You can ponder perpetual motion...

klangklangklang:

Dear Gustav,

This letter has been a long time coming; something I’ve mulled upon for the past couple of years, but never dared give utterance to—until now. How to express these feelings? How to find the right words? I’m not sure even now, but I will try…

This has been a long road we’ve tread; one that I’ve had the fortune of walking along ever since I was 15. I still remember the disgust your music inspired in me upon first hearing. It was so overwrought, I thought, so shamelessly exhibitionist. But I persisted in trying to divine your music’s secrets, hammering at it for the next three years. Then I discovered the Adagio from your 10th Symphony, easily one of the most perfect things you or anyone has ever composed—and I was immediately won over to your cause.

For a time it seemed I couldn’t get enough of your music, greedily acquiring anything of yours I came across. But time has a way of tempering the passions of youth—and so I find myself feeling differently about you, liebes Gustav.

No, no, don’t get upset. It’s not that I don’t like your music. On the contrary, I still like it very much. The best of it, like the Adagio from the 10th and Das Lied von der Erde, I revere as I do few other musical works. But—how shall I put it? I still like your music. But I’m just not in like with your music, you know what I mean?

I’m not sure how this happened. Really I’ve searched my heart deeply to find what caused me to cool off to you.

Perhaps it’s because your “time has come” with a vengeance. Seemingly everyone and their grandmothers these days are recording your symphonies and songs, regardless of their talent or ability to do justice to your work. What a lot of these people fail to understand is that in many ways you are to the symphony orchestra what Franz Liszt was to the piano. In other words, a composer that so thoroughly revolutionized and reimagined your chosen medium, daring conductors to summon themselves to heights of frenzied virtuosity a la Vladimir Horowitz. The problem is that so many conductors today approach your music with the opposite spirit, revealing themselves to be nothing more than mild-mannered milquetoasts that would probably be more at home with Massenet than Mahler, thereby removing the element of danger and daring so crucial to your music. At least if these people would apply their energies to other composers who are still awaiting their day in the sun. But who wants to hear another tepid run-through of something I know so well, I could play it backwards? And my local symphony orchestra exhorting me to replace my Facebook profile picture with your photo in a bid to “show my Mahler” didn’t help.

Maybe it’s the scores of hagiographers and tonsured acolytes that you’ve left in your wake, each one ascribing to you feats of superhuman or supernatural ability that leave me wondering when the Catholic Church will decide to canonize you. I mean who else has been intimated to foresee the future as often as you have? Countless times have I heard that your music somehow presages or outright predicts the horrors of the First and Second World Wars. Yet if this were true, don’t you think it was kind of a jerk move on your part not to hep the rest of us about the looming disaster? (By the way, were you ever clever enough to use some of that foresight to profit off the ponies? Just a thought.)

The fact that you berate other musicians for their careerist ways (e.g. Richard Strauss), while you yourself were no less a careerist—albeit one embittered for not receiving their level of renown or respect—has certainly served to cool off my passion towards your work. Didn’t you once say that your conversion from Judaism to Catholicism was nothing more than changing a hat?

Don’t get me wrong. Your music—under the right circumstances and in the right hands—still has the power to enchant and move me like few others can. But chalk it up to “maturity” or my progressively disintegrating mental faculties, but these days I find myself unable to really enjoy any of your work outside of the 4th and 9th Symphonies, Adagio from the 10th Symphony (the rest of which—pace Cooke, Wheeler, Carpenter, Barshai, Mazetti, et al—fails to impress me), and Das Lied von der Erde (which I can only bring myself to listen to on very rare and special occasions).

Please rest assured, dear heart, that those moments I spent deciphering your music, unlocking its secrets, and letting it seize me are among the most wonderful in my listening experience. Remember way back in 1998 when I finally “got” Das Lied von der Erde and your music left me a sobbing trainwreck for a good two hours?

But, despite all these treasured memories and experiences, it’s time for me to… move on. No, please, don’t say anything. It’s not you, Gustav—it’s me. Just know that you and your music shall always occupy a tender place in my heart. Only that nowadays you’ll have to make room for Anton Bruckner, Richard Strauss, and Franz Schmidt, among others.

So in short, dearest one… farewell. Or should I say?—leb’wol!

XOXO,

T.