Late October, 1962: Symphony No. 9, Bruno Walter conducting the "Columbia Symphony". The leaves had been blown down a few days earlier by the usual wind storm that New England gets that time of year. Everything had gone from blazing colors to shades of gray in a few days. The Cuban Missile Crisis had come and gone: Kennedy had stared down Khrushchev, and nuclear war had been narrowly avoided.

A few months earlier I had gotten into mountain climbing. A friend of mine who was also a classical music fan had recently developed the notion to collect multiple record LPs. He had told me about his latest acquisition, some "modern" music (based on our musical training and influences at the time, anything after Brahms/Wagner/Dvorak, etc. was considered "modern"), written by some guy he had never heard of.

So, after school, we walked to his house, which was located 2/3 of the way up the second highest hill in Bethel, CT. The view of the hills and mountains to the north was spectacular, which was where the picture window of his parent's house faced, of course. I studied the album, admired the fine black and white photography (I had been doing my own developing and printing for 3 years) of Walter conducting, and examined the picture of the composer, the famous 1909 Amsterdam profile, in which he appeared to me to look about 85 years old. What a shock later when I found out he was in his late forties.

My friend put the first LP on and, what he had described as "frog music", our common reference to any music that resembled the opening of "La Valse", started. Only thing was, this didn't sound like Ravel or amphibians, it sounded as if the mountains and lakes and sky and clouds off to the north had started speaking and singing. There was something there that a 15-year-old then had trouble putting into words and now all these years later still finds difficult to verbalize!

All through the Andante comodo I kept thinking, wow, where has this music been? It's great! It's fantastic! It talks directly to you, it pulls no punches! And, what it says! About life, thoughts, ideas, emotions, hopes, wishes, triumph and tragedy, god, what a life this guy must have had! This continued through the gemächlichen Ländlers, the Rondo-Burleske, and finally the Adagio: I was essentially spellbound. When the final D flat chord died away, I knew I had heard something wonderful. I knew on that first hearing that this is great music. The 9th (and eventually the rest of Mahler's music) got me in its grip and hasn't let go since.

PZ.

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