phonies 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 naive 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-