The cause of the unsatisfactoriness of much of the
music of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to be
found in the innate weakness of the men themselves rather more than in
the unhealthiness of the atmosphere in which they passed their lives.
Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passing
judgment. Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have
deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that
Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris
instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his
mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's
fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of
the 1860's. For if Mahler's music is pre-eminently a reflection of
Beethoven's, if he never spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vast
dreams of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his honesty, his
sincerity, his industry, his undeniably noble and magnificent traits,
there resulted only those unhappy boring colossi that are his nine
symphonies, it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence of
the fact that he, the Jew, was born in a society that made Judaism,
Jewish descent and Jewish traits, a curse to those that inherited them.
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