Why The Mahlerian?

"... (With) Mahler it is different. It is true that much of his music can be enjoyed ‘innocently’, that the listener can simply revel in its sensuous beauty and imaginative brilliance. The exquisite floating strings and harp textures that open the famous Adagietto in the Fifth Symphony are simply captivating as sound – no explanation needed. But almost invariably in a Mahler work the listener will sooner or later be forced to ask: why does he do that? Why is a passage of rapt contemplation suddenly interrupted by a violent emotional outburst, or a trivial little tune, or something that sounds alarmingly like mockery? Why does Mahler seem to set out purposefully on a journey, only to change direction suddenly? At such moments, it is hard to resist the impression that there is something in particular that Mahler wants to tell us: that he has a message, something urgently personal or perhaps even philosophical, that he wants us to contemplate.

Mahler’s letters and recorded comments make it clear that he did, even if he found it difficult to put this message into words. When his first two symphonies appeared, he provided them with elaborate literary programmes to guide the listener towards what he felt their meaning was. The trouble here was that he could be taken rather literally; one woman even pressed him to tell her what the afterlife was like (he must know, she insisted, since he had portrayed it so movingly in his‘Resurrection’ Symphony). There were times when Mahler must have felt inclined to agree with the composer Felix Mendelssohn, who wrote that ‘the thoughts which are expressed to me by music that I love are not too indefinite to be put into words, but on the contrary, too definite’. In other words, musical thoughts are real enough, but they are musical thoughts. They express things and obey laws that are peculiar to music."

From: Mahler - his life and work. Stephen Johnson