Mahler Remembered

Download or read book Mahler Remembered written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2010-08-19 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Gustav Mahler is the most influential symphonist of the twentieth century. In this pioneering study, Norman Lebrecht reveals the man and musician through the words of his contemporaries. Using many previously unpublished documents, he constructs a profile of Mahler even more complex and compelling than that familiar from his letters and the often unreliable memoirs of his widow, Alma. Compassionate or callous, idealistic or pragmatic, Mahler aroused violently contrasting impressions and emotions in those who lived and worked with him. Accounts of the composer include the artist Alfred Roller's description of Mahler's naked body, a Nazi-era reappraisal by one of his closest relatives, Natalie Bauer-Lechner's unpublished jottings of Mahler's childhood, and Stefan Zweig's report of his final voyage. Together, they form a remarkable and deeply illuminating image of a formidable personality. 'The effect is cumulative, sometimes contradictory and vivid - like a written version of a radio or film portrait.' Classical Music 'Norman Lebrecht's Mahler Remembered is quite breathtakingly interesting.' Birmingham Post

Download or read book Why Mahler? written by Norman Lebrecht and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2010-10-12 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Although Gustav Mahler was a famous conductor in Vienna and New York, the music that he wrote was condemned during his lifetime and for many years after his death in 1911. “Pages of dreary emptiness,” sniffed a leading American conductor. Yet today, almost one hundred years later, Mahler has displaced Beethoven as a box-office draw and exerts a unique influence on both popular music and film scores. Mahler’s coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as Leonard Bernstein’s boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which used Mahler’s music in its sound track. But that was just the first in a series of waves that established Mahler not just as a great composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for every listener. There are now almost two thousand recordings of his music, which has become an irresistible launchpad for young maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel. Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world’s most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was—along with Picasso, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world. “Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize,” writes Lebrecht, “with racism, workplace chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the limitations of medical knowledge.” Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.

Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to Mahler written by Jeremy Barham and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-12-13 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the years approaching the centenary of Mahler's death, this book provides both summation of, and starting point for, an assessment and reassessment of the composer's output and creative activity. Authored by a collection of leading specialists in Mahler scholarship, its opening chapters place the composer in socio-political and cultural contexts, and discuss his work in light of developments in the aesthetics of musical meaning. Part II examines from a variety of analytical, interpretative and critical standpoints the complete range of his output, from early student works and unfinished fragments to the sketches and performing versions of the Tenth Symphony. Part III evaluates Mahler's role as interpreter of his own and other composers' works during his lifelong career as operatic and orchestral conductor. Part IV addresses Mahler's fluctuating reception history from scholarly, journalistic, creative, public and commercial perspectives, with special attention being paid to his compositional legacy.

Download or read book The Mahler Companion written by Donald Mitchell and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 676 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'the one-stop guide to Mahler -- a volume of essays covering the widest range of Mahlerian topics, designed both for the academic and serious amateur music-lover... The core of the compendium is its coverage of all the main works, carrying recent research, with plentiful musical examples and other illustrations.' -Andrew Green, Classical Music 08/11/1999'beautifully produced volume... a tribute that surveys the familiar with affectionate new insights... all the articles on Mahler's reception outside Austria, both during his life and after, make for fascinating reading.' -David Nice, BBC Music Magazine October 1999'The Mahler Companion constitutes a distinguished and fitting monument to Mitchell's lifelong devotion to Mahler, and, in mustering so much talent in one volume, there is no doubt that it will deservedly take its place among the most significant publications on the composer.' -Jeremy Barham, Music andamp; LettersA brilliant gathering of international Mahler specialists write about Mahler's music from a variety of standpoints. The global spread of the authors is matched by a series of chapters that document the global spread of the composer's own symphonies and song cycles, while hitherto unexplored areas of research receive attention, both places (such as London and Prague) and people (Mahler's only surviving and highly talented daughter--a sculptor--Anna. In short, a volume that draws on the best resources and most up-to-date information about the composer and will undoubtedly act as the authoritative guide for Mahler enthusiasts for years to come.

Download or read book Gustav Mahler written by Jens Malte Fischer and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2011-08-09 with total page 721 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 siecle Europe.

Download or read book Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna written by K.M. Knittel and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-01 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No-one doubts that Gustav Mahler's tenure at the Vienna Court Opera from 1897-1907 was made extremely unpleasant by the antisemitic press. The great biographer, Henry-Louis de La Grange, acknowledges that 'it must be said that antisemitism was a permanent feature of Viennese life'. Unfortunately, the focus on blatant references to Jewishness has obscured the extent to which 'ordinary' attitudes about Jewish difference were prevalent and pervasive, yet subtle and covert. The context has been lost wherein such coded references to Jewishness would have been immediately recognized and understood. By painstakingly reconstructing 'the language of antisemitism', Knittel recreates what Mahler's audiences expected, saw, and heard, given the biases and beliefs of turn-of-the-century Vienna. Using newspaper reviews, cartoons and memoirs, Knittel eschews focusing on hostile discussions and overt attacks in themselves, rather revealing how and to what extent authors call attention to Mahler's Jewishness with more subtle language. She specifically examines the reviews of Mahler's Viennese symphonic premieres for their resonance with that language as codified by Richard Wagner, though not invented by him. An entire chapter is also devoted to the Viennese premieres of Richard Strauss's tone poems, as a proof text against which the reviews of Mahler can also be read and understood. Accepting how deeply embedded this way of thinking was, not just for critics but for the general population, certainly does not imply that one can find antisemitism under every stone. What Knittel suggests, ultimately, is that much of early criticism was unease rather than 'objective' reactions to Mahler's music - a new perspective that allows for a re-evaluation of what makes his music unique, thought-provoking and valuable.

Download or read book Mahler: Symphony No. 3 written by Peter Franklin and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 1991-11-29 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Conceived as a musical picture of the natural world, the composition of Mahler's grandiose work is described here in the context of the ideas that inspired it and the artistic debates and social conflicts that it reflects.