The Best Way to Meet People Is Through Friends. If you've met all your friends' friends, it's time you made some new ones through It's Just Lunch! Where we understand the best way to meet people is through people. Not computers. Not the personals. But through your circle of friends. Or a service that works the same way. home, Mahler took music lessons from a local Catholictwiest. He stud- ied at the Prague Gymnasium and Vienna Conservatory, winning awards for piano and composition. After graduation, Mahler made his living as a conductor white earning a sparse composing income. Before long, he had progressed to major opera houses in Prague (1885-86), Leipzig (1886-88), Budapest (1888- 91) and Hamburg (1891-97). Mahler was a popular conductor, although his harsh rehearsal methods and dealings with musicians were widely criticized. According to Norman Lebrecht, author of Mahler Remembered, the conductor/composer converted to Catholicism primarily to get ahead in the German musical world. In 1896, the 36-year-old Mahler was eager to take the top job at the prestigious Vienna Court Opera and Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra. "The job was his; provided he adopted the state religion of the Habsburg court," Lebrecht wrote. "On Feb. 23, 1897, he underwent baptism at St. Michael's Church, Hamburg. Twelve weeks later, he con- ducted [Richard Wagner's opera] Lohengrin in Vienna." Mahler's work as director of the Vienna Opera integrated top-quality musicianship with striking dramatic integrity. He enthusiastically embraced the works of Wagner and other German composers with an almost dictatorial fervor. In a 1922 memoir, Alfred Roller, an artist who designed sets during Mahler's tenure in Vienna, said the conductor/composer never hid his Jewish origins — and, even if he had wanted to, the world would not let him. "It's a funny thing," Mahler once told Roller, "but it seems to me the anti-Semitic papers are the only ones who still have any respect for me." However, these same anti-Semitic newspapers — the Neue Freie Presse, Wiener Tagebllatt and Deutsches Volksblatt — baited him as a Jew, despite the frequent Christian-Chemed texts of his symphonies and song cycles. When Mahler conducted Wagner's operatic cycle Ring of the Nibelungen in Vienna, it was widely characterized in the press as "the Jewish Ring." In 1907, Mahler traveled to America, taking over leadership of New York's Metropolitan Opera. He told his mother-in-law in a letter that he hoped American critics would judge his work by musical standards, not as a by-product of his Jewishness. At It's Just Lunch, we want to know you the way your friends do. So you feel comfortable telling us what you're looking for in another person. Then we find someone to fit your description, do all the "asking out" and make arrangements for you to meet. All you do is show up! Give us a call. We can't wait to meet you! DETROIT SUBURBS 248.273.1000 Dating for Busy Professionals 35 Locations Nationwide DSO Conductor Neeme Jarvi has chosen Mahler's Third Symphony for his return to the podium for the 2002-2003 classical concert season. "Since they are completely unpreju- diced," he wrote, "I hope I shall here find fertile ground for my works and thus a spiritual home, something that, for all the sensationalism, I should never achieve in Europe." Its Just Lunch Directors: Angela Johnson, Nancy Ansara, Heather Hill, and Pamela Lanier Deconstructing Mahler Although Mahler — who died near Paris in 1911 after seeking treatment for a heart condition diagnosed a few years earlier — achieved great fame as a conductor during his lifetime, it was not until the 1960s and the champi- onship of Leonard Bernstein, conduc- tor of the New York Philharmonic, that he became the cultural icon he is today. "In every aspect of his life, Mahler was a double man: sad grownup and innocent child; suave Westerner and gypsy-like Easterner; flowery romanti- cist and bold modernist; master of chamber music sounds yet composer for some of the biggest orchestras in history," Bernstein told television audiences in his Feb. 7, 1960, Young People's Concert. Bernstein became the first conductor to record all of Mahler's symphonies, not only on disk but also on video. In 1986, he produced a television docu- mentary titled The Little Drummer Boy, which focused on Mahler's Jewishness and his obsession with death. He concluded: "Mahler's music, at its greatest and most mature, [is] a synthesis of his life-long conflict between Judaism on the one hand and Christianity on the other." The 2001 London theater season included a play examining the emo- tional fallout of Mahler's abandonment of Judaism and of his volatile marriage to Alma Schindler, a non-Jew he mar- ried in 1902. 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