He composed in the summers and conducted the rest of the year — ten years at the Vienna Court Opera, then New York. He said a symphony must be like the world and contain everything, and his do: bugle calls, pastoral song, Jewish folk music, street dances and funeral marches, all set side by side.
His orchestration is heard from the inside — the extreme register of a single instrument, one solo line suddenly exposed inside an enormous ensemble. The Ninth ends in strings dying away on a held note marked to fade as slowly as possible, one of the hardest closes in the twentieth-century repertoire to bring off. In his lifetime he was regarded as a conductor; the music only entered the standard repertoire after Bernstein and others pushed it there in the 1960s.
