After Mahler

The music of Gustav Mahler repeatedly engages with Romantic notions of redemption. This is expressed in a range of gestures and procedures, shifting between affirmative fulfilment and pessimistic negation. In this groundbreaking study, Stephen Downes explores the relationship of this aspect of Mahler's music to the output of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill and Hans Werner Henze. Their initial admiration was notably dissonant with the prevailing Zeitgeist – Britten in 1930s England, Weill in 1920s Germany and Henze in 1950s Germany and Italy. Downes argues that Mahler's music struck a profound chord with them because of the powerful manner in which it raises and intensifies dystopian and utopian complexes and probes the question of fulfilment or redemption, an ambition manifest in ambiguous tonal, temporal and formal processes. Comparisons of the ways in which this topic is evoked facilitate new interpretative insights into the music of these four major composers.

When the second volume of de La Grange's monumental study of Mahler appeared, it was hailed in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications as an indispensable portrait of the great composer. Here at last is the third volume of this magisterial work. Ranging from 1904 to 1907, it explores Mahler's final years as administrator, producer, and conductor of the Vienna Opera. It was a time of intense inner struggle, with Mahler's energy and creative powers drained by the competing demands of running the Hofoper and struggling for recognition as a composer. And they were tragic years as well, especially 1907, Mahler's last year in Vienna, when the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of heart disease forced him to leave the Opera. Throughout the book, de La Grange offers true-to-life portraits of Mahler the human being, the family man, and the composer, and he weaves in innumerable testimonies and anecdotes that throw new light on the great composer's complex personality. The product of forty years of research, here is the definitive study of a musical giant. It is, as The Wall Street Journal said of volume two, "a work of the first importance, one that nobody seriously interested in Mahler can possibly afford to skip."

From the composer's lifetime to the present day, Gustav Mahler's music has provoked extreme responses from the public and from experts. Poised between the Romantic tradition he radically renewed and the austere modernism whose exponents he inspired, Mahler was a consummate public persona and yet an impassioned artist who withdrew to his lakeside hut where he composed his vast symphonies and intimate song cycles. His advocates have produced countless studies of the composer's life and work. But they have focused on analysis internal to the compositions, along with their programmatic contexts. In this volume, musicologists and historians turn outward to examine the broader political, social, and literary changes reflected in Mahler's music. Peter Franklin takes up questions of gender, Talia Pecker Berio examines the composer's Jewish identity, and Thomas Peattie, Charles S. Maier, and Karen Painter consider, respectively, contemporary theories of memory, the theatricality of Mahler's art and fin-de-siècle politics, and the impinging confrontation with mass society. The private world of Gustav Mahler, in his songs and late works, is explored by leading Austrian musicologist Peter Revers and a German counterpart, Camilla Bork, and by the American Mahler expert Stephen Hefling. Mahler's symphonies challenged Europeans and Americans to experience music in new ways. Before his decision to move to the United States, the composer knew of the enthusiastic response from America's urban musical audiences. Mahler and His World reproduces reviews of these early performances for the first time, edited by Zoë Lang. The Mahler controversy that polarized Austrians and Germans also unfolds through a series of documents heretofore unavailable in English, edited by Painter and Bettina Varwig, and the terms of the debate are examined by Leon Botstein in the context of the late-twentieth-century Mahler revival.

Gustav Mahler's Seventh Symphony stands out as one of the most provocative symphonic statements of the early twentieth century. Throughout its performance history, it has often been heard as "existing in the shadow" of the Sixth Symphony or as "too reminiscent" of Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. Anna Stoll Knecht's Mahler's Seventh Symphony offers a new interpretation of the Seventh based on a detailed study of Mahler's compositional materials and a close reading of the finished work. With a focus on sketches previously considered as "discarded," Stoll-Knecht exposes unexpected connections between the Seventh and both the Sixth and Meistersinger, confirming that Mahler's compositional project was firmly grounded in a dialogue with works from the past. This referential aspect acts as an important interpretive key to the work, enabling the first thorough analysis of the sketches and drafts for the Seventh, and shedding light on its complex compositional history. Considering each movement of the symphony through a double perspective, genetic and analytic, Stoll Knecht demonstrates how sketch studies and analytical approaches can interact with each other. Mahler's Seventh Symphony exposes new facets of Mahler's musical humor and leads us to rethink much-debated issues concerning the composer's cultural identity, revealing the Seventh's pivotal role within his output.

(Amadeus). Mahler's 10 symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde are intensely personal statements that have touched wide audiences. This survey examines each of the works, revealing their programmatic and personal aspects, as well as Mahler's musical techniques.

Alfred Mathis-Rosenzweig (1897-1948) was a Viennese musicologist and critic who studied at the universities of Budapest and Vienna. From 1933 he embarked on producing a large-scale study of Mahler but at the time of his death the manuscript was left unfinished. Although it was presumed lost until 1997, the unfinished typescript, written in German, had been deposited in the library of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. In 2003, the School‘s Research Centre commissioned Jeremy Barham to prepare the first published edition of this important work, and his annotations and commentary add invaluable material to his translation of this historic document. Biographical material is used as a loose framework and platform for Mathis-Rosenzweig‘s profound examination of the environment within which Mahler‘s earlier music was embedded. This is an environment in which Wagner, Bruckner and Wolf feature prominently, and in which Mahler‘s music is viewed from the wider perspective of nineteenth-century German cultural domination and the subsequent rise of political extremism in the form of Hitlerite fascism.

Gustav Mahler's music continues to enjoy global prominence, both in live or recorded performance and within broader ranges of critical perception and cultural sensibility. In recognition of such a profile, this volume brings together a unique collection of essays exploring the diverse methods and topics characteristic of recent advances in Mahler scholarship. The book's international group of contributors is actively involved not only in bringing fresh approaches to Mahler research in areas such as analysis, sketch studies and reception history, but also in examining hitherto neglected issues of cultural and biographical interpretation, performance practice and compositional aesthetic, thereby illustrating the developing vitality and scope of this field. Engaging with its subject from reconstructive, documentary, theoretical, analytical, discursive and interpretative viewpoints, this volume provides a wide spectrum of contexts in which continuing debate about Mahler's life and works can flourish. Its varied themes and strategies nevertheless collectively recognize and negotiate the shifting space both between the composer's life and his artistic creativity, and between the musical results of that creativity and the critical-analytical process. The essays in this book accordingly fill certain gaps in the scholarly understanding of the composer, and re-orientate Mahler studies towards some of the central concerns of contemporary musicological thinking.

"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 reveal his troubled state. It was a four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, that 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."--BOOK JACKET.