It
aims at being colossal, and mainly achieves emptiness. The _motifs_ are
more than familiar. After a funeral march of commonplace character and
boisterous movement, where Beethoven seems to be taking lessons from
Mendelssohn, there comes a scherzo, or rather a Viennese waltz, where
Chabrier gives old Bach a helping hand. The adagietto has a rather sweet
sentimentality. The rondo at the end is presented rather like an idea of
Franck's, and is the best part of the composition; it is carried out in
a spirit of mad intoxication and a chorale rises up from it with
crashing joy; but the effect of the whole is lost in repetitions that
choke it and make it heavy. Through all the work runs a mixture of
pedantic stiffness and incoherence; it moves along in a desultory way,
and suffers from abrupt checks in the course of its development and from
superfluous ideas that break in for no reason at all, with the result
that the whole hangs fire.
Above all, I fear Mahler has been sadly hypnotised by ideas about
power--ideas that are getting to the head of all German artists to-day.
He seems to have an undecided mind, and to combine sadness and irony
with weakness and impatience, to be a Viennese musician striving after
Wagnerian grandeur.
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