Best 9 quotes in «mahler quotes» category

There is a world of difference between a Mahler eighth note and a normal eighth note.

You should never trust anyone who listens to Mahler before they're forty.

Even before the First World War there was a strain in European art and music – in Germany more than anywhere – that was turning from ripeness to over-ripeness and then into something else. The last strains of the Austro-German Romantic tradition – exemplified by Gustav Mahler, Richard Strauss and Gustav Klimt – seemed almost to have destroyed itself by reaching a pitch of ripeness from which nothing could follow other than complete breakdown. It was not just that their subject matter was so death-obsessed, but that the tradition felt as though it could not be stretched any further or innovated any more without snapping. And so it snapped: in modernism and then post-modernism.

Although, I am proud of all my Symphonies as they all have something special to say, my particular favourite is the Fifth. As the great Mahler expert Donald Mitchell said that if Mahler had written another Symphony, it would have been my Fifth!

I cannot work and listen to Wagner at the same time, nor Mahler, nor Beethoven's late quartets. I enjoy listening to Chopin's piano music when I work.

I like to sing to Verdi, I like singing to Sibelius, and Mahler maybe.

I like the way Mahler wandered about in his music and still retained his passion. He must have looked like an earthquake walking down the street.

Perhaps, once I am gone, the one thing I might be remembered for is having sung a great deal of Mahler with a great many phenomenal conductors. It is wonderful music, very spiritual.

To be passionate in today's world is not politically correct... Nowadays we are supposed to cope. This was not Mahler's problem. He saw it, he heard it, and he expressed it. He was a kaleidoscopic, Olympian figure.