Released on YouTube recently, conductor and video producer Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Orchestra perform with his analysis of this pristine pillar of modern music. I have written OEN articles about classical music; the first of these was on the 5th Symphony Adagietto, the greatest musical love letter of all. Mahler will guide your soul to soar and could strike you so deeply and lyrically, you might even weep.

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Above is the video referenced in the article, which I hope you enjoy as much as I did.

[Beethoven will make you feel powerful; Shostakovich will make you feel the fear of War; Mozart will make you feel joy; Bach will make you feel the presence of God; Villa Lobos will bring you to the Amazon.

Mahler will make your soul soar, and, at time, strike you so deeply and lyrically, you might just weep at the absolute beauty you are hearing. When Leonard Bernstein was on his death bed, he knew he was dying and asked for only one thing to be buried with him: the score of Gustave Mahler's Fifth Symphony]

Just released on YouTube a few days ago, Video producer and conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Orchestra perform with his interspersed analysis this pristine pillar of modern music. I have written here on OEN many times about classical music, in particular the first of these articles, the Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony. Here is that one, with the headline video being a performance of the piece of music written about:

Gustave Mahler's Declaration of Love in the Adagietto Movement in his Fifth Symphony--click here

Michael Tilson Thomas went deep into the countrysides of the Czech Republic, Austria and Hungary, to show us Mahler's many compelling influences on his composition: the many military bands in his hometown as they assembled and then marched away, the rural musicians, the synagogue in which he and his family were members, the Catholic church in whose choir he sang in, and rough-hewn music he heard constantly in the tavern owned by his father, one of the few businesses allowed for Jews in the Hapsburg Empire. Also, let us include the presence of death and funeral mu, with 8 of his 13 siblings dying before they reached adulthood.

Honestly, I had forgotten how magnificent is this symphony, and in this emotional time, it has hit me like a ton of bricks, as well it should, and I don't mean in any negative way. In my mind, it was always overpowered by Mahler's Fifth Symphony. I love the way Michael Tilson Thomas uses no score as he conducts, and I love the way Mahler tells all of us in this, his first symphony, the very clear existential message that, yes, everything and anything is still possible, with our intellect and our focus and our effort, even in what we will term The Pandemic Era.

Symphony No. 1 was primarily composed between late 1887 and March 1888, though it expands on music that Mahler had composed for previous works, including the vastly lyrical (and let us even say "existential") Songs from the Earth and Songs for a Wayfarer.

Some conductors and scholars have titled this piece "Titan," despite the fact that Mahler only used this label for the second and third performances, and never after the work had reached its finalized 4-movement form in 1896.

It was composed while Mahler was second conductor at the Leipzig Opera in Germany. In Mahler's letters, he always referred to the work as a symphony, but the first two performances were termed "symphonic poem." It was premièred in 1889 in Budapest.

Mahler made some revisions for the second performance, given at Hamburg in October 1893; and more changes were made in the years before the first publication, at the end of 1898.

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We are absolutely compelled and duty bound to recall the horrible antisemitism he faced as a taken-for-granted minion of the Hapsburg empire, yet of course he looms above all of those emperors and their apparatchiks fawning all over them.

The presence of the anti-semitism played during the lifetime of Gustav Mahler, and many other artists of Jewish descent was overpowering in both artistic and personal senses. Don't think for a minute that Hitler was the first European anti-semitic (although of course it goes without saying that he was the most demonic and most dangerous). Many may think that the rise of hatred against European Jews stemmed from the 1920s and the rise of Hitler's National Socialist Party, but it in fact back much further.

European Jews were on the verge of real emancipation from religious bigotry. Mahler and his family were a case in point.

He was born in 1860 in the town of Iglau in Moravia, close to the border with Bohemia, a military outpost in the defenses against Prussia. His father, Bernhard, a German-born Jew, was a successful tavern owner with a lot education and accumulated wealth.

During the 1700s a major split developed among European Jews: the Haskalah sect was composed of doctors, lawyers, philosophers and business people of all types, who "exhibited an ideal synthesis of loyalty to Judaism and involvement in general culture and society", and its purpose can be defined as 'to bring light to the dark night in which the people of Israel are immersed'.

These were the beliefs that Bernhard Mahler adopted in his early years. The Maskalim bitterly opposed Hasidism and its superstitions as the main obstacle in the way of improving the political, moral, and cultural situation of the Jews.

When Gustav Mahler left Iglau in 1875, nothing dramatic had yet occurred to dash the Jews' hopes of emancipation: he no doubt looked forward to attaining his full civil rights in the capital. Like Mozart a century before, in Vienna he found himself in a tolerant society in which the Jews had been integrated, even though the benefits of assimilation were reserved for the bourgeoisie and top intellectuals.

This religious tolerance was about to change beginning in the late 1870s and then far more dramatically from 1880 onwards, especially after the 1895 general election, which brought the Christian Socialists to power with an anti-semitic agenda to destroy every aspiration to assimilation for the Jews.

Biographer De La Grange wrote:

[Henry-Louis de La Grange, Gustav Mahler-A New Life Cut Short (1907-1911), (Oxford University Press, London, 2008)]:

"In any case, although Christian politics, Christian anti-Semitism and Christian social demagogy had effectively taken over Viennese politics, it was still Jewish brains, Jewish passion for learning, and Jewish artistic gifts which held sway in all branches of the City's intellectual life, with science, medicine, philosophy, sociology, and the law all largely in Jewish hands. Jewish talent reigned over Viennese culture, especially in literature, while the philanthropy of Jewish magnates sustained the visual arts and saved them from sinking into traditional Viennese conservatism. The majority of the press was also in Jewish hands, and had remained faithful to its former liberal ideals. But an important change had taken place: Vienna had become the major centre of European anti-Semitism."

Since he had acquired such renown in Hamburg and in Prague, Mahler was approached by the Vienna Court Opera to direct the Opera. Mahler was quoted as saying "The fact was that it was impossible to occupy an official post without being baptized." He became a nominal Catholic in 1896.

Biographer De La Grange:

"In any case, what is demonstrable is that he never was, and never became, a church- or synagogue-goer. Although there were a great number of Jewish organizations, societies, and fraternities--both religious and secular--Mahler never belonged to any of them. Throughout his adult life he never observed any of the Jewish High Holidays, but instead confined himself to the traditional--i.e., Christian--feasts, with Christmas as the main one. His religious beliefs were expressed in other ways.

"First there was his devotion to music and his positive sense of morality and justice. Then there was his unceasing life struggle to achieve the highest ethical standards, whether in a search for inner truths and eternal values or in his uncompromising sense of duty and solidarity with the rest of humanity. But, above all perhaps, at the core of his belief lay the commitment to be as true to himself as possible (often dangerously so), whether in his life or in his music. Mahler's imaginary folk music, his expressionistic excesses (the asperities and cruel irony of his late scherzos for instance), can be interpreted as a form of the Jewish 'ethical pursuit of truth, because in his music he strove to include everything human and thus sought to fulfill his ultimate desire-artistic integrity."

12 years after publishing his first symphony, in the summer of 1910, he was working on his 10th Symphony.

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Going back to 1898, When Richter resigned as head of the Vienna Philharmonic subscription concerts, the governing committee unanimously chose Mahler as his successor. However, the anti-semitic press wondered if, as a non-German, Mahler would be capable of "defending" German music, whatever the hell that means....

Attendances rose sharply in Mahler's first season, but members of the orchestra were particularly resentful of his habit of re-scoring acknowledged masterpieces, and of his scheduling of extra rehearsals for works with which they were thoroughly familiar.

The orchestra tried to have Richter reinstated for the 1899 season but failed, because Richter was not interested. Mahler's position was weakened when, in 1900, he took the orchestra to Paris to play at the Exposition Universelle. The Paris concerts were poorly attended and lost money--Mahler had to borrow the orchestra's fare home from the Rothschilds.

In April 1901, obstructed by the return of very bad health, as well as exhausted by more battles with the orchestra, Mahler gladly gave up the Philharmonic concerts conductorship. In his three seasons he had performed 80 different works.

And despite of several great moments in the Opera, Mahler's Vienna years were always turbulent; he had conflicts with singers and directors of the opera the entire time he was there.

In December 1903 Mahler faced a revolt by stagehands, whose demands for better conditions he rejected in the belief that extremists were manipulating his staff. There were strong anti-semitic elements in Viennese society (perhaps going as high as the Royal Hapsburg family?) who for a very long time had been opposed to any of Mahler's successes; they attacked him relentlessly.

1907 instituted a press campaign designed to get rid of him, at which point he was battling with the opera administration about how much time he was involved in composing his own music.

In May 1907 he started talking with the director of the New York Metropolitan Opera, signing a contract on the first day of summer 1907 as conductor for four seasons in New York City.

At the end of the summer he submitted his resignation to the Hofoper. One of his very last performances there, of 645 performances in toto, was Beethoven's Fidelio.

"During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler had brought new life to the opera house and cleared its debts, but had won few friends--it was said that he treated his musicians in the way a lion tamer treated his animals. His departing message to the company, which he pinned to a notice board, was later torn down and scattered over the floor.

"After conducting the Hofoper orchestra in a farewell concert performance of his Second Symphony on 24 November, Mahler left Vienna for New York in early December."

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From Bill Breakstone's brilliant and still moving 2009 article on Mahler:

He and Alma returned to New York in late October 1910, where Mahler threw himself into a busy Philharmonic season of concerts and tours. Around Christmas 1910 he began suffering from a sore throat, which persisted. On 21 February 1911, with a temperature of 40 °C (104 °F), Mahler insisted on fulfilling an engagement at Carnegie Hall, with a program of mainly new Italian music.

This was Mahler's last concert. After weeks confined to bed he was diagnosed with bacterial endocarditis, a disease to which sufferers from defective heart valves were particularly prone and could be fatal. Mahler did not give up hope; he talked of resuming the concert season, and took a keen interest when one of Alma's compositions was sung at a public recital by the soprano Frances Alda, on 3 March.

On 8 April the Mahler family and a permanent nurse left New York on board SS Amerika bound for Europe. They reached Paris ten days later, where Mahler entered a clinic at Neuilly, but there was no improvement; on 11 May he was taken by train to the Löw sanatorium in Vienna, where he developed pneumonia and entered a coma.

Hundreds had come to the sanatorium during this brief period to show their admiration for the great composer. After receiving treatments of radium to reduce swelling on his legs and morphine for his general ailments, he died on 18 May.

On 22 May 1911 Mahler was buried in the Grinzing cemetery, as he had requested, next to his daughter Maria.

(Article changed on April 6, 2020 at 02:26)

(Article changed on April 6, 2020 at 02:42)

Authors Website: https://www.facebook.com/groups/592985284186083/

Authors Bio:

Early in the 2016 Primary campaign, I started a Facebook group: Bernie Sanders: Advice and Strategies to Help Him Win! As the primary season advanced, we shifted the focus to advancing Bernie's legislation in the Senate, particularly the most critical one, to protect Oak Flat, sacred to the San Carlos Apaches, in the Tonto National Forest, from John McCain's efforts to privatize this national forest and turn it over to Rio Tinto Mining, an Australian mining company whose record by comparison makes Monsanto look like altar boys, to be developed as North America's largest copper mine. This is monstrous and despicable, and yet only Bernie's Save Oak Flat Act (S2242) stands in the way of this diabolical plan.

We added "2020" to the title.


I am an art gallery owner in Santa Fe since 1980 selling Native American painting and NM landscapes, specializing in modern Native Ledger Art.


I have always been intensely involved in politics, going back to the mid's 1970's, being a volunteer lobbyist in the US Senate for the Secretary General of the United Nations, then a "snowball-in-hell" campaign for US Senate in NM in the late 70's, and for the past 20 years have worked extensively to pressure the FDA to rescind its approval for aspartame, the neurotoxic artificial sweetener metabolized as formaldehyde. This may be becoming a reality to an extent in California, which, under Proposition 65, is considering requiring a mandatory Carcinogen label on all aspartame products, although all bureaucracies seem to stall under any kind of corporate pressure.


Bills to ban aspartame were in the State Senates of New Mexico and Hawaii, but were shut down by corporate lobbyists (particularly Monsanto lobbyists in Hawaii and Coca Cola lobbyists in New Mexico).


For several years, I was the editor of New Mexico Sun News, and my letters to the editor and op/eds in 2016 have appeared in NM, California, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, the Christian Science Monitor, USA Today, and many international papers, on the subject of consumer protection. Our best issue was 10 days before Obama won in 2008, when we published a special early edition of the paper declaring that Obama Wins! This was the top story on CNN for many hours, way back then....


My highest accomplishments thus far are

1. a plan to create a UN Secretary General's Pandemic Board of Inquiry, a plan that is in the works and might be achieved even before the 75th UN General Assembly in September 2020.


2. Now history until the needs becomes clear to the powers who run the United Nations: a UN Resolution to create a new Undersecretary General for Nutrition and Consumer Protection, strongly supported ten years ago by India and 53 cosponsoring nations, but shut down by the US Mission to the UN in 2008. To read it, google UNITED NATIONS UNDERSECRETARY GENERAL FOR NUTRITION, please.


These are not easy battles, any of them, and they require a great deal of political and journalistic focus. OpEdNews is the perfect place for those who have a lot to say, so much that they exceed the limiting capacities of their local and regional newspapers. Trying to go beyond the regional papers seems to require some kind of "inside" credentials, as if you had to be in a club of corporate-accepted writers, and if not, you are "from somewhere else," a sad state of corporate induced xenophobia that should have no place in America in 2020!

This should be a goal for every author with something current to say: breaking through yet another glass ceiling, and get your say said in editorial pages all over America. Certainly, this was a tool that was essentially ignored in 2016, and cannot be ignored in the big elections of 2020.


In my capacity as Editor of the Santa Fe Sun News, Fox interviewed Mikhail Gorbachev: http://www.prlog.org/10064349-mikhail-gorbachev