ABSTRACT
Stuart Feder, one of the presenters, writes that "the boy's affinity for music was apparent from the time when only singing could soothe him on the bumpy road to Ledec" where his maternal grandparents lived. The 2005 Creativity Seminar began on his birthday. Feder writes that "Gustav Mahler, like his ideal, Beethoven, was born in the shadow of death", "a replacement child". Mahler worked through more than one life crisis in his music, including the crisis of 5 July 1907, when his beloved elder daughter, Marie, named for his mother, died of scarlet fever and diphtheria. The 8th Symphony was unlike anything ever heard before: a triumphant "gift of joy" Mahler called it, in two apparently disparate sections, the first, a setting of the ninth century Pentecostal hymn, "Veni Creator Spiritus". The second is the final scene from Goethe's Faust.
