Gustav Mahler is unquestionably one of the most important figures in the musical history of the last hundred years. On this fact most critics agree, but when they attempt to go beyond the fact to determine exactly wherein his greatness lies or squeeze the amorphous mass of symphonic hodge-podge that he left behind into a coherent critical straight-jacket, then there is a great variety of opinion. The Mahler cycle which is being broadcast every alternate Sunday at 12:30 by the Radio City Music Hall symphony orchestra is a very courageous and worthwhile undertaking, but the interpretations dispensed by the announcer during the pauses are for the most part a fanciful concoction and not borne out by the nature of the music or the facts of Mahler's life.

The picture which the Mahler popularizers paint of a genial pantheistic pagan who has achieved complete harmony within himself is entirely false. Mahler lived in a confused time and was himself a mass of contradictory tendencies. You have in him the paradox of a composer who, in contrast to the tone-painting and theme-overlapping of Wagner and Strauss, wrote in the classical symphonic form with a sound knowledge of counter-point, yet one who was essentially homophonic in style and never attained the balance and integrated development that the classical forms imply.

Romain Rolland called Mahler "an egoist who feels with sincerity," and it is probably his unmistakable earnestness and depth of feeling rather than surface skill that will keep him from becoming a fantastic museum-piece. He was most effective in lyrical passages where his braggadocio and forced climaxes could give way to mood-painting and color. In this respect and several others he resembled Schubert. Despite his strivings for power and long-winded reiterations, he might well be called the Heine of music with a dash of Buddha thrown in, the nostalgic life-affirmer and the world-weary philosopher rolled into one. Song was the germ of his material, and a vocal text gave him the unity he naturally lacked and set the prevailing mood. His greatest work was probably the song-cycle, "Das Lied von der Erde," in which he achieves great poignancy with the greatest economy of means. Here is the most vivid and original Mahler, strolling through a misty Chinese garden, haunted by stabs and flashes of memory.