Mahler Quotes

Man lives in greatest pain ~ Gustav Mahler

You must renounce all superficiality, all convention, all vanity and delusion. ~ Gustav Mahler

I love to read different books on completely different subjects at the same time. I cannot focus on one. I read a few pages of literature, then I jump to philosophy and at the same time I'm reading biographies of Mahler. ~ Gustavo Dudamel

I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his passion. He must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street. ~ Charles Bukowski

It is always the same with me; only when I experience something do I compose, and only when composing do I experience! After all, a musician's nature can hardly be expressed in words. ~ Gustav Mahler

I love Gustavo Dudamel and I love what he does for classical music, and I love what he comes out of, El Sistema and the old man Abreu. When we were in Venezuela, I had the chance to go to his building. He had, like, five or six orchestras playing of kids from the hood playing, like, Mahler's third symphony and Shostakovich fifth and Beethoven. Man, it's unbelievable. I mean, they could play. ~ Wynton Marsalis

If a composer could say what he had to say in words he would not bother trying to say it in music. ~ Gustav Mahler

I am hitting my head against the walls, but the walls are giving way. ~ Gustav Mahler

Spring won't let me stay in this house any longer! I must get out and breathe the air deeply again. ~ Gustav Mahler

In its beginnings, music was merely chamber music, meant to be listened to in a small space by a small audience. ~ Gustav Mahler

The real art of conducting consists in transitions. ~ Gustav Mahler

Outside Soviet Russia, and following the last symphonies of Mahler, Nielsen and Sibelius, an element of obsolescence has unmistakably attached itself to the genre. One could, perhaps, be forgiven for regarding Stravinsky's two ironic stylizations of the symphony as a fitting farewell salute. And yet the Shostakovich symphonies have, in Philip Larkin's phrase, 'penetrated the public mind' to an extent that has put them on a level with Beethoven. ~ Pauline Fairclough

To judge a composer's work, one must consider it as a whole. ~ Gustav Mahler

I cannot listen to Beethoven or Mahler or Chopin or Bach when I write because those composers require you stop what you are doing and listen. ~ Antonio Damasio

I don't like to hurry. I'm not a conductor of the fast, fiery romantic type. I prefer Bruckner, with the sincerity of his musical language and the huge time spans in which his ideas develop, to Mahler, with his hysteria and self-indulgence. ~ Jeffrey Tate

Tradition is not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire. ~ Gustav Mahler

Brahms' friends in Budapest finally managed to talk him into attending the performance of Don Giovanni - he had initially turned down their invitation, arguing that he preferred to read the score and had never seen or heard a decent performance of the work. He would even prefer a cold beer, he insisted. But in the end he allowed his friends to drag him along to their box, where he demonstratively settled down on a sofa at the back in the hope of enjoying a rest. But it was not long before he was making increasingly inarticulate noises indicative of his enthusiasm, and at the end of the first act he was heard to shout out: 'Most excellent, admirable, what a deuce of a fellow!' He then ran on to the stage and embraced Mahler with typically grumpy cordiality. ~ Jens Malte Fischer

I am thrice homeless, as a bohemian, as an Austrian, and all over the world, you guessed it right I am Jewish ~ Gustav Mahler

God can only be comprehended as Love. ~ Gustav Mahler

I beg of you ... never assume an inner or an outer pose, never a disguise. ~ Gustav Mahler

I also had a brother who was like me a musician and a composer. A man of great talent, far more gifted than I. He died very young ... he killed himself in the prime of his life. ~ Gustav Mahler

A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything. ~ Gustav Mahler

Garris had pet names for all of them. Mahler was the Mad Doktor. Franz Liszt was Son of Lovecraft. Mendelssohn was Santa Claus Meets the Hell's Angels. Beethoven was the High School Principal. ~ Chet Williamson

I was a crazy young man who let himself be blinded by his passions and obeyed only the impulses of the moment. ~ Gustav Mahler

Only when I experience do I compose - only when I compose do I experience. ~ Gustav Mahler

My time will come, that is: after the finish of the recurring song cycles ~ Gustav Mahler

I have become a different person. I don't know whether this person is better, he certainly is not happier. ~ Gustav Mahler

Both my marriages were failures! Number one departed, and number two stayed ~ Gustav Mahler

It is strange how one feels drawn forward without knowing at first where one is going. ~ Gustav Mahler

We all return. It is this certainty that gives meaning to life and it does not make the slightest difference whether or not in a later incarnation we remember the former life. What counts is not the individual and his comfort, but the great aspiration to the perfect and the pure which goes on in each incarnation. ~ Gustav Mahler

But it's peculiar, as soon as I am in the midst of nature and by myself, everything that is base and trivial vanishes without trace. On such days nothing scares me; and this helps me again and again. ~ Gustav Mahler

I live like a Hottentot. I cannot exchange one sensible word with anyone. ~ Gustav Mahler

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty. ~ Clive James

As the young husband and wife lay in each other's arms, each contemplating past, present, and future, Clint recognized the music as the adagietto from Gustav Mahler's fifth symphony. It was one of the most famous movements in the entire symphonic repertoire, but it was also one of the most debated. Mahler ostensibly composed the adagietto as a love song to his wife, Alma, but when played at the much slower tempo preferred by many conductors, the music instead evokes a feeling of profound melancholy. After almost eighty years, musicologists and aficionados still couldn't agree whether the music was supposed to be happy or sad, whether it was an expression of intense love and devotion or of unmitigated despair. Clint was struck by the irony that this music would be playing at this moment in his life, and his mouth curled into an ambivalent smile. Was he happy? Was he sad? Would he ever again be certain? ~ William T. Prince

Behind me the branches of a wasted and sterile existence are cracking. ~ Gustav Mahler

When I have reached a summit, I leave it with great reluctance, unless it is to reach for another, higher one. ~ Gustav Mahler

Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual. ~ Maureen Forrester

The call of love sounds very hollow among these immobile rocks. ~ Gustav Mahler

We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection. ~ Philip Kitcher

Don't bother looking at the view - I have already composed it. ~ Gustav Mahler

The further the music develops, the more complex the apparatus used by the composer to express his thoughts becomes. ~ Gustav Mahler

To be passionate in today's world is not politically correct ... Nowadays we are supposed to cope. This was not Mahler's problem. He saw it, he heard it, and he expressed it. He was a kaleidoscopic, Olympian figure. ~ Lorin Maazel

For me to rehearse with a children's orchestra a Mahler symphony was to really work. We had three or four weeks of rehearsal with the orchestra, every day eight or nine hours, putting the First together. I had been conducting Tchaikovsky a lot and Beethoven, but Mahler was different. ~ Gustavo Dudamel

To write a symphony is, for me, to construct a world. ~ Gustav Mahler

Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His voice cracks, like Nietzsche's, when he proclaims values, speaks from mere conviction, when he himself puts into practice the abhorrent notion of overcoming on which the thematic analyses capitalise, and makes music as if joy were already in the world. His vainly jubilant movements unmask jubilation; his subjective incapacity for the happy end denounces itself. ~ Theodor W. Adorno

In Bach, the vital cells of music are united as the world is in God. ~ Gustav Mahler

It is a funny thing, but when I am making music, all the answers I seek for in life seem to be there, in the music. Or rather, I should say, when I am making music, there are no questions and no need for answers. ~ Gustav Mahler

Einstein Freud Marx Proust Mahler Mendelssohn Chagall & don't forget Dr. Jonas Salk ... & still they hate us! ~ Sonia Taitz

At the age of six, Mahler accepted paid commissions as a composer, something he was never to do in later life, his mother having promised him two kreuzers on condition that he did not make any ink blots on the expensive music manuscript paper. ~ Jens Malte Fischer

Never let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries. Continue steadfastly on one's way. ~ Gustav Mahler

Hello, what are you afraid of?

Death.

Me too.

When you hear a Mahler symphony?

No, when I wake up in the night.

Me too.

Nice meeting you.

Same here. ~ Marilyn Sandberg

The important thing is never to let oneself be guided by the opinion of one's contemporaries; to continue steadfastly on one's way without
letting oneself be either defeated by failure or diverted by applause. ~ Gustav Mahler

The impressions of the spriritual experiences gave my future life its form and content. ~ Gustav Mahler

All that is not perfect down to the smallest detail is doomed to perish. ~ Gustav Mahler

It's not just a question of conquering a summit previously unknown, but of tracing, step by step, a new pathway to it. ~ Gustav Mahler

In his late quartets, Beethoven introduces an element that shouldn't be there, that should be left for meditation, though I love them. I can see that through them came Wagner and Mahler and Schoenberg and Berg. And then came Tracey Emin. And I can see it all as one downward path. ~ John Tavener

Presenting Aschenbach as a composer - based on Mahler - leads to some dreadful scenes (especially those in which Aschenbach is berated by his student), and it surely distorts the character Mann created. Yet, we know that Mann's novella was based on a holiday in Venice he took with his wife and brother, and that while he was there he followed the reports in the German newspapers, describing the dying Mahler's progress as he returned from New York to Vienna. ~ Philip Kitcher

The Montreux Palace Hotel was built in an age when it was thought that things would last. It is on the very shores of Switzerland's Lake Geneva, its balconies and iron railings look across the water, its yellow-ocher awnings are a touch of color in the winter light. It is like a great sanitarium or museum. There are Bechstein pianos in the public rooms, a private silver collection, a Salon de Bridge. This is the hotel where the novelist Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov and his wife, Véra, live. They have been here for 14 years. One imagines his large and brooding reflection in the polished glass of bookcases near the reception desk where there are bound volumes of the Illustrated London News from the year 1849 to 1887, copies of Great Expectations, The Chess Games of Greco and a book called Things Past, by the Duchess of Sermoneta.

Though old, the hotel is marvelously kept up and, in certain portions, even modernized. Its business now is mainly conventions and, in the summer, tours, but there is still a thin migration of old clients, ancient couples and remnants of families who ask for certain rooms when they come and sometimes certain maids. For Nabokov, a man who rode as a child on the great European express trains, who had private tutors, estates, and inherited millions which disappeared in the Russian revolution, this is a return to his sources. It is a place to retire to, with Visconti's Mahler and the long-dead figures of La Belle Epoque, Edward VII, d'Annunzi ~ James Salter

It is time to remind Sharon that the star of David belongs to all Jews, not to his repulsive Government. His actions are staining the star of David with blood. The Jewish people, whose gifts to civilised discourse include Einstein and Epstein, Mendelssohn and Mahler, Sergei Eisenstein and Billy Wilder, are now symbolised throughout the world by the blustering bully Ariel Sharon, a war criminal implicated in the murder of Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila camps and now involved in killing Palestinians once again. ~ Gerald Kaufman

Even if people censure me, they should do so hat in hand. ~ Gustav Mahler

Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen,
Mit der ich sonst viele Zeit verdorben,
Sie hat so lange [von mir nichts]1 vernommen,
Sie mag wohl glauben, ich sei gestorben.

Es ist mir auch gar nichts daran gelegen,
Ob sie mich für gestorben hält,
Ich kann auch gar nichts sagen dagegen,
Denn wirklich bin ich gestorben der Welt.

Ich bin gestorben dem [Weltgewimmel]2,
Und ruh' in einem stillen Gebiet.
Ich leb' allein [in mir und meinem]3 Himmel,
In meinem Lieben, in meinem Lied.

I am lost to the world
with which I used to waste so much time,
It has heard nothing from me for so long
that it may very well believe that I am dead!

It is of no consequence to me
Whether it thinks me dead;
I cannot deny it,
for I really am dead to the world.

I am dead to the world's tumult,
And I rest in a quiet realm!
I live alone in my heaven,
In my love and in my song. ~ Gustav Mahler

I don't choose what I compose. It chooses me. ~ Gustav Mahler

Beauty and fullness of tone can be achieved by having the whole orchestra play with high clarinets and a carefully selected number of piccolos. ~ Gustav Mahler

The longer you live and the more you learn, the more clearly you will feel the difference between the few men who are truly great and the mere virtuosi. ~ Gustav Mahler

Britten's opera tends to see things in simpler terms. It portrays an Aschenbach who wants a richer form of sexual fulfillment, and who is hemmed in by the social conventions to which he subscribes. But Visconti's use of the Mahler Adagietto is perfect for what I take to be Aschenbach's sexual desire. ~ Philip Kitcher

If you think you're boring your audience, go slower not faster. ~ Gustav Mahler

That which draws us by its mystical force; what every created thing, even the very stones, feels with absolute certainty as the center of its being ... is the force of love. Christians call this "eternal blessedness." It is a necessity of man for growth and joy. ~ Gustav Mahler

It's ahead of us. All I can tell you is, not even courage will help." "Are you reading Alma Mahler again?" "No." Her voice was even and knowing. The underground river. The ceiling lowers, grows wet, the water rushes into darkness. The air becomes damp and icy, the passage narrows. Light is lost here, sound; the current begins to flow beneath great, impassable slabs. ~ James Salter

It is easier to achieve a desired result in short pieces. ~ Gustav Mahler

Studying Mahler changed many things in my tastes as a composer. Mahler & Berg are my favourite composers even today, as opposed to Hindemith, say, a Krenek and Milhaud whom I liked when I was young but cooled towards rapidly. ~ Dmitri Shostakovich

For the last month I have been a strict vegetarian. The moral effects of this regime are immense, owing to the voluntary subjugation of the flesh and the resulting absence of desires. You will appreciate how full I am of this idea when I tell you that I expect it to work the regeneration of mankind. I advise you to change over to a natural way of life, with proper nourishment (wholemeal bread), and you will soon feel the benefit. ~ Gustav Mahler

Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism. ~ Douglas Murray

Melodic invention is one of the surest signs of a divine gift. ~ Gustav Mahler

In the theatrical works we love and admire the most, the ending of the drama generally takes place offstage. ~ Gustav Mahler

Don't bother to look, I've composed all this already. ~ Gustav Mahler