In the years from his death to the outbreak of the Second World War, Mahler’s music was in various degrees admired, misunderstood, celebrated, condemned, and ignored. The range of musical figures who engaged with it spans the continent geographically and aesthetically: the Viennese creative, critical, and academic intelligentsia; Europe’s leading conductors (Oskar Fried, Willem Mengelberg, Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, Hermann Scherchen, and Wilhelm Furtwängler); younger, forward-thinking Germans (Kurt Weill); adventurous British musicians and writers (Benjamin Britten, Henry Wood, Hamilton Hardy, Donald Francis Tovey, T. E. Clark); curious French pedagogues (Nadia Boulanger); central personalities in US music (Aaron Copland, Leopold Stokowski, Serge Koussevitzy, Olin Downes, Deems Taylor); and Russians eager to remain connected (Ivan Sollertinsky, Dmitri Shostakovich). The varied interests and opinions embodied in this group are surveyed here with a view to laying out the lively breadth with which this music was discussed in a supposedly quiet time of the composer’s reception history.
