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
in