Dear Nathaniel,

It's almost 5 o'clock, and I've spent all afternoon reading
about Gustav Mahler on the Internet, and downloading some of
the poetry which he wove into his music. Obviously the literary
aspect of his work is more accessible to me than are his symphonies.
But I think I get the point, and I thank you very much for
helping me understand, for sharing your enthusiasms, for
listening and following the score with me. I expect to continue
to listen to Mahler's music, and perhaps, in the course of the
years that are left to me, my understanding might grow.

My immediate reaction to the music we listened to, and especially
to the score that we followed, is that Mahler was above all a
conductor - there's nothing wrong with that, - whose profession
brought him into very intimate contact with the music that preceded
his; he absorbed not only the work of Mendelssohn and Schumann,
but of Schubert and Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Bach. I thought
I heard phrases and harmonies of various older composers find some,
albeit fleeting expression in his work. Even more: the literary tradition
and spiritual ambience which shaped his life resounds in his music,
unmistakable, loud and clear. In the Second Symphony, the pietist
stanza "Urlicht" from Des Knaben Wunderhorn, that thesaurus of
popular fantasy which was for decades the raw material of Romantic
poetry production; "Auferstehung" (resurrection) an extract from
Klopstock's Geistliche Lieder (spiritual songs), which is the
conventional title of the hymnals that are stored in brackets on the
back of each pew of German Protestant churches. Most remarkably,
Klopstock's pieties were insufficient for Mahler to an extent that
he felt compelled to supplement them with poetry of his own, such
as is worthy of a Lutheran Pastor's ordination, or perhaps a Catholic
priest's consecration. I don't know that much about the Catholics.
What I've read of Mahler's poetry strikes me as being quite good.
I can sympathize with his preoccupation with resurrection, when I
remind myself that 6 of his siblings died in childhood, and his
parents died before he was thirty. I'm convinced that Mahler's
expressions of religious ecstasy were sincere; and I suspect it's
the sincerity of Mahler's passion that has caught your ear and has
enchanted you. Arguably Mahler's contemporary popularity might be
explained by the circumstance that his music expresses a spirituality
which is deemed by modern standards to be politically and socially
incorrect. Remarkably, your appreciation of Mahler is quite analogous
to my parents' appreciation of Bach, whose music expressed for them
an intangible reality to which they had no other access.  Accordingly
I hear in Mahler's music a trumpet that summons from my past into
your future.

By a strange conincidence, while web-surfing the history of American
symphony orchestras, refreshing my memories of Serge Koussevitzky,
I came across a reference to a concert performance recording in
Symphony Hall in March 1937, of the Saint Matthew Passion. My parents,
had been in the habit of making an annual Good Friday pilgrimage to
the Thomas Kirche in Leipzig to hear this work, and when year after year
the winter's snows melted and spring came to the Virginia mountains
they felt increasingly trapped and deprived. Leipzig lay in ruins
and the local radio had nothing to offer but gospel preaching and
hillbilly music.  On the occasion of my first escape from there,
in the autumn of 1942, the year I went to Germantown Friends School
as an eighth grader, I made it my business to find a Saint Matthew
Passion recording for them.  Of course, I would have preferred one in
German, but the Koussevitzky recording in English was the only one
available. The 78 r.p.m. discs came in three volumes, the first with ten,
the third with about nine, and the second with about eight records,
which sold for a dollar a piece; there was, if I remember, no charge
for the album. It required several trips to the record store,
H. Royer Smith, on Walnut Street in downtown Philadelphia. (the oldest
music store in the US, founded in 1759) Finally I was able to bring
the last of the albums to Konnarock. They were much listened to and
much appreciated by my parents; but none of the locals whose ears were
attuned to hillbilly rhythms, could understand what it was all about.
One of the records' edges had been sheared off.  I remember exactly
which, and the aria "Sehet Jesus hat die Hand uns zu fassen ausgespannt"
did not become familiar to me until years later when as a college student,
I bought an LP version in German at McKenna's in Harvard Square.
Now, after I pick up the three disk CD package from the library,
I'll let the music take my memory back sixty-five years.  Maybe when
you listen to the English version, you won't fall asleep.  It might
even remind you of the chorale in one of Gustav Mahler's symphonies.

Yoyo