So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul of Gustav Mahler. In
the place of the united self, there came to exist within him two men.
For while one part of him demanded the free complete expression
necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in the
free flow the hated racial traits would appear. For Mahler would have
been the first to have been repelled by the sound of his own harsh,
haughty, guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have been the
first to turn in contempt from his own gestures. There was in him the
frenetic unconscious desire to rid himself of the thing he had come to
believe inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak in his
proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice of
speaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers;
of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; of
accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving a
power of speech.
And so his work became the doubtful and bastard thing it is, a thing of
lofty and original intentions unrealized, of large powers misapplied, of
great and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringing
into being anything really new, really whole. Of what Mahler might have
achieved had he not been the divided personality, his symphonies, even
as they stand, leave no doubt.
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