Gustav Mahler: the face of a man wearing glasses. The face attracts the attention of the viewer: there is something very expressive about it. It is a strong and open face, we are willing to trust it right away. Nothing theatrical about it, nothing presumptuous. This man wears no silks. He is not someone who tells us: I am a genius, be careful with me. There is something energetic, vivid, and “modern” about the man. He gives an impression of alacrity: he could enter the room any second. Many portraits from the same period display men, Germanic and not only Germanic men, politicians, professors, and writers, whose faces disappear stodgily into the thicket of a huge voluptuous beard, as if hiding in it, disallowing any close inspection. But the composer’s visage is naked, trans-parent, immediate. It is there to speak to us, to sing, to tell us something. I bought my first recording of Gustav Mahler many decades ago. At the time his name was almost unknown to me. I only had a vague idea of what it represented. The recording I settled on was produced by a Soviet company called Melodiya — a large state-owned (of course) company which sometimes produced great recordings. There was no trade in the Soviet Union and yet the trademark Melodya did exist. It was the Fifth Symphony, I think — I’ve lost the vinyl disc in my many voyages and moves — and the conductor was Yevgeny Svetlanov. For some reason the cover was displayed in the store window for a long time; it was a modest store in Gliwice, in Silesia. Why the display of Mahler’s name in this provincial city which generally cared little for music? It took me several days before I decided to buy the record. And then, very soon, when I heard the first movement, the trumpet and the march, which was at the same time immensely tragic and a bit joyful too, or at least potentially joyful, I knew from this unexpected conjunction of emotions that something very important had happened: a new chapter in my musical life had opened, and in my inner life as well. New sounds entered my imagination. At the same time I understood — or only intuited — that I would always have a problem distinguishing between “sad” and “joyful,” both in music and in poetry. Some sadnesses would be so delicious, and would make me so happy, that I would forget for a while the difference between the two realms. Perhaps there is no frontier between them, as in the Schengen sector of contemporary Europe. The Fifth Symphony was my gateway to Mahler’s music. Many years after my first acquaintance with it, a British conductor told me that this particular symphony was deemed by those deeply initiated in Mahler’s symphonies and Mahler’s songs as maybe a bit too popular, too accessible, too easy. “That trumpet, you know.” “And, you know, then came Visconti,” who did not exactly economize on the Adagietto from the same symphony in the slow, very slow shots in Death in Venice, where this music, torn away from its sisters and brothers, the other movements, came to serve a mass-mystical, mass-hys-terical cultish enthusiasm, floating on the cushions of movie theaters chairs. Nothing for serious musicians, nothing for scholars and sages…. But I do not agree. For me the Fifth Symphony remains one of the living centers of Gustav Mahler’s music and no movie will demote it, no popularity will diminish it, no easily manipulated melancholy in a distended Adagietto will make me skeptical about its force, its freshness, its depth. As for that trumpet: the trumpet that I heard for the first time so many years ago had nothing to do with the noble and terrifying noises of the Apocalypse. It was nothing more than an echo of a military bugle — which, the biographers tell us, young Gustav must have heard almost every week in his small Moravian town of Jihlava, or Iglau in German, which was the language of the Habsburg empire, where local troops in their slightly comic blue uniforms would march in the not very tidy streets to the sounds of a brass orchestra. Yet there was nothing trivial or farcical about this almost-a-bugle trumpet. It told me right away that in Mahler’s music I would be exposed to a deep ambivalence, a new complication — that the provincial, the din of Hapsburgian mass-culture, will forever pervade his symphonies. This vernacular, this down-to-earth (down to the cobblestones of Jihlava’s streets) brass racket, always shadows Mahler’s most sublime adagios. The biographical explanation is interesting and important, but it is not sufficient. An artist of Mahler’s stature does not automatically or reflexively rely on early experiences for his material. He uses them, and transposes them, only when they fit into a larger scheme having to do with his aesthetic convictions and longings. The strings in the adagios seem to come from a different world: the violins and the cellos in the adagios sound like they are being played by poets. But then in the rough scherzo-like movements we hear the impudent brass. From the clouds to the cobblestones: Mahler may be a mystical composer, but his mysticism is tinged with an acute awareness of the ordinary, often trite environment of all the higher aspirations. 
His aesthetic convictions and longings: what are they? Judging from the music, one thing seems to be certain: this composer is looking for the high, maybe for the highest that can be achieved, for the religious, for the metaphysical — and yet he cannot help hearing also the common laughter of the low streets, the unsophisticated noise of military brass instruments. His search for the sublime never takes place in the abstract void of an inspiration cleansed of the demotic world which is his habitat. Mahler confronts the predicament well known to many artists and writers living within the walls of modernity but not quite happy with it, because they have in their
There's nothing Artificial about our Intelligence