... We saw more of him at home now than ever before. He could scarcely bear to be parted from the children, and for each he had a special form of entertainment--stories, jokes or funny faces. He loved telling the elder one Brentano's fairy tale--"Gockel, Hinkel and Gackeleia".
... He finished the Sixth Symphony and added three more to the two Kindertotenlieder. I found this incomprehensible. I can understand setting such frightful words to music if one had no children, or had lost those one had. Moreover, Friederick Ruckert did not write these harrowing elegies solely out of his imagination: they were dictated by the cruellest loss of his whole life. ...
... This is the great soaring theme of the first movement of the Sixth Symphony. In the third movement he represented the unrhythmic games of two little children, tottering in the zigzags over the sand. Ominously, the childish voices became more and more tragic, and at the end died out in a whimper. In the last movement he described himself and his downfall or, as he later said, that of his hero: "It is the hero, on whom fall three blow of fate, the last of which fells him as a tree is felled." Those were his words.
Not one of his works came so directly from his inmost heart as this. We both wept that day. The music and what it foretold touched us so deeply. The Six is the most completely personal of his works, and a prophetic one also. In the Kindertotenlieder, as also in the Sixth, he anticipated his own life in music. On him too fell three blows of fate, and the last felled him. ...
... I remarked to him once during a walk: "All I love in a man is his achievement. The greater his achievement the more I have to love him."
"That's a real danger. You mean if any one came along who could do more than I --"
"I'd have to love him," I said.
He smiled: "Well, I won't worry for the time being. I don't know anybody who can do more than I can." ...
... Another understanding between us, which I understood as little, was that what he said one day was not to hold good the next. It was therefore out of the question for me to say: "But, Gustav, you said the very opposite yesterday" (as he very often did), because he reserved for himself the privilege of inconsequence. This characteristic of his was often a great shock to me. I could never be sure of what he thought and felt. ...
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