Iván Fischer at 70

[kernelbogey]

Thank you RichardF - I hope and intend to return to this thread later. Your post #30 opens up new perspective for me.

[RichardB]

do we need to postulate the existence of a “collective unconscious “ as opposed to a very collective consciousness? For these Armageddon scenarios were openly discussed.

Yes they were. And alongside a sense that the world was sliding towards catastrophe there was also the fact that much that had seemed certain and reliable about the world and about human beings themselves was being dismantled, from different directions, not just by Marx and the anarchists but also Darwin, Freud, Einstein and other scientific thinkers.

[richardfinegold]

Yes they were. And alongside a sense that the world was sliding towards catastrophe there was also the fact that much that had seemed certain and reliable about the world and about human beings themselves was being dismantled, from different directions, not just by Marx and the anarchists but also Darwin, Freud, Einstein and other scientific thinkers.

Absolutely. I had written something to that effect in #30, but then edited it out because I feared that I already had run on too much. You stated it much more succinctly than I had.

[kernelbogey]

I've tried to read a lot about the origins of WWI, and to do that one really has to delve into European, and to a lesser extent Asian, African and American History of the last half of the 20th Century. I think it's fair to say that by the end of the 19th Century most of the World knew that something dreadful was going to occur around the horizon. While a Composer such as Mahler could not have predicted some thing as specific as, for example, the Battle of the Somme, they knew that the various sources of stress in the world were going to burst the relative peace that Europe enjoyed. However Mahler was undoubtedly influenced by his personal tragedies as well. Is his music (and others of the general period, such as the Brahms Fourth, or the Tchaikovsky Sixth) indicative of purely personal psychological crisis, specific to the individual creator? Or is there a more general anxiety for the fate of mankind as a whole mixed in?

I just came across this statement in http://www.for3.org/forums/showthrea...o-6-in-A-minor:

Mahler was convinced that, in his music, he had the ability to foresee and even predict events and, painful though it might be, as an artist he could not avoid doing so.

I didn't know that he believed this.