Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler

Author: Donald Mitchell

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1980-01-01

Total Pages: 378

ISBN-13: 9780520041417

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Available again for a new generation of Mahlerians, Donald Mitchell's famous study of the composer's early life and music, revised and updated in 1980, includes a new introduction by the author, and supplementary addenda, which bring this classic work once again to the forefront of Mahler studies. Tracing Mahler's life from his birth in Bohemia, then part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire, to his early works (many now lost) Gustav Mabler: The Early Years forms an indispensable prelude to the period during which the cycle of great symphonies was to evolve. The conflicts which came to mark Mahler's music and personality had their beginnings in his childhood and youth. Without understanding the territorial, social and familial conflicts of this time one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song cycles of his later years. Book jacket.

Gustav Mahler, the Arduous Road to Vienna (1860-1897)
Gustav Mahler, the Arduous Road to Vienna (1860-1897)

Author: Henry-Louis De La Grange

Publisher:

Published: 2020-02-29

Total Pages: 809

ISBN-13: 9782503588148

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This long awaited revised volume I completes Henry-Louis de La Grange's four-volume English language biography of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler (1860-1911), which is widely considered to be the definitive work on the subject. The present instalment, covering the years 1860 to 1897, traces the life and career of Mahler from his birth in a small village in Bohemia to his appointment to the Vienna Hofoper, then the most prestigious opera house in the world. It describes his family background, his student days at the Vienna Conservatory, his private life, and his burgeoning career as both conductor and composer. Starting at a small summer theatre in Bad Hall, his first engagements took him to Laibach (Ljubljana), Olmutz (Olomouc), Kassel, Prague, and Leipzig, before he was appointed to principal posts at the important opera houses of Budapest (1888) and Hamburg (1891). By now Mahler had also begun to establish himself as a composer. Some of his major works - starting with "Das Klagende Lied" (1881) - the early "Wunderhorn" songs, "Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen", and the first three symphonies date from this period of his life. While regularly rejected by contemporary critics, today they are favourites of the concert repertoire.

Experiencing Mahler
Experiencing Mahler

Author: Arved Ashby

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2020-01-08

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1538104873

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Experiencing Mahler surveys the symphonies and major song sets of Gustav Mahler, presenting them not just as artworks but as vivid and deeply felt journeys. Mahler took the symphony, perhaps the most tradition-bound genre in Western music, and opened it to the widest span of human experience. He introduced themes of love, nature, the chasmic depth of midnight, making peace with death, facing rebirth, seeking one’s creator, and being at one with God. Arved Ashby offers the non-specialist a general introduction into Mahler’s seemingly unbounded energy to investigate the elements that make each work an experiential adventure—one that has redefined the symphonic genre in new ways. In addition to the standard nine symphonies, Ashby discusses Das Lied von der Erde, the three most commonly heard song sets (the Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen, Kindertotenlieder, and Rückert-Lieder), and the unfinished Tenth Symphony (in Cooke’s edition). Experiencing Mahler is a far-reaching and often provocative search for meaning in the music of one of the most beloved composers of all time.

Mahler and Strauss
Mahler and Strauss

Author: Charles Youmans

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2016-09-05

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 0253021669

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A rare case among history's great music contemporaries, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) and Richard Strauss (1864-1949) enjoyed a close friendship until Mahler's death in 1911. Unlike similar musical pairs (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, Schoenberg and Stravinsky), these two composers may have disagreed on the matters of musical taste and social comportment, but deeply respected one another's artistic talents, freely exchanging advice from the earliest days of professional apprenticeship through the security and aggravations of artistic fame. Using a wealth of documentary material, this book reconstructs the 24-year relationship between Mahler and Strauss through collage—"a meaning that arises from fragments," to borrow Adorno's characterization of Mahler's Sixth Symphony. Fourteen different topics, all of central importance to the life and work of the two composers, provide distinct vantage points from which to view both the professional and personal relationships. Some address musical concerns: Wagnerism, program music, intertextuality, and the craft of conducting. Others treat the connection of music to related disciplines (philosophy, literature), or to matters relevant to artists in general (autobiography, irony). And the most intimate dimensions of life—childhood, marriage, personal character—are the most extensively and colorfully documented, offering an abundance of comparative material. This integrated look at Mahler and Strauss discloses provocative revelations about the two greatest western composers at the turn of the 20th century.

Gustav Mahler
Gustav Mahler

Author: Donald Mitchell

Publisher: Univ of California Press

Published: 1980-01-01

Total Pages: 468

ISBN-13: 9780520042209

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Donald Mitchell's second book on the life and work of Gustav Mahler focuses principally on Mahler's first settings of Wunderhorn texts, volumes I and II of the Lieder und Gesaenge, his first song-cycle, the Lieder eines fahrendedn Gesellen, the later, orchestral settings of Wunderhorn poems. The central section of the book explores the extraordinary and often eccentric chronology of the First, Second and Third Symphonies' composition, an often minute exploration which reveals the interpenetration of song and symphony in this period of Mahler's art, emphasizes the significance for these works of imagery drawn from the Wunderhorn anthology, and calls attention to the ambiguous position ocupied by much of Mahler's music at this time, suspended as it was between the rival claims - and forms - of syphony and symphonic poem. The final section of the book not only looks at the Fourth Symphony as the final, perhaps most perfect, flowering of Mahler's Wunderhorn symphonies, but also investigates such fascinating topics as the relationship between Mahler and Berlioz, Mahler's addiction to the E flat clarinet, and the influence of Bach on Mahler's later masterpieces.