The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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Alex Ross. The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century

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Praise

ALEX ROSS, music critic for the New Yorker, is the recipient of numerous awards for his work, including an Arts and Letters Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Belmont Prize in Germany, three honorary doctorates and a MacArthur Fellowship.

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In the summer of 1906, Mahler sought to cement his relationship with the public by sketching his life-affirming, oratorio-like Eighth Symphony, which he called his “gift to the nation.” The first part was based on the hymn “Veni creator spiritus”; the second part was a panoramic setting of the last scene of Goethe’s Faust, Part II. The Eighth inspired earthshaking applause on the occasion of its premiere, four years later. “The indescribable here is accomplished,” hundreds of singers roar at the end; the storm of applause that followed might as well have been notated in the score.

The glowing optimism of the Eighth belied the fact that the composer was growing sick of Vienna, of the constant opposition of anti-Semites, of infighting and backstabbing. He announced his resignation in May 1907, conducted his last opera performance in October, and made his final appearance as a conductor in Vienna in November, bidding farewell with his own Second Symphony. To his ardent fans, it was as though he had been driven out by the forces of ignorance and reaction. When he left the city, at the end of the year, two hundred admirers, Schoenberg and his pupils among them, gathered at the train station to bid him farewell, garlanding his compartment with flowers. It seemed the end of a golden age. “Vorbei!” said Gustav Klimt—“It’s over!”

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