LAYBILLS ARE NECESSARY ONLY INSOFAR as the art they describe is not; it is as if listeners have to be distracted from the music they’re supposed to be listening to. These programs tell us that the slow drag we’re about to hear is no ordinary funeral procession but a Trauermarsch, composed in the dying days of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, under conditions of, usually, unremitting misery. Fill in the blank: The composer of this work suffered from insanity, tuberculosis, syphilis, or suicide. Go on any night to any concert hall: You will see people looking and seeing, not hearing, and the sound they make riffling pages is often louder than the pianissimos of the slowest slow movements. These notes, so opposed to musical notation, tell us the sequence of the evening’s entertainments and their stories as well, in the tradition of nineteenth-century “program music”—music that seeks associations outside of itself, aerating aural experience through reference to nature or philosophy, to literature or the visual arts. Although some metaphors provided by these notes reflect a composer’s intention, all insist on refusing music its abstraction, on transforming its absolute, mathematical quality into the emotionally relatable, the familiarly human. [...]

Conversely, giving a summary of these books is like producing a Mahler medley, condensing periphrastic brass into a brief fanfare

Keller was citing Mahler’s Third Symphony, which contrasts its scherzo with the scherzo’s historical forerunner, the courtly minuet.

living on the same Manhattan island, just blocks south, but they in sumptuary garb, practicing traditions from centuries past

His absence here speaks every cliché in the world: “louder than words,” certainly louder than de La Grange’s logorrhea

That history cannot repeat, which is an idea infused with both European Weltschmerz and hopeful American gusto, finds resonance in Mahler’s greatest contribution to compositional technique

Such a pattern played out in Mahler’s milieu of Germanic Jews. Mahler, like Kafka, like Marx a generation before, was born into the bourgeoisie, then became an artistic “Bohemian,” if only to redeem himself from guilt, before he was expected to be reabsorbed by the bourgeoisie, in a classical resolution, as if the key of home and hearth were a sunny C major. Except it wasn’t, and the basses surged beneath on a soured tone. Kafka left his parents’ house in Prague for a young Polish-born, ex-Hasidic girlfriend and Berlin; Marx abroad in Paris abandoned verse and metaphysics, entering politics to effect not art but change. Revolution is just that, an inability to be reintegrated, and, unlike his life, Mahler’s music cannot be reintegrated. Forsaking the sonata’s inevitable resolution, his compositions can lead only to discord, in a progressive development with no recapitulation save death. The ultimate modern depressive, Mahler fell in love with his death as the final finale, and this love, a one-man version of Wagner’s Liebestod, is what elicits our empathy today. The soundtrack of this death, because so much about Mahler’s life is cinematic, has become the soundtrack to all death, even to the death of music, and the fact that Mahler’s symphonies lack a certain program or biography for whatever degenerescence has been scored allows us to impute sufferings of our own, to become, in them, acting conductors of our personal mortalities.