Madam, - Eileen Battersby's celebratory article on Gustav Mahler (Arts, September 7th) did little more, in my view, than rehash well-worn platitudes.
Its final sentence - "More than half a century [from his death in 1911] would pass before Mahler was acknowledged as a modern master" - shows an insecure grasp of the historical facts, and above all of the pioneering efforts of Bruno Walter (who recorded The Song of the Earth and Symphony No 9 in the 1930s, and Symphonies Nos 4 and 5 in the 1940s); Willem Mengelberg (who held regular concerts and festivals in Amsterdam from 1912 to 1940: the details are in E. Bysterus Heemskerk's 1971 book Over Willem Mengelberg); and Otto Klemperer (whose Mahler performances spanned the years 1912 to 1971; his very first orchestral concert on January 30th, 1912 contained Mahler's 4th Symphony).
A host of others (who include Oskar Fried, Jascha Horenstein, Charles Adler, Dmitri Mitropoulos and Leopold Stokowski) all played their part, from the 1920s and 1930s on, with both public performances and recordings. To Fried goes the honour of being the first to put a complete Mahler symphony on record, his electrifying Berlin reading of the Second dating from 1924.
Mahler was certainly a complex man. But Ms Battersby overplays all the psychological paraphernalia, and in the process misses the main point. With the possible exception of Picasso, Mahler stands head and shoulders above every other creative artist who has been alive during the past 100 years. Otto Klemperer likewise observed that Mahler stood head and shoulders above all other conductors.
Greatness at this level is likely to involve clearly patterned processes of artistic planning. Symphonies 3, 7, 9 and 10, with their longer outer movements enclosing shorter movements in the middle, are one example of this; but so too is The Song of the Earth, the first five movements of which form an A-B-A-B-A sandwich balanced in their entirety by the long final Abschied movement. Ms Battersby should profitably have devoted more space to this perfectionist search for balance on Mahler's part.
But above all she is misguided to attempt to attempt to differentiate between Mahler the symphonist and Mahler the song-writer. To Mahler himself these elements were indivisible, and The Song of the Earth, with its six song movements, is a symphony in the absolute sense side by side with the purely orchestral symphonies. - Yours, etc,
Dr MARTIN PULBROOK,
Enniscoffey,
Co Westmeath.