As for the popularity of Mahler in this country, there certainly was a real fad for it in the 60s and 70s (I remember, as a student at the RCM, seeing scrawled on the wall of the "gents" "Mahler is great, Bruckner is C (scatological word) "
I don't know that Mahler's work appears in today's concert programmes nearly as frequently as it once did...but, then, it's not something I'd be keen to fork out from my pension to buy tickets for !
I think we are straying into the territory of Beecham's famous bon mot, which might be relevant both to this thread and the one regarding Mahler's Eighth: "The British may not like music, but they absolutely love the noise it makes." We are, after all, a nation which loves both Mahler in excelsis and scatological humour.
In his round-up of humorous references to classical music in the Simpsons, my colleague David Barker observes about "farting (I suspect this is the first time that word has been used on this site!)". I regret to inform him that he sadly overestimates the decorum of the contributors to this website; I am sad enough to have searched it and found many such occasions: Alex Russell in 2003 regarding Stravinsky's Pulcinella: "The LSO trombonist must not be afraid to fart when the occasion demands it."; Gary Higginson in 2010 re Frescobaldi: "One student of mine wrote that he “was potentially a boring old fart”."; John Ireland in Memoirs by Humphrey Searle: "Master Britten, always having something to show in the shop window - if he farts they'll record it."; Dan Morgan on Messiaen: "The fart and shriek of this weird score has seldom emerged with such clarity and impact" and shame on you, Dan, even worse on Shostakovich's The Nose in 2009: " the trombone fart in scene iii for instance - where Kovalev discovers his pecker has gone AWOL."
I could go on, as there are many more but I hesitate to wound further the delicate sensibilities of our readers. It just shows you: perhaps the world of classical music appreciation is not as stuffy as some would have you believe...
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