Your fiftieth birthday affords an occasion for me to tell you what I always want to keep on saying: in what high regard I hold you. And how I cannot help remembering, with much distress, that in earlier days I so often annoyed you by being at variance with you. I feel that I was wrong to try to thrust my opinions on you instead of listening when you talked and letting myself be enriched by what is more important than opinions: the resonance of a great personality. Even if the overtones of my opinions could not, or at least could not always, vibrate in accord with the gist of what you would say — I know that, being younger, I have a right to be different, even if that also means imperfect, since I must learn by my own experience and must not let myself be theoretically convinced—, still, there is one thing to which I should have yielded absolutely: the essential quality that emanates from whatever is great, that indefinable thing which I have so strongly sensed in your presence and which is for me the power of genius; something the existence and force of which is fully clear to my feeling. And if I have nevertheless been at variance with you — I do not know why. Perhaps it was shortsightedness, perhaps contrariness. Perhaps too it was love, for with all this I have always venerated you awfully. It was ‘flapperish’: love that pursues with hatred. I have so long been wanting to write you this letter, or if possible one putting all this better, because it has been weighing on my mind for a long time. I do find it relatively shaming that I did not understand you at once; but that I must needs have been a cause of annoyance to you is something I deeply repent of. I have only one excuse: I was no longer young enough, I was already too much occupied with my own development. Perhaps you will be disposed to let that serve. Schoenberg to Mahler (5 July 1910, Vienna)
Posted on: Sun, 28 Dec 2014 01:57:03 +0000