vokes, nor the heaven he strives so ardently to attain. They are in
the music of a score of other composers. For these men had lived. And it
was to real life that Mahler never attained.

If his music expresses anything at all, it expresses just the
characteristics that Mahler was most anxious to have it conceal. Life is
the greatest of practical jokers, and Mahler, in seeking to escape his
racial traits, ended by representing nothing so much as the Jew. For if
there is anything visible behind the music of Mahler, it is the Jew as
Wagner, say, describes him in "Das Judentum in der Musik," the Jew who
through the superficial assimilation of the traits of the people among
whom he is condemned to live, and through the suppression of his own
nature, becomes sterile. It is the Jew consumed by malaise and
homesickness, by impotent yearning for the terrain which will permit him
free expression, and which he conceives as an otherwheres, or as a
dream-Palestine. It is the Jew unable to feel faith or joy or content
because he is unable to live out his own life. It is the Jew consumed by
bitterness because he is perpetually untrue to himself. It is the Jew
afraid to die because he has never really lived himself out. It is the
Jew as he is when he wants most to cease being a Jew. Mahler could have
seemed no more the Jew had he expressed himself in all his Hebraic
fervor instead of singing about Saint Peter in Heaven and seeking to
reconcile Rhabanus Maurus and Goethe in a "higher synthesis." Only, it
would have been good music instead of a nondescript and mongrel thing
that he composed. All that he really attained by hampering himself was
sterility.

And, in the end, we are forced to conclude that it was not solely the
environment, however much that favored it, that condemned Mahler to
sterility. Did we have no example of a Jewish musician attaining
creativity through the frank expression of his Semitic characteristics,
we might presume that no choice existed for Mahler, and that it is
inevitable that the Jew, whenever he essays the grand style, becomes
just what Wagner called him in his brilliant and brutal pamphlet, a
pretender. But, fortunately, such an example does exist. Geneva, "la
ville Protestante," that saw unclose the art of Ernest Bloch, was, after
all, not much more eager to welcome a Jewish renaissance than was the
Vienna of Gustav Mahler. But some inner might that the elder man lacked
gave the young Genevese composer