Keeping Score, Gustav Mahler, Part 2, Legacy:

1. Mahler grew up listening to rustic dances, military marches, and the delicate sounds of nature.
2. Sometimes Mahler’s songs grew into symphonies.
3. Mahler was considered an artistic god but a difficult guy to deal with.
4. Mahler introduced new repertoire by modern composers like Puccini, Strauss and Tchaikovsky.
5. Mahler insisted on large number of rehearsals.
6. Not only did Mahler conduct the operas, but he also directed them.
7. In the Rückert Lieder, Mahler’s music found new tenderness.
8. Mahler wrote the final Rückert song for Alma, her soon to be wife.
9. Like Beethoven and Schubert, physical activity seemed to stimulate Mahler and free his creativity
and imagination.
10. Mahler started composing his 6th symphony right after finishing his 5th, but the two are so
different in feeling and tone.
11. Mahler said that writing his 6th symphony took him to the brink of suicide.
12. The 6th symphony is the most unflinching exploration of man's destructive impulses that Mahler
ever undertook.
13. The 6th symphony presented a vision of life without hope, a life battled by faith, symbolized by
an instrument Mahler specified for this piece, an enormous wooden hammer.
14. The 7th symphony explores the exotic and the manic, there is a start and stop quality in it.
15. In the 4th symphony Mahler asks the first violinist to play a deliberately mis-tuned instrument so
it would sound like a rough fiddler.
16. Mahler enjoyed throwing in other instruments for local colors.
17. After his daughter's loss, Mahler was devastated.
18. Mahler thought New York would be a place where he would make a lot of money and be free of
social-political intrigues, but he was wrong.
19. At the Met opera in New York, Mahler was replaced by Toscanini.
20. The first piece Toscanini wanted to conduct at the Met was Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde.
21. Mahler did great things with the New York Philharmonic, he expanded the repertoire, and raised
the level of performance.
22. Mahler’s the songs of the earth was based on ancient Chinese text, of an artist exiled for being
too truthful.
23. In the last movement of the songs of the earth, Mahler returned to the same motive he used to
begin the songs of a Wayfarer.
24. The Rondo-Burlesque from the 9th symphony, is a parody of Mahler himself.
25. In the last movement of the 9th symphony, Mahler rings every last drop of pathos and
expression from his beloved Wayfarer motive.
26. Mahler began to sketch a 10th symphony, exploring a whole new musical world, the manuscript
witnesses the pain he was feeling, in the pages there are lines like: The devil dances with me, may I
forget I exist? May I cease to be? Only you will understand. Farewell, farewell.
27. The 10th symphony explores a new musical world.
28. Mahler died af the age of 50.
29. Even after his death, he was for long considered more a conductor than a composer, even in his
hometown.
30. Mahler said about the place he asked to be buried: Those who love me will know where to find
me, for anyone else, it makes no difference.