It is the Jew unable to feel faith or joy or content
because he is unable to live out his own life. It is the Jew consumed by
bitterness because he is perpetually untrue to himself. It is the Jew
afraid to die because he has never really lived himself out. It is the
Jew as he is when he wants most to cease being a Jew. Mahler could have
seemed no more the Jew had he expressed himself in all his Hebraic
fervor instead of singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking to
reconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a "higher synthesis." Only, it
would have been good music instead of a nondescript and mongrel thing
that he composed. All that he really attained by hampering himself was
sterility.
And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it was not solely the
environment, however much that favored it, that condemned Mahler to
sterility. Did we have no example of a Jewish musician attaining
creativity through the frank expression of his Semitic characteristics,
we might presume that no choice existed for Mahler, and that it is
inevitable that the Jew, whenever he essays the grand style, becomes
just what Wagner called him in his brilliant and brutal pamphlet, a
pretender. But, fortunately, such an example does exist. Geneva, "la
ville Protestante," that saw unclose the art of Ernest Bloch, was, after
all, not much more eager to welcome a Jewish renaissance than was the
Vienna of Gustav Mahler.
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