Just listened to Mahler 6 the other day, on the plane back from Boston, back from home, from NYC — from visiting pretty much all the family I have in the US, on my dad’s side, visiting the few dear friends I have, and playing music for the first time in some time — on the plane back from a good trip, all in all. The 6th of course is the “Tragic”. Actually I listened to his 1st, 2nd, 6th, and most of the 9th over the course of the flights to and from Boston. I haven’t listened to his music in quite some time. The 6th was of course tragic — try try try so hard, and in the end it isn’t enough.

But now hearing the 9th, the finale — I was rather sick on the flight back to San Fran and found my ears clogging up toward the end of the 3rd movement and figured I’d leave the finale for later. Of course the finale is everything that it is. This is music that no matter where I am does something to me. I read the entirety of Pushkin’s Evgeni Onegin with my mom in Russian back home, and now since then have started to read Byron’s Don Juan. They both were written when the respective writers were around 30, and in both they opine of first love and of how somehow those innocent firsts are lost to them at this age, of course it is my age as well.

I suppose what I wanted to say was that in Mahler’s 6th there is the “try try try and not enough” and how poignant it is, and yet compared to the finale of the 9th — there is also the “try try try and not enough,” and also poignant, but the try is so much more, so much wider, more personal. More zoomed out and general and broad and yet so much more personal. And the “not enough” is as devastating, more so, and yet it is also so accepted. This is the music. It was always these moments of resolution/irresolution — the “try try try and not enough” — the break, just as Lensky’s murder — the definitive loss of… something — that made me feel whatever it is that I so cherish in this music.