The destiny that had made him Jew decreed that, did he speak out fully,
he would have to employ an idiom that would recall the harsh accents of
the Hebrew language quite as much as that of any tongue spoken by the
peoples of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of the art he
practised, whatever the character of the age in which he lived, he could
not impress himself upon his medium without impregnating it with the
traits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that in speaking he
would have to suffuse musical art with the qualities and characteristics
engraved in the stock by the history and vicissitudes of his race, by
its age-long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the barren hills of
Syria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanic
and terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia,
by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness that
carried it whole across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt
through the eternal Red Sea. But it was just the racial attributes, the
racial gesture and accent, that a man in Mahler's position found
inordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a great
price on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in its
activities only on the condition that he did not remind it continually
of his alienhood, of his racial consciousness.
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