THE IMAGE OF MAHLER THAT HAS EMERGED from this study is neither that of a nostalgic modernist nor that of a neoromanticist. Mahler was not melancholically looking backward in the sense that he longed to reinstate traditions presumably lost or mourned values associated with earlier times — an image that was in part created by Alma Mahler and Bruno Walter, but that, in a far more sophisticated way, also underlies Adorno's ideas about Mahler. What is sometimes called Mahler's “eclecticism” — a term I am not entirely comfortable with, because it has associations with a passive borrowing and an implied lack of creativity, while Mahler's music is also highly original when it refers to tradition — is one aspect of Mahler's work that is far closer to the aesthetic strategies of the avant-garde version of modernism, which considered all of the means that cultural history had in stock as potential tools (see “Introduction”), than to the nostalgic modernism of some of Mahler's contemporaries. Mahler chose to use traditions selectively and in a critical way, and in doing so showed that German cultural history was far more diverse than the nationalistic mobilization of German cultural heritage that occurred around 1900 would suggest. It is important to realize that he did not simply mimic the cultural and literary preferences of his time but rather made determined and conscious choices. In doing so, he reconstructed German cultural history in ways very different from those of the composers before him in whose tradition he worked (Wagner, Bruckner) as well as those of his contemporaries (Hugo Wolf, Richard Strauss).

To some extent Mahler viewed cultural history, as did many of his contemporaries, as a conversation between great men — a conversation in which he himself would participate.