The finale of the Ninth Symphony with its blare and crash, its chorus
screaming on high C, its Turkish March with cymbals and bass-drum, is
not entirely inspired, most folk will agree. And yet, for all his
shortcomings, the wonders of Beethoven are innumerable. There are the
many quartets with their masterly invention and composition, the First
and Sixth Symphonies with their immortal youth and freshness, their
hearty strength and simplicity, the deeply beautiful passages and
movements to be found in nearly every one of his works. There is all the
wonderful solidity that Mahler, for instance, never achieved. For in
poor Mahler's work we feel only the intention, rarely the achievement.
We feel him agonizedly straining, pushing and laboring, trying to
manufacture his banal thematic material into music by the application of
all the little contrapuntal formulas. We find him relying finally upon
physical apparatus, upon sheer brute force. His symphonies abound in
senseless repetitions, in all sorts of eye-music. And in the Eighth
Symphony, the apotheosis of his reliance on the physical, he calls for a
chorus of a thousand men, women and children, and at the end, I believe,
the descent of the Holy Ghost. But the ultimate effect is exactly the
reverse of what Mahler planned.
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