The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual (includes 1 CD)
by David Hurwitz
from Amadeus Press
Anyone fascinated but daunted by Mahler's monumental, complex orchestral works will find this book a welcome guide. Focusing on the nine completed symphonies and The Song of the Earth, David Hurwitz addresses his readers directly in an informal, conversational tone. Aided by a CD of four selected movements, he tells them what to listen for, what to pay special attention to, and, pointing out some recurring characteristics, what to remember for future reference. He explains Mahler's concept of form and structure, from the smallest motives to the over-life-size finished edifice. He discusses Mahler's manifold use of his songs, his love for quoting from himself and for recalling and anticipating thematic material--always in a new guise--and his penchant for aborted climaxes and deceptive endings: part of his reluctance (or inability) to conclude a composition. Despite his originality, Mahler stood on the shoulders of other giants, notably Wagner and Verdi, whose works he conducted at the Vienna Opera. Hurwitz devotes much attention--and an entire appendix--to Mahler's unsurpassed mastery of orchestration, his skill in exploiting every instrument's resources, even using them for thematic purposes.
Hurwitz admits that describing music in words has limitations; he falls back instead on describing Mahler's complex mixture of elements from the most sublime to the raw (for example, we find the music characterized as pretty," "cute," "sleazy," "sexy," "vulgar," "flatulent," or "squealing" like a barmaid "after being pinched on the behind" and the like). On the other hand, he rejects the conventional assumption that there is a link between a composer's work and life experiences, isolating the music from the personality. This might be considered a drawback insofar as it neglects a crucial dimension (consider, for example, our knowledge that Mahler tried to outwit fate by interpolating The Song of the Earth between his Eighth and Ninth Symphonies and how this might enhance our understanding of those two dark, valedictory final works). Yet even such cavils cannot diminish the originality and thoughtfulness behind this illuminating book. --Edith EislerSince Gustav Mahler was rediscovered in the early 1960s, his symphonies have become arguably the most popular works in the modern orchestral repertoire. Mahler's Symphonies: An Owner's Manual is the first discussion of the ten completed symphonies (No. 1-9 plus "The Song of the Earth") to offer music lovers and record collectors a comprehensive overview of the music itself, what it sounds like, how it is organized, its form, content, and meaning, as it strikes today's listeners. The book caters to the novice as David Hurwitz describes what the listener will hear, section by section, using simple cues such as important instrumental solos, recognizable tunes, climaxes, and other easily audible musical facts. He explains how each work is arranged, how the various parts relate to each other, and how one work leads to the next. It describes the emotional extravagance that lies at the root of Mahler's popularity, the consistency of his symphonic thinking, the relationship of each work to its companions, and his dazzling and revolutionary use of orchestral instruments to create an expressive musical language that is varied in content and immediate in impact. The accompanying CD contains recordings from Symphony No. 1, Third Movement; Symphony No. 2, First Movement; Symphony No. 5, Third Movement; and Symphony No. 7, Second Movement: "Nachtmusik I."
The Diaries, 1898-1902
by Alma Mahler-Werfel
from Cornell University Press
Alma Mahler was born in Vienna in 1879. As the daughter of the landscape painter Emile Schindler, she was afforded easy entrance into the cultural life of the city; it seems that by the time these diaries open there was no part of the artistic, musical, literary, and theatrical life in fin-de-siècle Vienna with which Alma was not intimately connected. Before marrying the composer Gustav Mahler in 1902, Alma had already been a pupil and lover of Zemlinsky, Klimt, and Burckhard. (And after Mahler died she married Walter Gropius, had an affair with Oskar Kokoschka, and then married Franz Werfel.) In combining the naiveté of a teenager on the cusp of womanhood with a wonderfully frank account of a remarkable time and place, Alma has left a priceless and unique record of personal and artistic history. The editor and translator Antony Beaumont rightly comments that reading the diaries is like "raising a curtain, behind which stands the Vienna of 1900 in all its majesty. So close that you can almost reach out and touch it". --Nick Wroe
The manuscript of Alma Mahler's Diaries, a pile of old exercise books, lay unread and seemingly illegible in the library of an American university. In search of the truth about Alma and Alexander Zemlinsky, Antony Beaumont read them--and found what he was looking for. But he found far more: the authentic saga of one of the century's most charismatic personalities. The Diaries depict in intimate detail the four years during which Alma grew from adolescence into womanhood. Opening with her first, heady affair with Gustav Klimt, they break off shortly before her marriage to Gustav Mahler. "To me," writes Beaumont, "reading The Diaries is like raising a curtain, behind which stands the Vienna of 1900 in all its majesty, and so close that one can almost reach out and touch it. The vitality of everyday life, eye-witness accounts of significant artistic events, unique insights into the behavioral patterns and linguistic conventions of homo austriacus--all these serve to make the book unique." Having come to grips with Alma's handwriting, Beaumont and his coeditor for the German edition, Susanne Rode-Breymann, added meticulously researched commentaries and annotations. The German edition was published in the autumn of 1997.
Gustav Mahler: Letters To His Wife
by Gustav Mahler
from Cornell University Press
Gustav Mahler and Alma Maria Schindler were married in . . . 1902. The bride was twenty-one and a half years old, her groom a few months short of forty-two. Apart from their substantial age difference, it seems to have been the very disparity of their intellectual and social backgrounds that drew them together. Mahler was attracted to Alma by her beauty, her alert mind and emotional intensity. Though aware that he possessed by far the broader outlook, he trusted in Alma’s ability and willingness to learn from him."—from the Introduction
"Once the stiffness of unfamiliarity has been softened by a few months of marriage, Mahler’s style of correspondence with Alma is generally simple, direct, and astonishingly down-to-earth. In a manner akin to that of his musical style, he spikes his language with witticisms and double-entendres, colloquialisms and quotations from librettos and classical works of literature."—from the Preface
This profusely illustrated collection of Gustav MahlerÂ’s letters to his wife Alma is more comprehensive than any previous edition; it contains 350 letters, 188 of them until now unpublished. Since 1995, when the German edition of this book was first published, two events have served to expand its horizons: the publication in 1997 of the complete text of AlmaÂ’s early diaries, dating from January 1898 to March 1902, and the publication in 2003 of a catalogue of all Mahler letters acquired from the Moldenhauer Archives. With the aid of this new material, the editors were also able to revise the dates assigned to many of the letters. Commentaries and annotations throughout the book have been corrected and expanded annotations included. The editorsÂ’ introduction provides a biographical context for the correspondence that follows.
Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis
by Stuart Feder
from Yale University Press
The life of the brilliant composer and conductor Gustav Mahler was punctuated by crisis. His parents both died in 1889, leaving him the reluctant head of a household of siblings. He himself endured a nearly fatal medical ordeal in 1901. A beloved daughter died in 1907 and that same year, under pressure, Mahler resigned from the directorship of the Vienna Opera. In each case Mahler more than mastered the trauma; he triumphed in the creation of new major musical works.
The final crisis of Mahler’s career occurred in 1910, when he learned that his wife, Alma, was having an affair with the architect Walter Gropius. The revelation precipitated a breakdown while Mahler was working on his Tenth Symphony. The anguished, suicidal notes Mahler scrawled across the manuscript of the unfinished symphony revealed his troubled state. A four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, restored the composer’s equilibrium. Although Mahler left little record of what transpired in Leiden, Stuart Feder has reconstructed the encounter on the basis of surviving evidence. The cumulative stresses of the crises in Mahler’s life, in particular Alma’s betrayal, left him physically and emotionally vulnerable. He became ill and died soon after in 1911.
At once a sophisticated consideration of Mahler’s work and a psychologically acute portrait of the life events that shaped it, this book extends our thinking about one of the great masters of modern music.
Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy
by Theodor W. Adorno
from University Of Chicago Press
Since its appearance in 1960 in German, Mahler has established itself as a classic of musical interpretation. Now available in English, the work is presented here in a translation that captures the stylistic brilliance of the original.
Theodor W. Adorno (1903-69), one of the foremost members of the Frankfurt school of critical theory, studied with Alban Berg in Vienna during the late twenties, and was later the director of the Institute of Social Research at the University of Frankfurt from 1956 until his death. His works include Aesthectic Theory, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, The Jargon of Authenticity, Prism, and Philosophy of Modern Music.
The Life of Mahler (Musical Lives)
by Peter Franklin
from Cambridge University Press
This is a well-written biography that eschews mythology in favor of a closer examination of both biographical and musical materials. A generation after the first wave of Mahler appreciation, Peter Franklin takes a new look from a different angle and succeeds in separating myth from fact, making this book a most welcome one. It does, however, presume a certain amount of prior knowledge of Mahler, his circle, and his music, so don't go into it completely cold.
As a leading European conductor and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) inspired mythologizers in his own lifetime. Some of them were personal friends, concerned with countering biased criticism of him in which German-nationalist, hide-bound traditionalist or anti-Semitic elements were often mixed. In this new biography, Peter Franklin reconfronts the myth of Mahler-the-misunderstood-hero and attempts to find the person, or persons, behind the legends. His illuminating biography shows Mahler to be a profoundly sensitive thinker and composer, a dictatorial conductor and husband, an iconoclast and paradoxically, a traditionalist.
As a leading European conductor, and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) inspired mythologizers in his own lifetime. Some of them were personal friends, concerned to counter biassed criticism of him in which German-nationalist, hide-bound traditionalist or antisemitic elements were often mixed. In this new biography, Peter Franklin re-confronts the myth of Mahler the misunderstood hero and attempts to find the person, or persons, behind the legends: the profoundly sensitive thinker and composer, the dictatorial conductor and husband, the iconoclast, the traditionalist.
Mahler: His Life, Work and World
Gustav Mahler was one of the greatest conductors and composers of his time, acclaimed throughout Europe and America for his full-blooded interpretations of a repertoire that ranged from Mozart and Beethoven to Wagner and Strauss, and for his own richly orchestrated pieces. Today his music is almost a cult: intensely emotional and evocative, it stirs and inspires the listener, and it awakens curiosity as to the nature of the man who created it.This book brings together a wealth of contemporary material--letters, reviews, concert programs, diary extracts--to create a picture of Mahler in his own words and those of his friends, colleagues, and critics. From his early childhood to the days of his final triumphs in Vienna and New York, his life, attitudes, beliefs, conflicts, loves, and losses are recorded and presented in vivid detail.
Mahler: Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) (Cambridge Music Handbooks)
by Stephen E. Hefling
from Cambridge University Press
Since its premiere Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) has been widely regarded as his finest masterpiece. It was written in the wake of personal events that shook the foundations of his life in 1907 and, like all his earlier works, it is deeply influenced by the composer's individual and philosophical worldview. Stephen Hefling provides a background to this symphony for voice and orchestra, describes its genesis, summarizes reviews of the premiere, and gives a careful account of all six movements.
Since its première Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) has been widely regarded as his finest masterpiece. It was written in the wake of three catastrophic events that shook the foundations of his life in 1907 and, like all his earlier works, it is deeply influenced by the composer's personal and philosophical worldview. Stephen Hefling provides a background to this symphony for voice and orchestra, describes its genesis, summarises reviews of the première, and gives a careful account of all six movements.
Gustav Mahler: An Essential Guide to His Life and Works (Classic FM Lifelines)
by Julian Haylock
from Pavilion Books
Written with energy and accessible prose, Cl assic FM''s Lifelines series presents biographies of the worl d''s most famous composers, chosen from a Classic FM survey. '
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