ABSTRACT
While de La Grange is here referring to critics from the earlier part of the century, one can find these same characteristics mentioned in more modern scholarly works. With the exception of his orchestration, every aspect of Mahler's style seems to make critics uncomfortable, demanding that they explain it away or at least attempt to contextualize it. Adorno's writings, particularly the Physiognomy that was translated into English in 1992, have been particularly influential, perhaps because they seem to abandon a tone of apology. The problem is threefold: Mahler borrows melodic material from other composers, he composes in many different styles, and he attempts to weld all this together by sheer force of personality. Mahler's music rebels against the "norms of a fastidious musical culture", and therein lays the problem for the critics: Mahler's music shakes the foundations of a self-assured aesthetic order in which infinity is enclosed within a finite totality.
