Object #45

Arnold Schönberg
Gustav Mahler
Der Merker 3/5 (March 1912)

Arnold Schönberg Center, Wien

“Gustav Mahler was a saint. Anyone who knew him even slightly must have had that feeling. [...] ‘As if it had been dictated to me,’ Mahler once said, to describe how rapidly and half-unconsciously he created, in two months, his Eighth Symphony. [...] Here is the faith that raises us on high. Here is someone believing, in his immortal works, in an eternal soul. I do not know whether our soul is immortal, but I believe it. What I do know, though, is that men, the highest men such as Beethoven and Mahler, will believe in an immortal soul until the power of this belief has endowed humanity with one. Meanwhile, we have immortal works. And we shall know how to guard them.”