Whistling in the dark?_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

Whistling in the dark?

Despite their endings, Das Lied von der Erde and the Ninth no more support that image than the Tenth invalidates it. Like the Tenth, and like Mahler’s other mature symphonies, they are far too varied in emotional content to admit of so simple an interpretation. In 1907, on a visit to Finland, Mahler had a discussion with Sibelius on the nature of the symphony, in the course of which he told Sibelius, “The symphony must be like the world. It must embrace everything.” Nowadays these famous words are cited to show that Mahler wanted to open the symphony to all the highly personal, disturbing, lurid emotions supposedly eschewed by classicists such as Brahms and Sibelius. Mahler’s words have been assumed to justify the popular view of him as an essentially confessional artist – the representative composer of our troubled century, the supreme purveyor of musical angst. Every apparently cheerful Scherzo must be heard as eerily grotesque, with Hitler’s jackbooted troops and the Holocaust lurking just around the next bend. The most beautiful slow movements are revealed as laden with pathos and bleak resignation. The gayest and most festive finales, closely inspected, show us that Mahler was merely whistling in the dark. It has been easy to forget that only one Mahler symphony, the Sixth, actually ends in the minor.

- Mahler’s Unfinished Symphony, Atlantic Monthly, December, 1998.

2. While an angry mob bayed for the culprits outside Molineux, Terry Connor intoned “We’re all in this together”, somehow managing to sound even less convincing than David Cameron.