Music and the season …

… The sadder side of summer | Norman Lebrecht | The Critic Magazine. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

The archetypal summer composer was Gustav Mahler who, working full time at an opera house, had only June to August for symphonic thoughts. In 1893, Mahler took rooms at an inn on the Attersee in northern Austria and built himself a shed at the edge of the lake. “No need to look up there,” he told Bruno Walter, who was admiring the mountains, “I have composed them all away.” Seldom has a composer revealed a more sensitive secret. In order to touch his unconscious, Mahler needed to take physical possession of a landscape that resembled his childhood environment.