LDV100

The rain has been falling all day; now it is finally letting up. Outside, the extremities of the hut’s roof are dripping, and the smell of humus penetrates as far as the fireplace. The vegetation is drenched and glistens through slowly spreading patches of mist. He feels the damp and the cold creeping up his spine, but pays it no heed, for he is bent over the paper, his hand to his brow and his fingers stained with ink. This is the moment when he lives, when he performs his sacred duty: the past year as director at the Vienna Opera has exhausted him, and each year spent at the conductor’s desk seems to take him further from his path. He has to write, to expel the music that wrenches at his stomach, otherwise he will die of it. The doctors have warned him that had it not been for their intervention, his intestinal haemorrhage would have vanquished him. Now, haunted by anguish, he writes. It is a Sunday without God and without light, a Sunday suffused with anxiety and solitude, choked by a quest for the infinite that will never be satisfied; but the music takes a decisive turn under his pen. He is misunderstood, yet that is of little matter to him, because he knows that he is the builder of a new language and nothing can stand in the way of his faith. ‘It’s true that I bang my head against the walls, but it’s always the walls that give way in the end’, he often says to himself. ... Mahler Summer 1901 Adagietto of the Fifth Symphony 20 MAHLER ∙ SCHOENBERG / JUGENDSTIL