Mahler, Gustav Books

The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual (includes 1 CD)

David Hurwitz

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Since Gustav Mahler was rediscovered in the early 1960s, his symphonies have become arguably the most popular works in the modern orchestral repertoire. Orchestras worldwide ask to be judged by their expertise in playing these lengthy and colorful scores, while few composers since the mid-20th century have escaped Mahler’s influence.

Mahler was a commanding figure in his own time and renowned as the greatest living conductor.

His works summarize the great German symphonic tradition. 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. The emphasis throughout is on the experience of listening, and how each symphony embodies Mahler’s dictum that the symphony "must embrace the world. It must contain everything."

In considering each of these epic "sound worlds" in turn, Mahler’s Symphonies: An Owner’s Manual 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.

Gustav Mahler (German Edition)

Constantin Floros

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Total reviews: 5 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

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Gustav Mahler thought of his symphonic writing as autobiographical, an expression of his philosophy of life. Important references to musical meaning in Mahler's symphonies can be found in sketches, drafts, autograph scores, and printers' proofs; they demonstrate that his symphonies cannot be classified as absolute music but rather as music with personal, biographical, literary, and philosophical meanings.

In Gustav Mahler: The Symphonies Constantin Floros undertakes a precise and detailed exploration of each of Mahler's ten symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde, bringing to light various aspects of the works. Professor Floros examines their history and autobiographical origins and discusses the events that profoundly influenced the composer's writing. For example, Mahler's meeting with Alma Schindler in November 1901 and the tragic events of 1907—the death of the composer's older daughter and the diagnosis of his heart trouble—profoundly changed Mahler's attitude toward life and subsequently changed his music.

Floros analyses Mahler's compositional techniques in each symphony and relates these to stylistic and semantic aspects to decode Mahler's symbolic musical language. The author is thus able to identify certain basic qualities of these works: tragic irony, the sense of the grotesque, and the affirmation of Mahler's belief both in life after death and in the power of love to transcend death.

Mahler: A Biography

Jonathan Carr

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Gustav Mahler's meeting with Sigmund Freud remains a mystery 5 out of 5 stars.
12 of 12 people found this review helpful.

The Author describes, at appreciable length, why Gustav Mahler was widely misunderstood both as man and musician. More than 50 years after his death his works were left apart until, restored to life prompted by interest and performance, Mahler took his deserved place in the repertoires.

Mahler's tempestuous marriage to Alma Schindler is of particular interest. Alma claimed she was for decades the main authority of Mahler's works, values, character and his day-to-day actions and movements.

For many years, Alma's various publications quickly became the central source of information and references for Mahler scholars and music-lovers alike.
But, unfortunately, many writers have treated her accounts as unreliable, false, misleading and often impaired soundness. It is a fact that these imperfect accounts have nevertheless had a great influence upon several generations of music-lovers, hence the legend: "Alma's Problem"".
Mahler's youth, as described in the first two chapters is fascinating, like the reader's watching a live short resume cast by History Channel. There begins Mahler's occupation as summer composer "" in isolated huts in the country, and his revolutionary achievements as director of Vienna Opera. In 1907 Mahler resigned his post, many claimed he was driven from it, and went with Alma to America. Four years later his health in ruin and his marriage crumbling, he returned to Vienna and died there on the 18th of May 1911, a few weeks before his 51st birthday. He was buried four days later in Grinzing cemetery next to his daughter Maria (died in 1907)""
""On the day he died, that teeming rain on that blustery Monday afternoon, hundreds of ordinary Viennese crowded outside the little church where the service was held and the coffin blessed. Only minority had come to pay tribute to Mahler the composer. His gigantic Symphonies had rarely gone down well in Vienna and not a single one had been premiered there. But Mahler -the Opera Director- that was another matter. In a few stormy years he had lashed the institution at the heart of the city's cultural life to a peak of excellence it might never reach again. Many Viennese had acknowledged as much while Mahler was still at the helm. Now some erstwhile critics were starting to do so too. As one contemptuous Mahler fan put it, `'the same sneering somebody's'' who had attacked every Mahler production were now `'keen to belong to the exclusive circle of Mahlerites'""

The talented, ambitious and ruthless conductor is often degenerated in Alma's memoirs as a sickly and cerebral recluse; Arnold Schoenberg called him a `saint'. For some of Mahler's friends and disciples, he was a great creative artist. Mahler was even suicidal, often called `the Jewish Monkey'' because he was committed to his interpretations of Wagner, Mozart, Beethoven, Dvorak, Berlioz, Brahms, Bruckner, Schubert, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, even Georges Bizet and many more. His violent conducting gesticulations had been subject to laughter from his peers, pupils, viewers and musicians. The man was simply very absorbed (committed) in his work; for instance he believed he made-up for Beethoven's deafness by offering interpretations that he felt was necessary in the Ninth Symphony which Beethoven must have had in mind. Yet one described Mahler's dynamite conducting `'Like a cat with convulsions"' He had many clashes with fellow conductors, theater directors, and even composers; something else, early on Mahler had a row with Brahms .While at the university, he worked as a music teacher and made his first major attempt at composition with the cantata Das klagende Lied. The work was entered in a competition where the jury was headed by Johannes Brahms, but failed to win a prize. (Did he feel the brunt of Jewish curse?? It could be!!)
(In later years, however, Brahms was greatly impressed by Mahler's conducting of Don Giovanni.). Similarly Mahler had noisy discussions with Richard Strauss on Strauss's tone poem `'Sinfonia Domestica'', Mahler simply couldn't hold his row.
Now, the author pinpointed inscriptions that go: To the `'holy Gustav Mahler'' and the `'immortal example of his works and deeds'' dedicated on one of the hundreds of wreaths lay beside the route between church and graveside. ""It came from Arnold Schonberg, often helped Mahler with cash and counsel, and other pioneers of the atonal school, including Alban Berg, and Anton Webern. Arnold Schonberg was one of those who, huddled under the umbrellas, trudged slowly behind the coffin as it was borne away from the church. So was the conductor Bruno Walter, destined to fight for wider recognition of Mahler's music on two continents over the half a century. So was Anna Bahr-Mildenburg, Mahler's greatest love before his marriage and transformed by him from a promising young singer into a dramatic soprano without peer. ""
Many more attended, there too was Mahler's revolutionary stage designer Alfred Roller, the poet and dramatist Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the painter Gustav Klimt, one of Alma's old flames. Alma herself did not attend - on doctors' orders, it was said. How cruel of Mahler's wife not to attend her husband's funeral! Had she really loved him? Had she really respected him despite all his flaws? Alma wrote two books (memoirs) - My Life, My Loves, and My Diaries 1898-1902) - and their impact on Mahler's studies was great for at least some 40 years.
Alma was a graceful, well-connected and influential woman who outlived Mahler by more than 50 years. (This reminds me of Cosima and Wagner. Cosima outlived Wagner by 47 years). How trustworthy is any story laid by women who outlive their notorious husbands for so long? Shouldn't they be given credence, though there may not have been full and final grain of truth in it?) - The greatest difficulty in writing one's memoirs is to keep a certain detachment at a time when passions were running high. True in her old age Alma wouldn't admit that her apprehensions with the past `'husband and wife"" days had been influenced with the benefit of hindsight when she now perceived the significance of events after they have occurred. Within 50 years Alma's reminiscences of past events couldn't pass without nostalgia or without an urging wistful desire to return, at least in written thoughts (modified and garbled), to a former time in one's life when young.

Enigmatic, though, was Mahler's meeting with Freud:
Gustav and Sigmund were Jews by birth. They had much more in common. Their thoughts had no relation to religion and did not oppose it. They were very strict, thoughtful and rigorous in observance of moral matters, often excessively so; rigidly austere Viennese gentlemen - by adoption.
When Freud had been a medical trainee in Vienna, Mahler was a student at the Conservatory. When met for the first and last time in the summer of 1910, Freud was 54 and Mahler at 50. With his heart troubles Mahler had less than a year to live. The time of the encounter was in the middle of a significant event in Mahler's life: the composer's marital problems with the young and beautiful Alma. Mahler was then very busy with his Tenth Symphony (he left it unfinished) and suddenly found Alma in total defiance and reticence towards him although he always wanted to be `good and loving husband''. Alma had, she complained in her memoirs" submitted to his tyranny and neglect long enough; she felt used, drained by his self-absorption"". (Music) The truth of her rebellion is perhaps accentuated by Mahler's chronic inability to attain an erection for the performance of their sexual act. Mahler had in him duel sense of guilt and panic - panic that was painful in the presence of Walter Gropius on the scene. Mahler therefore decided to take immediate action and he conceived Freud as his only savior.
During that summer of 1910, Sigmund Freud was spending his vacation in Leyden, Holland when he received a telegram asking for an appointment. The following day Herr Doctor received another telegram cancelling the first one. Mahler was in a state of indecision, unsteadiness and fluctuating mood. This was well drawn by his unbalanced behaviors in dispatching too many telegrams before he managed to get over his ever-present opposition to any attempt to bring his repressed thoughts into consciousness. Mahler and Freud met in a Leyden hotel and spent some four hours loitering about the town. Freud, the thickset and trusted doctor and Mahler, the slender, ailing and vehement composer - were devouring their cigars as they walked and talked. The Doctor conducted a brief analysis of the conductor's grievances: ""A mother fixation "" Freud ruled. On the one hand "" Mahler was attracted by his wife's youthful beauty but resented the fact that she was not old and careworn like his mother"". Alma, on the other hand, ""had a father complex and found her husband's age appealing"". Mahler was twenty years her senior.

Jonathan Carr describes this episode with additional clarity: ""Gustav's father, Bernhard, had a travelling sales job too but he went one better than his mother (G. Mahler's Grandma) and got hold of a horse and cart. Reckoning that knowledge was power he read books voraciously, even studied French, in spare moments on trips. It was no love match on either side when in 1857 he married Maria Hermann (usually called Marie), daughter of a soap-boiler and, at nineteen, ten years his junior. She limped and had a weak heart but arguably it was a step up socially for Bernard and he would have got a dowry. The first child, Isidor, died soon after birth in 1858. The second was Gustav.
An authoritarian father, a suffering, constantly pregnant mother (14 children) brothers and sisters borne off regularly in coffins; that, alas, was still an all too familiar picture in the 19th. Century. It did not necessarily mean that children grew up psychologically maimed, still less that the pressures turned them into great creative artists. All the same, Mahler's family background makes it sorely (for many irresistibly) tempting to try fathom him and his music via the psychiatrist's couch. None other than Sigmund Freud did just that; at least, he made a stab at analyzing Mahler during a few hours stroll round the Dutch town of Leiden in 1910. The outcome was predictable. Freud concluded that Mahler had a Holy Mary complex (mother fixation) and unearthed an early incident which seemed to explain much about the character of Mahler's work. Mahler is said to have remembered that after a `specially painful scene'' between his parents, he ran out of the house and heard a passing barrel organ grinding out popular tune Ách du lieber Augustin. Hence, we are told, the stark contrast between the tragic and the banal became fixed in his mind for life. According to Freud's biographer, Ernest Jones, Mahler even `suddenly said that now he understood why his music had always been prevented from achieving the highest rank through the noblest passages... being spoilt by the intrusion of some commonplace melody".""
Freud's comment about a `Holy Mary complex'' has helped sustain a distorted view of Mahler's relation with his parents. Despite the `dreaming'', which Alma reports, Mahler was under no illusion about how things really were between Bernard and Marie. (His father and Mother) `'They were as ill-suited as fire and water", he told a lady-friend when he was in his mid thirties. ""He was all obstinacy, she was gentleness itself". Blunt words but not enough to justify the frequent claim Mahler hated his father and so identified with his mother that throughout his life he unconsciously imitated her limp. Demonstrably there were much of both his parents in Mahler, of Bernard certainly no less than Marie. He needed no barrel organ incident to fix the pain of stark contrast in his mind. It was already there. The battle between fire and water, as it were, was implanted in Mahler at birth and it never ceased to rage.""
This reminds me of the relationship between Mozart and his father- Leopold. Mahler's father encouraged his son to pursue piano lessons, hoping his son ""would become money-spinning virtuoso, and who later let him study at Vienna conservatory, though certainly not helping him much to pay the fees.""
Bernard was protective. ""when young, Gustav was mistreated by a family with whom he had been sent to stay in Prague, a wrathful Bernard descended, packed his son's things and took him straight home"" from his father, Gustav inherited, among other things, voracious ambition and unshakable will. ""At six or seven he was already giving piano lessons for about 5 crowns an hour and boxing his pupils sharply on the ears whenever they played a wrong note.""
The Austrian physician and founder of psychoanalysis - who theorized that the symptoms of hysterical patients represent forgotten and unresolved infantile psychosexual conflicts-, befitted Mahler's eccentricities. But, who was complexed of whom? Perhaps history would have been fairer had Alma went to see Freud as well.
Alma was a beautiful young lady. Like many people, I saw her picture in other publications, indeed she was very beautiful. Alma claims that Mahler 'feared women' and that their relationship was never really without danger, arguing that he had almost no sexual intercourse right up to his forties (he was 41 when they met). In fact, Mahler's long record of prior love affairs-- including a lengthy one with Anna von Mildenburg -- suggests that this was not the case. Whereas Alma's flirtation and first kiss was in her teens - as she boastfully said so. ".In her memoirs she must have been looking for an edge over Mahler. For instance, Alma Mahler (then Schindler) played piano from childhood and in her memoirs reports that she first attempted composing at age 9. Was that false or true??(She knew that Mahler's parents had arranged piano lessons for him when he was six)
During the emotional instability in their marriage after Mahler's discovery of the affair (Alma's infatuation with Walter Gropius 1883-1969 - a German architect and founder of Bauhaus and is widely regarded as one of the pioneering masters of "modern" architecture) Mahler took a sincere interest in Alma's musical compositions; completely regretting his earlier attitude when he dropped her talents out.
Upon Mahler's endeavoring, and under his coaching and assistance, Alma prepared five of her songs for publication (they were issued in 1910, by Mahler's own publisher, Universal Edition). His meeting with Freud couldn't have been to discuss Mahler's dynamite style of conducting because by 1910 his style changed and he eschewed all expansive gestures on the podium. But was `'Alma'' the ONLY crises they discussed? What else could they have had as sincere discussion and why? Backlog of hard feelings I believe; they had watched with apprehension the gradual encirclement of the Jews !! At the Opera, Mahler stubbornness in artistic perfection had created enemies, and he was subject to perpetual attacks from anti-Semitic circles in the press. His resignation from the Opera, 1907, was hardly unexpected. (Incidentally: Dreyfus affair divided France from the 1890s to the early 1900s and its repercussion continued until well after WWI)
The hard feelings of anti-Semitism must have adversely impacted his marital relationship with Alma? It could also have been ""the curse of the ninth"" - Mahler knew he would not live long after his composition of the Ninth symphony that he completed in 1908 (perhaps!).

By the way, Pages 227, 228, 229, 230 refer to RECORDINGS, but there is no mention of Herbert Von Karajan. This is strange indeed!! Symphonie No.9, and Das Lied von der Erde, are remarkable interpretations, performed in 1982 and 1975. The only reference is made on page 94 "" For comparison's sake,in his first five and a half years (1956-62) as Vienna Opera director, Herbert Von Karayan led just 168 performances - and he was no slouch"" whereas Mahler, in four years between his arrival in Vienna and his break with the Philharmionic, he conducted some 370 opera performances including nearly thirty premieres......

Editorial Review:

Evaluating with exemplary judiciousness the masses of material about Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), British journalist Jonathan Carr pens a highly readable biography. Whether describing the composer's youth in Central Europe, triumphs as a conductor in Vienna and New York, or stormy marriage to Alma Schindler, Carr elucidates Mahler's complex nature without presuming to "explain" it. Devilish or saintly? Cunning or naive? Extrovert or withdrawn? "He was all these things," writes Carr, "brandishing his contradictions in music of stinging intensity." Mahler's compositions and personality gain new dimensions from this fresh, nuanced approach.

Mahler

Kurt Blaukopf

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Better, and better balanced, than most Mahler biographies 5 out of 5 stars.
37 of 37 people found this review helpful.

This brand-new paperback edition of the 1991 revised English translation of a 1976 indispensable "classic" is superior to virtually any combination of individual Mahler biographies that come to mind. I hope I'm able to explain why in this review, and to further explain how it is that a book on Mahler can be a "page turner."

The music of Gustav Mahler has been the centerpiece of my musical listening for virtually all of my adult life, in excess of 40 years now. It's fair to say that it started for me, as it did for others of my generation, with the recordings of Bruno Walter in the late '50's and Leonard Bernstein and others throughout the '60's. It's also fair to say that Mahler's music engenders intense personalization on the part of a listener who is drawn in, to the extent that there is a never-ending desire to know more about the man, his creative processes, his quite obvious contradictions, and the bipolar way in which his contemporaries, his critics, his musicians, and audiences and critics ever since his death, have characterized the man and the music.

I have yet to read a Mahler biography or critique that is not in one way or another colored by the thoughts and opinions of the biographer, starting with the first Mahler biography I read about 30 years ago, by his widow, Alma Werfel-Mahler. Each has had a "pitch," an agenda, which has left rather an incomplete, and often judgemental, picture of this complex human being. Perhaps, had I read all of them in an attempt to weigh matters in the balance, I would have been satisfied in having reached a reasonably accurate overview.

Kurt and Herta Blaukopf, in their "Mahler: His Life, Work & World," have done something quite different and remarkable. As a result of reviewing what must have been millions of words by and about the man and his music, incorporating the most up-to-date research on the availability of these materials, and selecting and incorporating those pieces that illuminate the man, his music, his life, and the times in which he lived, a gripping yet balanced portrait of Mahler, from birth to the first posthumous performance of his "Das Lied von der Erde," conducted by Bruno Walter on November 20, 1911 (six months after his death).

Along the way, we follow him through success and failure, appointments gained and appointments lost or surrendered, works that came relatively easily and works that resulted only from Herculean struggle, through his own words and the words of friends, associates, subordinates, superiors, acquaintances, rivals, and critics (who, it is clear to see from the selections chosen for this volume, were clearly on one side or the other in the matter of the worth of his music). In several instances, the juxtaposition of critical reviews by admirers and detractors, published the same day but in different papers, lead one to ask "Were these two critics at the same concert?"

The pages literally fly by. When, in the last year of his life he experienced his greatest triumph (the first performances of hs Eighth Symphony) in the face of mortality, the narrative becomes absolutley gripping, despite its being comprised of nothing more than what is in the written record. The last dozen or so entries are simply heartbreaking in their poignance as the end approaches, a fellow composer places a valuation on his estate as testator, and, six months after Mahler's death, Anton von Webern corresponds to Alban Berg about the text to the final poem in "Das Lied von der Erde" and how, in planning for the two of them to travel to Munich to hear this as-yet-unplayed music, in the premiere conducted by Walter, he knows that they will "...expect to hear the most wonderful music that there is. Something of such magnificence as has never yet existed." And of course Webern was absolutely correct in his assessment.

The Blaukopfs note in their Preface that "The biographer who seeks to portray an artist is unable to resist colouring the picture with his own ideas. Documentation, on the other hand, is more disciplined: it provides the reader with the factual components of Mahler's life and identifies their sources. Each individual can then fit these pieces together to form their own Mahler portrait." At barely 250 pages, this book is a treasure for the Mahlerite. It could have been twice or three times as long and still have been the page-turner that the Blaukopfs have created from the private papers and public records of Gustav Mahler.

Every Mahlerite should have this volume in his or her collection.

Bob Zeidler

Editorial Review:

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.

Gustav Mahler

Deryck Cooke

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Concise but Creditable 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

Cooke has an insight into the works and personality of Mahler as the 'completer' of his Tenth Symphony. This book is a brief guide of the life and works of the composer. Interesting biographical detail is interspersed with information about each symphony. The inclusion of the text of the songs is a helpful addition as are the words of Mahler's earliest symphonic composition 'Das Klagende Lied.' Certainly a work that can be read and re-read with pleasure.

A guidebook for listening to Mahler 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

There are many books on my favorite composer, Gustav Mahler.
This one is geared specifically to explaining each of his compositions, rather than just providing his biography.

It also provides the words to Mahler's works, in both the original German, and in good English translations, side by side.

Look to one of the many excellent books on Mahler, if you want to find out more about the man and his life. This book is the indispensable, quick source for information on his music. Have it at hand, as you listen to a symphony, or any of the lovely songs on which Mahler based those symphonies. It's especially useful to read the page or two commentary on each symphony, just before you listen to it. You'll get much more out of the music with a better understanding.

Gustav Mahler, Vol. 2: Vienna: The Years of Challenge, 1897-1904

Henry-Louis De La Grange

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Editorial Review:

In an age of artistic accomplishment, Gustav Mahler stood out as one of the supremely gifted musicians of his generation. As a composer, he won acclaim for his startling originality. As a conductor, his relentless pursuit of perfection was sometimes seen as tyrannical by the singers and musicians who came under his baton. And always, even with his greatest triumphs, he provoked controversy among the critics. Now Henry-Louis de La Grange, Mahler's celebrated biographer, offers new insight into Mahler's life and work with his latest look at the career of this musical genius.

In Mahler in Vienna, La Grange follows the great musician to the intellectual and artistic capital of turn-of-the-century Europe. From Mahler's spectacular debut as director of the Vienna Court Opera to his triumphant tour of the continent, we see him at the height of his powers. La Grange vividly portrays the marvelous spectacle, including the extraordinary range of artists who worked with Mahler--the composers Dvorak, Gustave Charpentier, Richard Strauss, Zemlinsky, and Schoenberg; the painters, architects, and decorators of the Secession (led by Klimt); and the writers Hauptmann, Dehmel, Hofmannsthal, and Schnitzler. In Vienna, the conductor worked a revolution in standards of performance and (along with Secession painter Alfred Roller) scenic illustration. It was also during this period that he wrote some of his best-loved symphonies--including his Fourth and Fifth--and his three orchestral song-cycles and collections, the Wunderhorn-, Ruckert-, and Kindertotenlieder. For each of these works La Grange provides full notes and analytic descriptions. And the author does not neglect Mahler's temptestuous personal life, for during these years he met Alma Schindler--"the most beautiful woman in Vienna." La Grange deftly captures the story of their engagement and marriage in 1902.

Mahler remains one of the greatest figures in the history f music, a man whose work provokes strong reactions today as in his own time. This account is just one part of the definitive four-volume biography Gustav Mahler, the result of a thirty-year research project; the author has personally translated it from his original French into English. Scrupulously researched and insightfully written, this volume is a brilliant account of a critical epoch in Mahler's life.

The Diaries, 1898-1902

Alma Mahler-Werfel

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Editorial Review:

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.

Alma Mahler: or the Art of Being Loved

Francoise Giroud

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Editorial Review:

Born in 1879, the daughter of a Viennese painter, Alma Mahler inspired the passionate love and devotion of an astonishing array of creative artists. She married three of them--the composer Gustav Mahler, the architect Walter Gropius, and the writer Franz Werfel--and had a host of admirers and lovers, including the painters Oscar Kokoschka, Egon Schiele, and Gustav Klimpt. The composer Alban Berg dedicated his opera Wozzeck to her and a violin concerto to the memory of her daughter, Manon, who died of polio.
In Alma Mahler, Francoise Giroud provides a spirited portrait of one of Europe's great femme fatales, ranging from her childhood (she was raised on a steady diet of Nietzche) to her heyday as a leading figure in Europe's art scene, to her later life as an exile in California and New York. We meet a woman of remarkable beauty and unconventional mind, the possessor of a fine, demanding intelligence, who was highly conscious of herself as a member of the elite, a woman never truly conquered by her lovers. Her last husband, Franz Werfel, called her "one of the very few sorceresses of our time." And indeed when she appeared, her presence attracted all eyes as she moved like a queen through a room. And what eyes she drew. Virtually all the great figures of 19th-century Vienna march through these pages, including Sigmund Freud, Richard Strauss, Arnold Schonberg, Hugo van Hofmannsthal, Karl Kraus, and Elias Canetti, and Giroud pens striking portraits of each. There are also many memorable scenes: Franz Werfel singing Verdi arias with James Joyce in a Paris cafe; the young Gropius, having an affair with then-married Alma, chased from the Mahler home by guard dogs and taking refuge under a bridge; Kokoschka, after his affair with Alma has died, commissioning a life-sized doll, a faithful reproduction of his former lover. But the heart of the book is Alma's marriage to Mahler. We read Alma's own first impression of Mahler--"He is terribly nervous. He paced around the room like a wild animal. He's pure oxygen. You get burnt if you go too near." Unfortunately for Mahler, his attempt to subjugate his young wife to his will--"you have only one profession from now on: to make me happy"--led to disaster, and he himself was burnt.
Alma Mahler stood at the center of the creative world, the intimate friend (if not lover) of the major artists of her age, and Giroud paints an unforgettable portrait. It was awarded France's Grand Prix litteraire de la femme in 1988.

Gustav Mahler: Letters To His Wife

Gustav Mahler, Henry-Louis De LA Grange

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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 Mahler’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 Alma’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 editors’ introduction provides a biographical context for the correspondence that follows.

Gustav Mahler: A Life in Crisis

Stuart Feder

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Crises in the life of Gustav Mahler inspired some of his greatest works—but eventually led to an early death

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.



Stuart Feder is clinical associate professor of psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine and attending psychiatrist at Beth Israel Hospital in New York. He is also on the faculties of The New York Psychoanalytic Institute and The Juilliard School in New York.