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 roerht 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 vorhaendenen 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 "Romeo" of Berlioz, Mahler boldly planned
sym