Most young American and English musicians have been encouraged, I think, to disregard Mahler. At least I myself was. Always coupled with Bruckner, he was supposed to be a purely local composer. For Germans, I was told, he had a certain sentimental attraction, though even on the Rhine and the Danube, the academicians preferred Brahms, the glamour-seekers Strauss, and the modernists Schönberg and Berg. He was long-winded and formless—the bright intellectuals cited him as an example of a romantic self-indulgent, who was so infatuated with his ideas that he could never stop.