Mahler and His World

(Paperback)

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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. Mahler's advocates have produced countless studies of his 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-siecle 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

Reviews

"The best thing in the [Bard Music] festival could have been enjoyed in the cool quiet of one's study: Ms. Painter's book... The highlight is Mr. Botstein's own essay, a typically virtuosic riff on Theodor W. Adorno's book on Mahler... But the book's other essays--on performance in late-19th-century Central Europe as a political statement on Mahle"s Jewishness, on gender issues and Ms. Painter's own discussion of the mass public gestures in Mahler's big works (especially the 'Symphony of a Thousand) and their connection to socialist cultural policy--are all worth reading. As are the musical analyses and the period reviews."--John Rockwell, The New York Times' "[A] valuable addition to the Mahler library."--BBC Music Magazine

Author Bio

Karen Painter is Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University. She is the recipient of a Berlin Prize and a Humboldt fellowship in Berlin.