it's storming, it's raining, it's terrible - and the music storms even more than the words, the way Mahler set it. All of the songs of the Kindertotenlieder are terribly painful."
Without fear of the storm, With God's hand to cover them, They rest as in their mother's home.
"He wrote these Songs on the Death of Children, Kindertotenlieder. and sure enough, one of his children died in rather tragic circumstances, and he felt haunted by that. I think he was haunted by death throughout. It was a constant theme in his music."
"He must have had on top of it a feeling of strange guilt, because she asked him not to write the songs, and it must have been a terrible shock."
"He dropped everything and went away, left her to handle the funeral, told her to sell the house and went off into the mountains to find, as he said, solace for his own troubled heart. He didn't pay any attention to her suffering. He was prepared to let her suffer alone. so, yes, the death of the daughter was something that pulled them apart. But it wasn't the tragedy itself, but the way that Mahler reacted to it."
In a bizarre premonition, Mahler has predicted his future in his earlier 6th Symphony by writing "the three hammer blows of fate" in the last movement. Now they would return to haunt him. Within weeks of his daughter's death, he was diagnosed with a heart condition, and forced to resign from the Opera after an anti-Semitic press campaign. accused him of spending too much time conducting his own music abroad.
"Mahler put up on the notice board, his farewell message to the company, saying what he'd striven for, the successes and the failures, and thanking them for all they'd done. It was found ripped to pieces. He had a lot of enemies."
"Over the space of a few weeks, he'd lost the only job he ever wanted - Director of the Opera in Vienna - he'd lost his beloved elder child, and he'd been told that he had to live as a semi-invalid, and couldn't take the vigorous exercise that he loved and felt he needed. So to him it felt like a death sentence."
Mahler completed his 8th Symphony a few weeks before his daughter died. Now he feared his own death. Beethoven, Schubert and Bruckner had all died after their 9th Symphonies, and Mahler was too superstitious to write his own 9th. So he composed a symphonic song cycle, based on ancient Buddhist texts recently translated from the Chinese. He called it Song of the Earth.
"This head-over-heels of song and symphony and symphony and song culminates in what is quite frankly a song and a symphony together. We have sung moments and symphonic moments - it's the complete synthesis. You could probably find a germ of every piece of music he ever wrote in it. It's a huge testament."
The sun is setting, behind the mountains. In every valley, night is falling. with cool shadows.
"It's a farewell but it's having come to terms with the fight through life, and come out the other side and realising it's all spirit, and that all the things around us, the things we own and say, the bad feelings we might have about people. they just... shed - and just pure love."
"He's no longer talking about resurrection. He's found his true religion, if you like, as a pantheist. I believe he had, and that's what's so incredibly moving about Das Lied von der Erde, because he's returning to the earth."
"The Buddhist philosophy which is very strong in the Lied von der Erde, the acceptance of oblivion, resignation to mortality, the reconciliation to the idea of mortality. Because Das Lied von der Erde dissolves in a wonderful burst of radiance, not in depression. But in radiance of oneness, if you like, with the world."
Mahler had resigned from the greatest musical institution in Europe. Now he was approached by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Its manager, Heinrich Conried, asked Mahler to be their Music Director.
"To be the chief director of the opera house in Vienna, he had to do a hundred operas. Not only conduct them, but direct them, and deal with the administration for 3000 dollars a year, which was a sizeable amount of money. perhaps one of the larger fees in Europe. The Director of the Metropolitan Opera however was willing to pay him 15,000 dollars for three months work. Now what would you do? Mahler wanted to compose, he wanted to be in peace and quiet. He knew he was ill and wanted to leave his family financially secure. So when he was offered 15,000 dollars for three months work, he said:"I'll be right over"
"There was this very touching scene one morning in December, 1907, when Mahler and Alma turned up on the railway platform in Vienna, and the whole of Viennese cultural life had turned out to greet them. As the train pulled out, Gustav Klimt, the great artist uttered the fateful word,"Vorbei" - "It's over". And what he meant was that the cultural revolution in Vienna was over. The progressive forces that Mahler had represented, the belief in a new art had gone with Mahler, on that train to a new world, to another place."
Mahler arrived in New York to face yet more political in-fighting. Conried was given the sack, and his replacement brought in a young ambitious ltalian conductor - one Arturo Toscanini. Mahler realised the Met wasn't big enough for both of them, so he took up an offer from the New York Philharmonic - his first post as Chief Conductor of a Symphony Orchestra. During the summer, the Mahlers could no longer bear to live at Maiernigg. Instead, they found a spot in the Tyrol at Toblach, where Gustav composed. He built his third composing hut in 1908, when he was 48, and it was here that he wrote his last music.
"Everyone thinks of the last movement with its emotional Adagio, which is one of the most moving pieces ever written by anyone. But one forgets that there are moments in which the desire to live and work, and to exist in every possible way, is just as strong as the presence of death."
"I've always felt the 9th Symphony is one of the most sophisticated dissolutions of metered time, that we know in human existence. By the end of the symphony, you have no more orientation to those successive moments of life - you have become part of the ether. It is a most extraordinary unravelling of rhythmic-centricity that we need in music to understand, to know where our balance is. By the time the 9th Symphony's over, you are unbalanced, You've been transported somewhere within your own consciousness. You're forced to reflect on what it is to be human and alive."
"I think it's a requiem for the child. He must have been thinking about his child. That's why there's the reference to Kindertotenlieder in it. It's strange that at the end of the symphony, he should quote that very line about children in the sunlight. Why did he suddenly think of that?"
In the sunshine, the day is bright on yonder heights!
The final twist of fate in Mahler's life occurred only months before his death. His music was beginning to achieve the recognition it deserved. and he was preparing for one of the highlights of his career: a performance of his massive 8th Symphony. The strain had taken its toll on Alma, who had become an alcoholic. At a sanatorium she started an affair with a young architect, Walter Gropius. Mahler was devastated by Alma's infidelity and blamed himself entirely. Paranoid with insecurity and guilt, he sought the help of the psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud.
"Freud said:"I think that Alma's problem is you. If you relax a little bit with your obsession, probably your relationship is going to be easier" But I have a feeling that the man knew the nature of the lady, the beauty of the lady, and the character of the lady. So how could he trust a serene quiet ending between the two of them? It's not possible and I regret this happened because, it's very unfair, when you are dying, and have had a great physical crisis as he had in the last years - it's very unfair, the whole story. I've nothing against Gropius who was one of the great architects of his time. But the moment where it happened is awful, and the most tasteless thing I could ever think."
In the gloom of despair, knowing he'd lost his wife to a younger man. Mahler wrote his final symphony. Its heart-rending dissonances, stretch the bounds of harmony and tonality to its limits.
"The music is incredibly intense and passionate, and probably reflects this terrible guilt he had at the time, that he'd almost lost Alma. It was a terrible realisation for him. and as always, it was poured into the music. But it was achieved in such a refined way. The central climax of that Adagio is extraordinary, It's like a series of piling up organ chords, one dissonance upon another. And here with just the single trumpet note held like a knife through the heart. And then these anguished chords around it. Never was Mahler's grief, anguish, passion, expressed more succinctly."
"It was an extraordinary time of turmoil for him, and it finds its expression in the 1 0th Symphony with exclamations written in the score, directly over the music, both of a sort of terror, I think, the fear of losing her, and in the Finale an avowal of love for her written over the last bars. He writes:"fur dich leben, fur dich sterben" - "to live for you, to die for you", and at the bottom of the page, his private name for his wife, "Almschi"."
Mahler never finished his 10th Symphony. He died on the 18th of May, 1911. He was 50. Mahler laid the foundations for modernism in music. His influence on Schoenberg, Berg and Webern was colossal. But his lasting effect on the music of the whole of the 20th century has been immeasurable.
"Mahler wrote the music he wanted to write. He didn't follow fashions. He followed the dictates of his heart and soul, and in the process he took music somewhere else."
"His music takes one beyond what one is able to bear, because it's a relief, and because it's a freedom."
"I know I'm alive when I'm listening to it, but I'm on higher plane. Music is the the most magical of arts, and Mahler is one of the most magical of its practitioners."
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