Dead Europeans

Today's Dead European: Gustav Mahler


I hate you...so very, very much Gustav Mahler

I do not like Gustav Mahler. He is very boring. His music is boring, his very gaze is death to fun and adventure. His 3rd symphony is about the longest you are ever likely to hear, and lenght does not become it. This is one boring dead European.

So imagine my suprise when I purchased Das Lied von der Erde at the Best Buy the other day. Suprise because that particular peice of choral work was written by Captain Excitement up there himself. I figured, what the hell, I've never heard this maybe it will be good, perhaps he makes up in opera what he lacks in every other respect. Well, he doesn't. However, the arrangement is old-fashioned so there is some joy in hearing it done like the soundtrack to an Errol Flynn movie, instead of the smooth-as-thunder treatment it would no doubt get today. So there you are: Mahler--when you want music, but nothing you will really get in to or care about at all.

UPDATE: I was looking into him and it turns out he was really into Wagner. That seems about right.

UPDATE: Excuse me, not opera, "song-cycle." Snobby, boring German bastard.