Was mir die Engel erzählen . Mahlers traumhafte Gegenwelten

Gustav Mahler was given to extremes, both as man and as artist. Even at the age of 19 he could write that, The strongest glow of life s most joyous power and the all-consuming yearning for death, both rule alternately in my heart. The experience of being lost between heaven and earth became, in Schoenberg s words, the melody of life for Mahler and the central theme of his music. Thus he creates tension between the funeral ceremony and resurrection chorus (2nd Symphony), and sets to music his great homesickness for the distant land of the redeeming music of the future. This allows him to recognise voices which sound as if they come from another world , enables him to hear what the angels tell (3rd Symphony), or the circling planets (8th Symphony).
Mahler understood how to convey emphatically his artistic mission, so that Schoenberg addressed him as a luminous prophet. Ernst Bloch claimed that this holy, hymn-like man had composed the most visionary music . But eyes that see the future (Schoenberg) can also be unsettling and may be suspected of totalitarianism: was he not a usurper (H. Mayer) who firmly prescribed his religion of art? Were his dream-like parallel worlds reality made sound or unredeemed Utopias? Was his principal work the failed, objectively impossible revival of the cultic (Adorno)?
Academics, writers, musicians and visual artists examine these questions, theses and hypotheses.