The very size of the apparatus throws
into crudest relief his weariness and uncreativeness. For a moment, a
work like the Eighth Symphony stuns the auditor with its sheer physical
bulk. After all, one does not hear a thousand voices singing together
every day, and the brass and the percussion are very brilliant. Soon,
nevertheless, there insinuates itself the realization that there is in
this work neither the all-creating spirit the composer so magniloquently
invokes, nor the heaven he strives so ardently to attain. They are in
the music of a score of other composers. For these men had lived. And it
was to real life that Mahler never attained.
If his music expresses anything at all, it expresses just the
characteristics that Mahler was most anxious to have it conceal. Life is
the greatest of practical jokers, and Mahler, in seeking to escape his
racial traits, ended by representing nothing so much as the Jew. For if
there is anything visible behind the music of Mahler, it is the Jew as
Wagner, say, describes him in "Das Judentum in der Musik," the Jew who
through the superficial assimilation of the traits of the people among
whom he is condemned to live, and through the suppression of his own
nature, becomes sterile. It is the Jew consumed by malaise and
homesickness, by impotent yearning for the terrain which will permit him
free expression, and which he conceives as an otherwheres, or as a
dream-Palestine.
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