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In addition to many of his celebrated pianoforte pieces, which he had only recently written, we went through several new symphonies with great ardour, and especially his Faust Symphony. Later on, I had the opportunity of describing in detail the impressions I received at this time in a letter which I wrote to Marie von Wittgenstein, which was afterwards published.
This learned and worthy doctor astonished the musical world a few years by his new marks of phrasing in the Beethoven symphonies. They topsy-turvied the old bowing. With Chopin, new dynamic and agogic accents are rather dangerous, at least to the peace of mind of worshippers of the Chopin fetish. Riemann breaks two bars into one.
Thus the layman nowadays has seldom an ear for the subtleties of the string quartet, whereas, on the other hand, our great-grandfathers would indubitably have run away from the sound of our brass bands and military music. The earlier symphonies, since they were essentially intended to bring out the effects of the stringed instruments, now seem like darkened pictures.
Edith A. Chamberlayne has composed two symphonies, as well as a manuscript opera, a sextette for harp, flute, and strings, and various harp, organ, and piano music. Edith Swepstone has had some movements of an unfinished Symphony performed, also an overture, "Les Tenebres," at London in 1897.
These new chords, the new musical daimons that he had summoned from the abyss of sounds, were used to build clear symphonies, vast, sunlit buildings, like the Italian cupola'd basilicas. These plays and battles of the mind occupied him all winter.
But if we had no dates for Mozart's three greater symphonies, we might readily fall into the mistake of attributing them to another year than that of their composition, and the mistake would be natural, if not inevitable, when we consider the enormous amount of music we know Mozart to have written in 1788.
His mind was noble and above all mean passions; he neither knew envy nor the feeling of rivalry.... He composed," says the same writer, "seventy-eight operas, of which twenty-seven were serious, and fifty-one comic, eight intermezzi, and an immense number of cantatas, oratorios, masses, etc.; seven symphonies for King Joseph of Spain, and many miscellaneous pieces for the court of Russia."
The Russian sons of Berlioz with their new orchestral chemistry arrived. The orchestral machine expanded and grew subtle. Huysmans dreamt of symphonies of liqueurs, concertos of perfumery. And the new century, when it came, showed that it was no deliberately assumed thing, this fusion of Oriental and Occidental modes of feeling, showed that it was a thing arising deep in the being.
Oh! fellow-pilgrims through this desert dreary, In all the scenes of life God's mercy trace, Then though with grief cast down, with watching weary, Strong shall ye stand in His sufficient grace! Thus sweet, melodious tones and forms of beauty, All glorious sights and sounds may ever prove Angels to lure us on the path of duty, Echoes of symphonies that float above!
In 1891 he went to Hamburg to conduct the opera, and in 1897 he was made director of the Vienna Court Opera. In 1908 he came to New York to conduct the operas of Wagner, Mozart and Beethoven at the Metropolitan. In 1909 he became conductor of the New York Philharmonic Society. His health broke in 1911, and he returned to Vienna. Mahler wrote nine symphonies.
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