Gustav Mahler: sublime music, suspicious "physiognomy"

"Saturated with lachrymose melodies, dirgelike rhythms and the ghastly, fatal oompahs of sad waltzes," writes the music professor David Schiff, in The Nation, "the songs and symphonies of Gustav Mahler prophetically mourn the victims of twentieth-century catastrophes the composer died too soon to witness, or perhaps even imagine."

How can Schiff make such a bold, seemingly anachronistic claim? Because Mahler's influence can be heard in many composers who did, in one way or another, chronicle the horrors of the century that followed 1900: Alban Berg, Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten, Leonard Bernstein, and others.

In his lifetime, however, Mahler hardly seemed such a central figure: "French composers dismissed him as German, Germans considered him to be Viennese and the Viennese either admired or detested him for being a Jew." ("Never mind the sublime notes; it all came down to the nose," Schiff writes.)

(Photo via the Nation. Credit: NYPL / Astor, Tilden and Lenox foundations)