“Even Mahler’s bucolic idylls were conditioned by his busy life. The resorts where he went were fashionable and increasingly crowded. Good rail connections linked them to the major centers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, making them ‘microcosms of the very cities from which the composer so often claimed to take refuge.’ The experience was more like Davos than Caspar David Friedrich. Mahler’s love of nature was predicated on his separation from it.”