saccharine and
characterless than those of the last movement of the Third Symphony, or
the adagio of the Fourth. Once in a while, no doubt, a vague personal
tone, a flavor of the Bohemian countryside where Mahler was born, does
manage to distinguish itself from the great inchoate masses of his
symphonies. The strolling musician plays on his clarinet; peasants sit
at tables covered with red cloths and drink beer; Hans and Gretel dance;
evening falls; the brooks run silvered; from the barracks resound the
Austrian bugle calls; old soldier songs, that may have been sung in the
Seven Years' War, arise; the watchman makes his sleepy rounds.

But, for the most part, it is precisely the personal tone that his music
completely lacks. For he was never himself. He was everybody and nobody.
He was forever seeking to be one composer or another, save only not
Gustav Mahler. The fatal assimilative power of the Jew is revealed
nowhere in music more sheerly than in the style of Mahler. Romain
Rolland discovers alone in the Fifth Symphony reminiscences of Beethoven
and Mendelssohn, Bach and Chabrier. Schubert flits persistently through
Mahler's scores, particularly through that of the Third Symphony, whose
introductory theme for eight horns recalls almost pointedly the opening
of the C-major of Schubert, without, however, in the least recapturing
its effectiveness. Bruckner, Mahler's teacher, is also incessantly
reflected by these works, by the choral themes which Mahler is so fond
of embodying in his compositions, and, more particularly, by the length
and involutions of so many of the themes of his later symphonies. For,
like Bruckner's, they appear chosen with an eye to their serviceability
for contrapuntal deformation and dissection. Wagner, Haydn, Schumann and
Brahms, the sentimental _Wienerwald_ Brahms, also pass incessantly
through these scores. But it was Beethoven whom Mahler sought chiefly to
emulate. Over his symphonies (and it is a curious fact that Mahler, like
the three men that he most frequently imitated, Schubert, Bruckner, and
Beethoven, wrote just nine symphonies), over his entire work, his songs
as well as his orchestral pieces, there lies the shadow of the Master of
Bonn. Mahler was undoubtedly Beethoven's most faithful disciple. All his
life he was seeking to write the "Tenth Symphony," the symphony that
Beethoven died before composing. He was continually attempting to
approximate the other's grand, pathetic tone, hi