After visiting Beethoven's House in Heiligenstadt (more about that later) we took a short trip to Grinzing to see Mahler's grave. It is a beautiful piece of stonework, simple and moving. Mahler was asked once what he wanted on his gravestone. He said, "Just my name. Those that know me won't need anything more, those that don't won't care.
Mahler is a special composer. His music captures the modern world that was to come and expresses a wistful longing for the loss of the natural world. Alban Berg wrote, " I have played through the 9th Symphony again. The first movement is the finest Mahler has ever written. It is the expression of an unprecedented love of this Earth, the longing to live on it in peace, and to enjoy it and its nature in its most fundamental form - before death comes." He goes on, "Because it will inexorably come. This whole movement is a premonition of death. It appears again and again. All that is earthly and dreamy surges in it..."
Booyah (!) to that. Great music can mean all these things without a word being spoken. When I first listened to that movement, I was in high school. I knew I had experienced something important. I started the record over, and listened again and again. Sad, beautiful, happy... I heard mountains, valleys, love... and of course, death. And that was only the first movement!
I get to hear it live with Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Vienna Philharmonic in Novemeber.
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