Attention spans may be getting shorter, but you couldn’t prove it by the public’s craving for the composer’s massive works.

Here we go again. Tuesday night, once more, Mahler.

Mahler symphonies are momentous works. They are meant, the composer insisted, to contain the world. They teem with the crises and issues of life, big and small, spiritual and prosaic. Before Mahler, as Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno pointed out earlier in the century, symphonies, and even those of Beethoven, were like carefully argued plays. Mahler turned them into unruly novels.

As such, they can never be routine. Mahler demands far too much of orchestra and audience for that. The Los Angeles Philharmonic opens its Hollywood Bowl subscription season Tuesday night with the Second Symphony, which lasts around an hour and half and requires a solo soprano, mezzo-soprano and chorus as well as a large orchestra. Roger Norrington, the conductor, will have three rehearsals, rather than the single one usually allotted for typical Hollywood Bowl programs.

And yet Mahler symphonies have, indeed, become common at the Hollywood Bowl and everywhere else. Not just the Philharmonic but our regional orchestras program them regularly. The Pacific Symphony closed its season last month with the Fifth, and less than a week later the San Francisco Symphony opened a Mahler festival with it. Esa-Pekka Salonen performed and recorded the Third Symphony earlier this season. He also included it on the orchestra’s spring programs in New York, and wouldn’t you know it, another orchestra in town happened to be playing this, the longest Mahler symphony, the same weekend.

Mahler mania knows no bounds, and it seems to go against just about everything we hear about classical music. Attention spans, if you believe the current classical music doomsday obsessions, get shorter with every passing day. Audiences want easy listening. They want to relax in the concert hall. They use classical CDs and radio as high-class Muzak. They want good cheer, and no tough questions. Not only is vocal music off-limits at many classical radio stations, but now the violin too. It apparently grates.

And yet Mahler’s lengthy, weighty symphony-novels thrive. Not only did San Francisco’s festival sell out for performances of the Fifth, Eighth and Ninth symphonies conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, but Davies Hall’s 2,000 seats couldn’t hold all who wanted to attend a Mahler symposium with Tilson Thomas and biographer Henry-Louis de La Grange. (De La Grange, by the way, is a perfect example of just how deeply someone can get wrapped up in Mahler. He has written an engrossing biography of the composer that is more than 3,000 pages long.)

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Even the general public is fascinated with every biographical detail of Mahler’s life (the latest biography is by a British foreign correspondent, Jonathan Carr). And for some, Mahler becomes an outright fetish. Only Wagnerians are more extreme. But unlike Wagnerism, an idolatry that began during the composer’s lifetime, the Mahler fixation is still fairly new. For half a century after his untimely death in 1911 (at age 51), his nine completed symphonies were considered music for connoisseurs. Leonard Bernstein brought them to a much wider public, in the 1960s, through his audacious displays of emotion. Bernstein’s Mahler performances were wrenching, draining, highly theatrical occasions that repelled some and enslaved others. I remember during my student days lining up with other enthusiasts hours before a local record store opened to get a copy of Bernstein’s first recording of the massive Eighth Symphony the day it came out.

Such releases were occasions. Listening to Mahler, and Bernstein’s Mahler in particular, was the classical equivalent of a Grateful Dead concert: music to get helplessly lost in. But that doesn’t explain today’s continued Mahlerian rapture. Mahler enthusiasts are hardly nostalgic, countercultural Deadheads. And Bernstein’s charisma no longer defines Mahler; conductors of every stripe, from the most hysterical to the coolest cucumber, conduct Mahler.

In fact, Mahler’s continual hold on the public may be precisely because he is so hard to pin down. Rather than offering a comfortably familiar experience time and time again, Mahler is never the same for any two conductors or any two listeners. Mahler’s music is, indeed, novelistic but in a remarkably postmodern way. We know an enormous amount about Mahler, and about how his music should be played (he notated it with unprecedented specificity), and yet it is so rich that we see only ourselves in it, our inner lives, our struggles with life and death. Mahler’s novels seem like our own stories.

Two recent examples make this particularly clear. One was Tilson Thomas’ unforgettable performance of the Fifth Symphony in San Francisco three weeks ago. The other is the release of a strange new CD entitled “Primal Light” on the German label Winter & Winter. The CD is a kind of jazz Mahler arranged by the pianist Uri Caine, although that only begins to describe it.

Caine takes very seriously a suggestion that Tilson Thomas makes for Mahler’s particular relevance now. He was the first composer to employ a wide range of music, and especially popular music of his day, without disguising its origins. In Mahler, the high and the low fight it out continually. And Caine, joined by a wild crew of collaborators, expands on the implications of the ethnic and popular musics in Mahler. A cantor intones the farewell of “Das Lied von der Erde.” A trumpet turns the opening of the Fifth Symphony into a Miles Davis riff. DJ Olive spins turntables updating Mahlerian frenzy; Don Byron, the versatile clarinetist, reveals klezmer underpinnings in much Mahlerian melody.

This is a CD that takes Mahler’s music further than it has ever been taken and opens up worlds. Mahler jazz, and avant-garde jazz at that, is a radical thought, but it also requires, as jazz must, the making of new music out of the old.

Tilson Thomas’ Fifth, on the other hand, accomplished much the same effect without changing a note. He, too, gave solo players in the orchestra an unprecedented amount of freedom, and he too was able to demonstrate the remarkable individuality of the musical characters that people this drama.

Norrington, who is a conductor known for re-imagining the historical situation of old music and for a bias toward making everything dance, will surely have his own way with Mahler. And that is precisely the attraction. Mahler’s symphony-novels, so much the product of the previous turn of the century, are also just right for our own self-absorbed fin de siecle. We want our art to be like our computers, where everything comes to life, where everything links to everything else, where we can never get to the bottom of anything. Mahler was there first.