Bar 500. Still resting. The piccolos are about to come in and I am going to lose another decibel of hearing for Gustav Mahler.
You are not allowed to say you don’t like Mahler. Try it sometime — in a lobby, on a forum, at dinner with people who own seasonal orchestra subscriptions. Watch the faces. Conductors love him. Critics love him. Audiences pay good money to weep through eighty minutes of him. To dissent is to out yourself as stupid amateurs.
But musicians feels might differ. I see the looks — backstage, the desperate “here we go again” before tuning, in the half-second of eye contact violins make with their stand partner after a particularly punishing tutti. Mahler is long, loud, and a coarse job.
Take the Second Symphony we’re rehearsing now. He wanted five clarinets, four flutes. At a certain point when all the flutes pick up piccolos, who really needs a resurrection is the second violins in front of us.
Still a lot of rests to count. I have started keeping a folder on my phone of old reviews while waiting for the next entrance:
The drooling and emasculated simplicity of Gustav Mahler! It is not fair to the readers of the Musical Courier to take up their time with a detailed description of that musical monstrosity, which masquerades under the title of Gustav Mahler’s Fourth Symphony. There is nothing in the design, content, or execution of the work to impress the musician, except its grotesquerie… The writer of the present review frankly admits that… to him it was one hour or more of the most painful musical torture to which he has been compelled to submit.
— Musical Courier, New York, November 9, 1904
Mahler had not much to say in his Fifth Symphony and occupied a wondrous time in saying it. His manner is ponderous, his matter imponderable.
— New York Sun, December 5, 1913
Alas for the music of Mahler! What a fuss about nothing! What a to-do about a few commonplace musical thoughts, hardly worthy of being called ideas. Never was the poverty of his invention more apparent than in these songs, in which triviality is the dominant quality.
— L. A. Sloper, Christian Science Monitor, Boston, January 20, 1924
Piccolos incoming. Wish me luck.