Almost simultaneously with the rise of Russian music and the new birth of French music, that of Germany has deteriorated. The great line of composers which descended from Bach and Haendel for two centuries has wavered and diminished visibly during the last three decades. The proud tradition seems to have reached a temporary halt in Wagner and Bruckner and Brahms. It may be that modern Germany is a difficult terrain, that the violent change in conditions of life, the furious acceleration, has created, for the time being, a soil unusually inimical to the disclosure of perfect works of art. The blight on the entire new generation of composers would seem to point to some such common cause. There is, no doubt, a curious coincidence in the fact that in each of the four chief German musicians of the recent period there should be manifest in some degree a failure of artistic instinct. The coarsening of the craftsmanship, the spiritual bankruptcy, of the later Strauss, the grotesque pedantry of Reger, the intellectualism with which the art of Schoenberg has always been tainted, and by which it has been corrupted of late, the banality of Mahler, dovetail suspiciously. And yet, it is probable that the cause lies otherwhere, and that the conjunction of these four men is accidental. There have been, after all, few environments really friendly to the artist; most of the masters have had to recover from a "something rotten in the state of Denmark," and many of them have surmounted conditions worse than those of modern Bismarckian Germany. The cause of the unsatisfactoriness of much of the music of Strauss and Schoenberg, Reger and Mahler, is doubtless to be found in the innate weakness of the men themselves rather more than in the unhealthiness of the atmosphere in which they passed their lives.

Still, the case of Mahler makes one hesitate a while before passing judgment. Whereas it is probable that Richard Strauss would have deteriorated no matter how friendly the age in which he lived, that Reger would have been just as much a pedant had he been born in Paris instead of in Bavaria, that Schoenberg would have developed into his mathematical frigidity wherever he resided, it is possible that Mahler's fate might have been different had he not been born in the Austria of the 1860's. For if Mahler's music is pre-eminently a reflection of Beethoven's, if he never spoke in authentic accents, if out of his vast dreams of a great modern popular symphonic art, out of his honesty, his sincerity, his industry, his undeniably noble and magnificent traits, there resulted only those unhappy boring colossi that are his nine symphonies, it is indubitably, to a great extent, the consequence of the fact that he, the Jew, was born in a society that made Judaism, Jewish descent and Jewish traits, a curse to those that inherited them. The destiny that had made him Jew decreed that, did he speak out fully, he would have to employ an idiom that would recall the harsh accents of the Hebrew language quite as much as that of any tongue spoken by the peoples of Europe. It decreed that, whatever the history of the art he practised, whatever the character of the age in which he lived, he could not impress himself upon his medium without impregnating it with the traits he inherited from his ancestors. It decreed that in speaking he would have to suffuse musical art with the qualities and characteristics engraved in the stock by the history and vicissitudes of his race, by its age-long sojourn in the deserts of Arabia and on the barren hills of Syria, by the constraint of its religion and folkways, by its titanic and terrible struggle for survival against the fierce peoples of Asia, by the marvelous vitality and self-consciousness and exclusiveness that carried it whole across lands and times, out of the eternal Egypt through the eternal Red Sea. But it was just the racial attributes, the racial gesture and accent, that a man in Mahler's position found inordinately difficult to register. For Austrian society put a great price on his suppression of them. It permitted him to participate in its activities only on the condition that he did not remind it continually of his alienhood, of his racial consciousness. It permitted him the sense of equality, of fraternity, of citizenship, only on the condition that he should seek to suppress within himself all awareness of his descent and character and peculiarities, and attempt to identify himself with its members, and try to feel just as they felt and speak just as they spoke.

For if Austro-German society had admitted the Jews to civil rights, it had made them feel as never before the old hatred and malediction and exclusion. The walls of the ghettos had, after all, prevented the Jew from feeling the full force of the disability under which he labored, insomuch as they had repressed in him all desire to mingle in the life of the country in which he found himself. But in exciting his gregariousness, in appearing to allow him to participate in the public life, in both inviting and repelling him, a community like that of Austria, still so near the Middle Ages, made him feel in all its terrible might the handicap of race, the mad hatred and contempt with which it punished his descent. And it is but natural that amongst those very Jews best fitted to take part in affairs, and consequently most sensitive to the ill-will that barred them from power and success, there should be aroused, despite all conscious efforts neither to surrender nor to shrink, an unconscious desire to escape the consequences of the thing that stamped them in the eyes of the general as individuals of an inferior sort; to inhibit any spiritual gesture that might arouse hostility; and to ward off any subjective sense of personal inferiority by convincing themselves and their fellows that they possessed the traits generally esteemed.

So a ruinous conflict was introduced into the soul of Gustav Mahler. In the place of the united self, there came to exist within him two men. For while one part of him demanded the free complete expression necessary to the artist, another sought to block it for fear that in the free flow the hated racial traits would appear. For Mahler would have been the first to have been repelled by the sound of his own harsh, haughty, guttural, abrupt Hebrew inflection. He would have been the first to turn in contempt from his own gestures. There was in him the frenetic unconscious desire to rid himself of the thing he had come to believe inferior. And rather than express it, rather than speak in his proper idiom, he made, unaware to himself, perhaps, the choice of speaking through the voices of other men, of the great German composers; of imitating them instead of developing his own personality; of accepting sterility and banality and impotence rather than achieving a power of speech.

And so his work became the doubtful and bastard thing it is, a thing of lofty and original intentions unrealized, of large powers misapplied, of great and respectable creative efforts that did not succeed in bringing into being anything really new, really whole. Of what Mahler might have achieved had he not been the divided personality, his symphonies, even as they stand, leave no doubt. If Mahler is not a great man, he is at least the silhouette of one. The need of expression that drove him to composition was indubitably mighty. The passion with which he addressed himself to his labor despite all discouragement and lack of success, the loftiness and nobleness of the task which he set for himself, the splendor of the intentions, reveal how fierce a fire burnt in the man. He was not one of those who come to music to form little jewels. On the contrary, in gesture he was ever one of the eminently faithful. He came to music to create a great, simple, popular symphonic art for these latter days, a thing of broad lines and simple contours and spiritual grandeur. He sought to express sincerely his deep, real sorrow, his choking homesickness for the something which childhood seems to possess and maturity to be without; to dream himself into childlike, paradisaic joys and wake himself to faith and action once again. He attempted to create a musical language that would be gigantic and crude and powerful as Nature herself; tried to imbue the orchestra with the Dionysiac might of sun and winds and teeming clay; wished to be able to say of his symphonies, "Hier rÖrht die Natur." To a friend who visited him at his country house in Toblach and commented upon the mountains surrounding the spot, Mahler jestingly replied, "Ich hab' sie alle fortcomponiert." And he had large and dramatic programs for his symphonies. The First should have been a sort of Song of Youth, a farewell to the thing that is alive in us before we meet the world, and is shattered in the collision. The Second should have been the Song of Death, the music of the knowledge of death. The Third was conceived as a Song of the Great Pan—his "gaya scienza," Mahler would have liked to call it. In the Fourth he sought to open the heart of a child; in the Sixth, to voice his desolation and loneliness and hopelessness; in the Eighth, to perform a great religious ceremony; in "Das Lied von der Erde" to write his "Tempest," his epilogue.

And in general plan, his symphonies are original enough. Mahler was completely emancipated of all the old prejudices concerning the nature of the symphony. He conceived the form anew. "Mir heiszt Symphonic," he is reported to have said, "mit allen mitteln der vorhÄndenen Technik mir eine Welt aufbauen." He conceived the form particularly with reference to the being, the exigencies, the frame, of the modern concert hall. He realized that the shortness of the classic symphonies handicaps them severely in the present day. For modern audiences require an hour and a half or two hours of musical entertainment. In order to fill the concert programs, the symphony has to be associated with other works. In consequence it loses in effectiveness. So, taking hints from the Ninth of Beethoven and the "RomÉo" of Berlioz, Mahler boldly planned symphonies that could stand alone and fill an evening. Beginning with his Second, he increased the number of movements, dropping the inevitable suite of allegro, andante, scherzo, rondo; prescribed intermissions of a certain length; and added choruses and vocal solos to give the necessary relief to the long orchestral passages. In the Second, he placed between an allegretto and a scherzo a soprano setting of one of the lyrics out of "Des Knaben Wunderhorn," and concluded the work with a choral setting of one ode of Klopstock's. In the Third Symphony, he preceded the orchestral finale with an alto solo composed on "Das Trunkene Lied" of Nietzsche, and with a chorus employing the words of another of the naÏve poems in the anthology of Arnim and Brentano. The Eighth is simply a choral setting of the "Veni, Creator" and the closing scene of Goethe's "Faust." And in the Fifth Symphony, one of those in which he called for no vocal performers, he nevertheless managed to vary and expand the conventional suite by preceding the first allegro with a march, and separating and relieving the gargantuan scherzo and rondo with an adagietto for strings alone.

His material he organized fairly independently of the old rules. He was one of those who seem to have learned from Liszt that the content of a piece must condition its form. Mahler's symphonies resemble symphonic poems. They are essentially dramatic in character. Although he strove continually for classic form, his works nevertheless reveal their programmatic origin. He was at heart one of the literary composers. But he was a better craftsman than most of them are. He was a finer workman than Strauss, for instance. His scores are much more bony. They are free of the mass of insignificant detail that clutters so many of Strauss's. He could asseverate with some justice, "I have never written an insincere note." And although his orchestration is not revolutionary, and is often commonplace enough, he nevertheless oftentimes employed an instrumental palette distinctly his own. He utilized instead of the violin the trumpet as premier instrument of the band; achieved all manner of brilliant effects with it. He increased the variety and usefulness of the instruments of percussion, forming out of them a new family of instruments to balance the families of the strings, brass, and wood-wind. In the score of the Second Symphony he calls for six timpani, bass and snare-drums, a high and a low tam-tam, cymbals, a triangle, glockenspiel, three deep-toned bells, in the chief orchestra; besides a bass-drum, triangle and cymbals in the supplementary. In the Eighth Symphony, the instruments of percussion form a little band by themselves. And he utilized the common instruments in original fashion, made the harps imitate bells, the wood-wind blow fanfares, the horns hold organ-points; combined piccolos with bassoons and contrabasses, wrote unisons for eight horns, let the trombones run scales——

But there is not one of poor Mahler's nine symphonies, honest and dignified as some of them are, that exists as fresh, new-minted, vivid music. His genius never took musical flesh. His scores are lamentably weak, often arid and banal. There is surely not another case in musical history in which indubitable genius, a mighty need of expression, a distinctly personal manner of sensation, a respectable musical science, a great and idealistic effort, achieved results so unsatisfactory. One wonders whether Mahler the composer was not, after all, the greatest failure in music. If there is any music that is eminently Kapellmeistermusik, eminently a routine, reflective, dusty sort of musical art, it is certainly Mahler's five latter symphonies. The musical Desert of Sahara is surely to be found in these unhappy compositions. They are monsters of ennui, and by their very pretentiousness, their gargantuan dimensions, throw into cruelest relief Mahler's essential sterility. They seek to be colossal and achieve vacuity chiefly. They remind one of nothing so much as the huge, ugly, misshapen "giants" that stand before the old Palace in Florence, work of the obscure sculptor who thought to outdo Michelangelo by sheer bulk. And the first four of his symphonies, though less utterly banal and pedantic, are still amorphous and fundamentally second-hand. For Mahler never spoke in his own idiom. His style is a mongrel affair. The thematic material is almost entirely derivative and imitative, of an unequaled mediocrity and depressingness. One wonders whether indeed there has ever been a respectable composer who has utilized ideas as platitudinous as the ones employed in the first movement of the First Symphony, or the brassy, pompous theme that opens the Eighth, or the tune to which in the latter work the mystic stanza beginning

is intoned. One wonders whether any has used themes more saccharine and characterless than those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, or the adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personal tone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, does manage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of his symphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sit at tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance; evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound the Austrian bugle calls; old soldier songs, that may have been sung in the Seven Years' War, arise; the watchman makes his sleepy rounds.But, for the most part, it is precisely the personal tone that his music completely lacks. For he was never himself. He was everybody and nobody. He was forever seeking to be one composer or another, save only not Gustav Mahler. The fatal assimilative power of the Jew is revealed nowhere in music more sheerly than in the style of Mahler. Romain Rolland discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences of Beethoven and Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier. Schubert flits persistently through Mahler's scores, particularly through that of the Third Symphony, whose introductory theme for eight horns recalls almost pointedly the opening of the C-major of Schubert, without, however, in the least recapturing its effectiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantly reflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fond of embodying in his compositions, and, more particularly, by the length and involutions of so many of the themes of his later symphonies. For, like Bruckner's, they appear chosen with an eye to their serviceability for contrapuntal deformation and dissection. Wagner, Haydn, Schumann and Brahms, the sentimental Wienerwald Brahms, also pass incessantly through these scores. But it was Beethoven whom Mahler sought chiefly to emulate. Over his symphonies (and it is a curious fact that Mahler, like the three men that he most frequently imitated, Schubert, Bruckner, and Beethoven, wrote just nine symphonies), over his entire work, his songs as well as his orchestral pieces, there lies the shadow of the Master of Bonn. Mahler was undoubtedly Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All his life he was seeking to write the "Tenth Symphony," the symphony that Beethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting to approximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, his broad and self-righteous manner. His music is full of but slightly disguised quotations. The trumpet-theme that ushers in Mahler's Fifth Symphony, for instance, appears the result of an attempt to cross the theme of the funeral march of the "Eroica Symphony" with the famous four raps of Beethoven's Fifth. In the first movement of the Second Symphony, just before the appearance on the oboe of the scarcely disguised "Sleep" motif from "Die WalkÜre," a theme almost directly lifted out of Beethoven's violin concerto is announced on the 'cellos and horns. And the andante of the same symphony derives from both the allegretto of Beethoven's Eighth and the andante of his "Pastoral Symphony"; might, indeed, figure as a sort of "Szene am Bach" through which there flow the yellowish tides of the Danube. Beethoven is recalled by some of Mahler's triumphant finales, particularly by those of the Fifth and Seventh Symphonies, and by many of Mahler's adagio passages. "Es sucht der Bruder seinen Bruder," oh, how often and at what length through Mahler's symphonies, and with what persistency on the tenor trumpet! And how often in them does not the German family man take his children walking in the woods of a Sunday afternoon and bid them worship their Creator for having implanted the Love of Virtue in the Human Heart!

Just as it was inevitable that Mahler, instead of developing his own artistic individuality, should seek all his life to identify himself with certain other composers, so, too, it was inevitable that it should be Beethoven whom he would most sedulously emulate. For not only was Beethoven the great classic presence of the German concert hall, and deemed, in the words of Lanier, the "dear living lord of tone," the "sole hymner of the whole of life." He was also, of all the masters, the one spiritually most akin to Mahler. For Beethoven was also one of those who wish to endow their art with moral grandeur, give it power to rouse the noblest human traits, to make it communicate ethical and philosophical conceptions. He, too, came to his art with a magnanimous hope of invigorating and consoling and redeeming his brothers, of healing the wounds of life and binding all men in the bonds of fraternity. Torn between desire of self-expression, and fear of self-revelation, Mahler found the solution of his conflict in this particular piece of self-identification.

And had Mahler been able really to be himself alone, to develop his own individuality, he would no doubt have been the thing he most desired to be, and given the world a new Beethoven. But, as imitator, he is far from being Beethoven! Whatever Beethoven's limitations (and they were many, for all that the worshiping crowd may say), he nevertheless had in extraordinary degree two things which Mahler eminently lacked—inventive genius and a giant peasant strength. He was able to cope vigorously with the gigantic programs he set for himself. At moments, no doubt, as in the C-minor Symphony and so many of his piano-sonatas, one is repelled by a certain indefinable pompousness and self-righteousness and exasperated by the obviousness and dullness and heaviness of his art. The finale of the Ninth Symphony with its blare and crash, its chorus screaming on high C, its Turkish March with cymbals and bass-drum, is not entirely inspired, most folk will agree. And yet, for all his shortcomings, the wonders of Beethoven are innumerable. There are the many quartets with their masterly invention and composition, the First and Sixth Symphonies with their immortal youth and freshness, their hearty strength and simplicity, the deeply beautiful passages and movements to be found in nearly every one of his works. There is all the wonderful solidity that Mahler, for instance, never achieved. For in poor Mahler's work we feel only the intention, rarely the achievement. We feel him agonizedly straining, pushing and laboring, trying to manufacture his banal thematic material into music by the application of all the little contrapuntal formulas. We find him relying finally upon physical apparatus, upon sheer brute force. His symphonies abound in senseless repetitions, in all sorts of eye-music. And in the Eighth Symphony, the apotheosis of his reliance on the physical, he calls for a chorus of a thousand men, women and children, and at the end, I believe, the descent of the Holy Ghost. But the ultimate effect is exactly the reverse of what Mahler planned. The very size of the apparatus throws into crudest relief his weariness and uncreativeness. For a moment, a work like the Eighth Symphony stuns the auditor with its sheer physical bulk. After all, one does not hear a thousand voices singing together every day, and the brass and the percussion are very brilliant. Soon, nevertheless, there insinuates itself the realization that there is in this work neither the all-creating spirit the composer so magniloquently invokes, nor the heaven he strives so ardently to attain. They are in the music of a score of other composers. For these men had lived. And it was to real life that Mahler never attained.

If his music expresses anything at all, it expresses just the characteristics that Mahler was most anxious to have it conceal. Life is the greatest of practical jokers, and Mahler, in seeking to escape his racial traits, ended by representing nothing so much as the Jew. For if there is anything visible behind the music of Mahler, it is the Jew as Wagner, say, describes him in "Das Judentum in der Musik," the Jew who through the superficial assimilation of the traits of the people among whom he is condemned to live, and through the suppression of his own nature, becomes sterile. It is the Jew consumed by malaise and homesickness, by impotent yearning for the terrain which will permit him free expression, and which he conceives as an otherwheres, or as a dream-Palestine. It is the Jew unable to feel faith or joy or content because he is unable to live out his own life. It is the Jew consumed by bitterness because he is perpetually untrue to himself. It is the Jew afraid to die because he has never really lived himself out. It is the Jew as he is when he wants most to cease being a Jew. Mahler could have seemed no more the Jew had he expressed himself in all his Hebraic fervor instead of singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking to reconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a "higher synthesis." Only, it would have been good music instead of a nondescript and mongrel thing that he composed. All that he really attained by hampering himself was sterility.

And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it was not solely the environment, however much that favored it, that condemned Mahler to sterility. Did we have no example of a Jewish musician attaining creativity through the frank expression of his Semitic characteristics, we might presume that no choice existed for Mahler, and that it is inevitable that the Jew, whenever he essays the grand style, becomes just what Wagner called him in his brilliant and brutal pamphlet, a pretender. But, fortunately, such an example does exist. Geneva, "la ville Protestante," that saw unclose the art of Ernest Bloch, was, after all, not much more eager to welcome a Jewish renaissance than was the Vienna of Gustav Mahler. But some inner might that the elder man lacked gave the young Genevese composer the courage to speak out, and to attain salvation. It was, after all, a sort of intelligence, a sense of reality, a real overwhelming spiritual strength that Mahler lacked. For all his immense capacities, he was a weak man. He permitted his environment to ruin him.