“If Mahler, like Heine before him, saw conversion as his billet d’entrée to opportunity, Schoenberg would, with his reconversion to the religion of his birth, declare the opposite. Though Hitler provided Schoenberg with an immediate motivation, Mahler provided an inheritance of such undeniably great and original music that reconversion to Judaism could be understood as an act of defiance. This was one of Mahler’s most remarkable, and as yet unsung, accomplishments.”

– from Forbidden Music