The Jewish band master - Mahler's 3rd

The performance of Mahler's Third Symphony takes 94 minutes, far too long for any piece of music. I attended the NZ Symphony Orchestra's performance of it and came away with mixed feelings. I thought that the First Movement is full of bombast, powerful brass chords, fanfare, corny popular tunes and romantic calls to action, but what kind of action? It also has distorted references to Brahms's First Symphony, a work that is the very opposite in spirit to this work. Mahler wrote descriptive titles for each movement, then, quite rightly, abandoned them. You should listen to music with your ears and your whole body, not reflect on some presumed extra musical message. After the First Movement the mood changes, and you get beautiful transparent musical passages. In the Third Movement Mahler throws in a mezzo-soprano soloist, at last night's concert Charlotte Hellekant, a statuesque woman with a beautiful, penetrating warm voice. As if this weren't enough in the next movement there is an additional children's and women's choir. This is a rich gulyas indeed. The concluding movement is a long tranquil adagio. Though this symphony is perhaps too long for my liking, it contained some very beautiful sequences. What was Mahler, 'a little German-Czech-Moravian Jewish boy', as the great American Jewish conductor, Leonard Bernstein described him, doing writing such ambitious overblown music? Mahler's ambitions were out of keeping with his humble origins, the grandson of  a Jewish peddler grandmother. He had to be the conductor of the world's foremost opera houses and orchestras, the Vienna State Opera, the Vienna Philharmonic, the New York Metropolitan and the New York Philharmonic. Likewise his music had to be grander, and longer, than any other works in the repertoire. And he would throw in a little ditty about Jesus and Peter to underline his credentials as a Catholic convert, identifying Jesus with the struggling artist, though by then Mahler was far from struggling. He converted to Catholicism because this was a necessary condition for his appointment as the musical director of the Vienna Opera, but was always cynical about his conversion, seeing himself as an atheist [1]. However he was not just any ordinary common and garden atheist, he described himself as 'thrice homeless, as a native of Bohemia in Austria, as an Austrian among Germans and as a Jew throughout the world. Everywhere an intruder, never welcomed.' [2] There is the story of the emanicpated Jewish world of Europe in this long symphony 

 1.[Jonathan Carr: From Province to Promised Land,

https://www.nytimes.com/books/first/c/carr-mahler.html]

2.ibid