Yes John, I can't believe it myself! LOL!
Everyone asks me, "Why do you like all that tragedy?" I guess my answer is that M6 and M9 (so far anyway, I'm just starting to explore the fifth) help me to deal with and answer my own questions about my life as someone who is totally blind, and about the world in general. Mahler's music is so complex that I am guessing many people are turned away from it--I know it was that way for me for a while. I mean, come on, the idea of an 80-minute symphony? No thanks. (Well, at first, anyway.) I am still coming to terms with M6 and M9, and that's just two of them!
It doesn't help that nobody at school--even in the orchestra--really cares about classical music, let alone the music of Gustav Mahler. I start talking about Mahler symphonies and everyone is lost!
As for when I heard my first Mahler, it was back when I was nine years old. I was going through CDs of my parents' and found a CD of what I now know is Symphony No. 1. I didn't much care for anything else, but I sure did like the third movement. There was something magical about it, and I suspect I will always be reminded of that first night I heard it whenever I hear that movement.
My next encounter with Mahler was in September 2007. I had obtained a copy of the Barber's Adagio and Other Romantic Favorites for Strings CD (by Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic) from the conductor at the high school I attended at the time. I got this CD to copy mainly for the Andante Cantabile by Tchaikovsky, but I found myself listening to the M5 Adagietto more and more as well. Beautiful, I thought. (I still think that way, lest any of you be concerned. ;-) ) I don't know how I found out exactly what the name of that piece was; I may have asked my conductor, I do not remember.
I was exposed to Mahler 6 in November of 2008 while reading an autobiography called Mozart in the Jungle. After researching the work a bit, I thought it was my fit: emotion to the extreme. So I downloaded two recordings, one the Michael Tilson Thomas/San Francisco Symphony, and the other the one by Bernard Haitink and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. And then some things happened in my life that made me relate all too easily to the story M6 told. (Yes, I know Mahler was not telling a romantic tragedy in M6, but grief is grief is grief, in my opinion.)
I first heard the Ninth on Saturday, June 13, 2009. It was the day before my last performance with the Willowbrook High School Orchestra; this performance was at graduation, to add to the emotion. I had to switch high schools for the 2009-2010 school year (the educational program that served students with visual impairments was moving) and my parents and I were furious about it. While there had first been some indication that I might be able to stay where I was (I don't need many support services) we had found out the day before that in fact no, I could not stay.
Only when faced with leaving the (reasonably) good high school orchestra I was in did I really start to love where I was and the people involved in the last two months of that school year. I had formed some close relationships over that two-month period, and being somewhat of an emotional person already I was totally lost when it came time for my final concert (not counting Graduation) and when it came time to really say good-bye to everyone, especially those friends I had drawn closer to in the closing months.
So yeah, that's my story with M9. I listened to the Ninth (performed by Bruno Walter in 1961) on Napster (that $5 all-you-can-listen-to music membership came in handy) and walked away with a feeling of serenity. Again, I know Mahler's original meaning in the music was to portray those emotions associated with upcoming death, but I could identify so clearly with Mahler's love of what is being lost--it felt as though his music spoke directly to me--and I cannot honestly think that Mahler would have been displeased by attachment and identification with the work's theme.
