Orts #708

 
The movement begins as if it couldn’t count to three, but then launches out into the full multiplication table, until at last it is reckoning dizzily in millions upon millions.
     — Gustav Mahler, describing the first movement of his fourth symphony
 
 
It’s good! awfully emotional! too emotional, but I love it.
     — Edward Elgar, describing his Violin Concerto
 
 
Outwardly, Mahler and [Richard] Strauss had an amicable working relationship; they were not exactly friends but colleagues who supported each other’s work. . . . But privately Mahler was keen to distance himself from Strauss’s aesthetic. In a letter of February 1897, he thanked Arthur Seidl for distinguishing carefully between himself and Strauss: “You are right in saying that my music generates a programme as a final imaginative elucidation, whereas with Strauss the programme is a set task.”. . .  It was in this same letter, however, that Mahler compared himself and Strauss to two miners tunneling into the same mountain but from different sides.

   
— Julian Johnson, Mahler’s Voices: Expression and Irony in the Songs and Symphonies, Oxford University Press, 2009