“Mahler was in the auditorium for the first performance of Schoenberg’ Schamber Symphony (Op. 9) in 1907. There were rowdy scenes after the performance, with people clapping, hissing and yelling. Mahler himself clapped, but the man next to him hissed for all he was worth. ‘How dare you hiss when I’m clapping?’ Mahler asked him imperiously. ‘I hissed your filthy symphony, too!’ came the answer. ‘You look as though you would!’ countered Mahler, and the two men would have come to blows if the police had not intervened.

“Thirty years later in Vienna I [Otto Klemperer] conducted a full orchestral setting of the work, arranged by Schoenberg him self. It was a great success.”