"
And he had large and dramatic programs for his symphonies. The First
should have been a sort of Song of Youth, a farewell to the thing that
is alive in us before we meet the world, and is shattered in the
collision. The Second should have been the Song of Death, the music of
the knowledge of death. The Third was conceived as a Song of the Great
Pan--his "gaya scienza," Mahler would have liked to call it. In the
Fourth he sought to open the heart of a child; in the Sixth, to voice
his desolation and loneliness and hopelessness; in the Eighth, to
perform a great religious ceremony; in "Das Lied von der Erde" to write
his "Tempest," his epilogue.
And in general plan, his symphonies are original enough. Mahler was
completely emancipated of all the old prejudices concerning the nature
of the symphony. He conceived the form anew. "Mir heiszt Symphonic," he
is reported to have said, "mit allen mitteln der vorhaendenen Technik mir
eine Welt aufbauen." He conceived the form particularly with reference
to the being, the exigencies, the frame, of the modern concert hall. He
realized that the shortness of the classic symphonies handicaps them
severely in the present day. For modern audiences require an hour and a
half or two hours of musical entertainment.
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