Gustav Mahler

Description

A best seller when first published in Germany in 2003, Jens Malte Fischer's Gustav Mahler has been lauded by scholars as a landmark work. He draws on important primary resources—some unavailable to previous biographers—and sets in narrative context the extensive correspondence between Mahler and his wife, Alma; Alma Mahler's diaries; and the memoirs of Natalie Bauer-Lechner, a viola player and close friend of Mahler, whose private journals provide insight into the composer's personal and professional lives and his creative process. Fischer explores Mahler's early life, his relationship to literature, his achievements as a conductor in Vienna and New York, his unhappy marriage, and his work with the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic in his later years. He also illustrates why Mahler is a prime example of artistic idealism worn down by Austrian anti-Semitism and American commercialism. Gustav Mahler is the best-sourced and most balanced biography available about the composer, a nuanced and intriguing portrait of his dramatic life set against the backdrop of early 20th century America and fin de siècle Europe. Contents Illustrations 1 What Did Mahler Look Like? An Attempt at a Description 2 Small Steps: Kalischt and Iglau (1860–75) 3 Studies in Vienna (1875–80) 4 The Summer Conductor: Bad Hall (1880) 5 Emotional Ups and Downs in Laibach (1881–2) 6 For the Last Time in the Provinces: Olmütz (1882–3) 7 Presentiment and a New Departure: Kassel (1883–5) 8 The Avid Reader: Mahler and Literature 9 Becoming Mahler: Prague (1885–6) 10 The First Symphony 11 Life’s Vicissitudes: Leipzig (1886–8) 12 Notes on Mahler’s Songs 13 Lowland Dreams: Budapest (1888–91) 14 The Conductor 15 The Second Symphony 16 Self-Realization: Hamburg (1891–7) 17 Jewishness and Identity 18 The Third Symphony 19 The God of the Southern Climes: Vienna (1897–1901) 20 Mahler’s Illnesses: A Pathographical Sketch 21 The Fourth Symphony 22 Vienna in 1900: Alma as a Young Woman (1901–3) 23 The Fifth Symphony 24 ‘Nothing is lost to you’: Faith and Philosophy 25 The Sixth Symphony 26 Opera Reform – Early Years of Marriage – Mahler’s Compositional Method (1903–5) 27 The Seventh Symphony 28 The Administrator – Contemporaries – Signs of Crisis (1905–7) 29 The Eighth Symphony 30 Annus Terribilis (1907) 31 Das Lied von der Erde 32 Starting Afresh: New York (1908–11) 33 The Ninth Symphony 34 Crisis and Culmination (1910) 35 The Fragmentary Tenth Symphony 36 ‘My heart is weary’ – The Farewell 37 Mahler and Posterity Abbreviations Notes Select Bibliography Index Acknowledgements