Gustav Mahler

Books about Gustav Mahler and his music

Alma Mahler-Werfel and Anthony Beaumont Diaries 1898-1902 Cornell University Press, 2000; ISBN 0801486645; 494 pages Price indication: $ 16.45

Constantin Floros Gustav Mahler : The Symphonies Amadeus Press, 2003; ISBN 1574670255; 364 pages Price indication: $ 13.57

David Hurwitz The Mahler Symphonies: An Owner's Manual (includes 1 CD) Amadeus Press, 2004; ISBN 1574670999; 224 pages 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. Price indication: $ 15.61

Robert Samuels and Ian Bent Mahler's Sixth Symphony : A Study in Musical Semiotics (Cambridge Studies in Music Theory and Analysis) Cambridge University Press, 2004; ISBN 0521602831; 191 pages Price indication: $ 24.99

Theodor W. Adorno and Edmund Jephcott Mahler : A Musical Physiognomy University Of Chicago Press, 1996; ISBN 0226007693; 188 pages Price indication: $ 14.00

Jonathan Carr Mahler: A Biography Overlook Press, 2000; ISBN 0879518871; 254 pages 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. Price indication: $ 8.99

Theodor W. Adorno Mahler Peninsular Publishing Company, 2004; ISBN 8483074680; in Spanish Price indication: $ 11.44

Donald Mitchell and Andrew Nicholson The Mahler Companion Oxford University Press, 2001; ISBN 0199249652; 668 pages The Mahler Companion consists of a collection of original essays on Mahler written especially for the occasion by Mahler specialists from around the world. It addresses all parts of his life and work-- symphonies, songs and song-cycles (each of which is discussed individually), his conducting activities, compositional habits, and aesthetic development--and sets these within the cultural and political context of his time. In addition, it responds to the global spread of this remarkable composer's music, and an almost universal fascination with it, by attempting to give an account of the reception of Mahler's music in many of the countries in which it eventually came to flourish, eg. Holland, France, Japan, Russia, England, and the United States. This particular series of chapters reveals that the 'Mahler Phenomenon' earned its description principally in the years after the Second World War, but also that the Mahler revival was already well under way pre-war, perhaps especially in England and the States, and most surprisingly of all, Japan. The selection of contributors, who between them cover all Mahler's musical output, shows that here too this volume significantly crosses national boundaries. The very diverse approaches, analyses and commentaries, amply illustrated with music examples, are evidence of the uniquely rich and complex character of a music that spans more than one culture and more than one century. The volumes includes the most significant and up-to-date Mahler research and debate, and illumines some hitherto unexplored areas of Mahler's life eg. his visit to London in 1892, his sculptor daughter, Anna, and the hall in which the Seventh Symphony was first performed in Prague in 1908. It has often been claimed that Mahler, born in 1860, was in fact a prophet of much that was to come in the 20th century. His later works undeniably anticipate, often with dazzling virtuosity, many of the principal techniques and aesthetics of the new century, only the first decade of which he lived to see. Small wonder that among his earliest admirers was a collective of some of the most important and innovative composers of our time, Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern. Their successors (Copland, Shostakovich, and Britten, to name a few) were to range across contrasting cultures and national frontiers. Drawing on the best resources and the most up-to-date information about the composer, this volume fulfils the need in Mahler literature for a genuinely comprehensive guide to the composer and will be the authoritative guide for Mahler enthusiasts for years to come. Price indication: $ 98.99

Michael Kennedy Mahler (Master Musicians Series) Oxford University Press, 2001; ISBN 0198164807; 256 pages Celebrating its 100th anniversary, this extraordinary series continues to amaze and captivate its readers with detailed insight into the lives and work of music's geniuses. Unlike other composer biographies that focus narrowly on the music, this series explores the personal history of each composer and the social context surrounding the music. In a precise, engaging, and authoritative manner, each volume combines a vivid portrait of the master musicians' inspirations, influences, life experiences, even their weaknesses, with an accessible discussion of their work--all in roughly 300 pages. Further, each volume offers superb reference material, including a detailed life-and-times chronology, a complete list of works, a glossary highlighting the important people in the composer's life, and a select bibliography. Under the supervision of music expert and series general editor Stanley Sadie , Master Musicians will certainly proceed to delight music scholars, serious musicians, and all music lovers for another hundred years. In this revised edition, Michael Kennedy has drawn on new documentary evidence which has enabled him to give a much fuller account of Mahler's childhood and youth, and of his years as an opera conductor in Cassel, Prague, Leipzig, Budapest, Hamburg, and Vienna. All Mahler's works are discussed, and the latest research on the Eighth Symphony and Das Lied von der Erde has been incorporated. Price indication: $ 12.89

Henry-Louis De La Grange Gustav Mahler : Vienna : The Years of Challenge (1897-1904) Oxford University Press, 1995; ISBN 0193151596; 944 pages 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. Price indication: $ 99.50

Kurt Blaukopf and Herta Blaukopf Mahler: His Life, Work and World Thames & Hudson, 2000; ISBN 0500281971; 256 pages 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. Price indication: $ 16.26

Gustav Mahler and Knud Martner and Antony Beaumont and Henry-Louis De LA Grange and GUNTHER WEISS an Gustav Mahler: Letters To His Wife Cornell University Press, 2004; ISBN 0801443407; 431 pages 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. Price indication: $ 26.40

Stuart Feder Gustav Mahler : A Life in Crisis Yale University Press, 2004; ISBN 0300103409; 368 pages 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. Price indication: $ 26.37

Peter Franklin The Life of Mahler (Musical Lives) Cambridge University Press, 1997; ISBN 0521467616; 240 pages As a leading European conductor and the composer of enormous and controversial symphonies, Gustav Mahler (1860-1911) inspired mythologizers in his own lifetime. Some of them were personal friends, concerned with countering biased criticism of him in which German-nationalist, hide-bound traditionalist or anti-Semitic elements were often mixed. In this new biography, Peter Franklin reconfronts the myth of Mahler-the-misunderstood-hero and attempts to find the person, or persons, behind the legends. His illuminating biography shows Mahler to be a profoundly sensitive thinker and composer, a dictatorial conductor and husband, an iconoclast and paradoxically, a traditionalist. Price indication: $ 23.99

Norman Lebrecht Mahler Remembered W W Norton & Co Inc, 1988; ISBN 0393025721; 322 pages Price indication: (used only): from $ 26.97

Susanne Keegan Alma Mahler: Bride of the Wind Viking Adult, 1992; ISBN 0670805130; 368 pages Price indication: (used only): from $ 9.90

Henry-Louis de La Grange Mahler Doubleday, 1973; ISBN 0385005245 Price indication: (used only): from $ 64.99

David B. Greene Mahler, Consciousness and Temporality Gordon & Breach Publishing Group, 1984; ISBN 0677061609; 314 pages Price indication: (used only): from $ 47.20

Sheet music, libretti, etc.

Das Lied Von Der Erde in Full Score - Dover Publications
The great Austrian composer’s most highly regarded work, a fusion of song and symphony epitomizing both his genius and the very spirit of late Romanticism. Reprinted from the original Viennese edition published in 1912 by Universal Edition, with English translations of song texts. Table of contents.<br>

Songs of a Wayfarer and Kindertotenlieder in Full Score - Dover Publications
Two orchestral song cycles, one from the early period and one from the late, that richly display Mahler’s intense romanticism and his genius in composing for voice and orchestra. Reprinted from authoritative Viennese and German editions.<br>

Symphonies Nos 3 and 4 in Full Score - Dover Publications
Two brilliantly contrasting masterworks—one scored for a massive ensemble of full orchestra, two choruses and soloist, the other for small orchestra and soloist, the latter also marking Mahler’s move into the contrapuntal style of all his later works. Reprinted from authoritative Viennese editions with new translations of texts.<br>

Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 in Full Score - Dover Publications
Handsome, inexpensive volume reproduces authoritative Austrian editions of the Symphony No. 1 in D Major ("Titan") and Symphony No. 2 in C Minor ("Resurrection"). Beautifully printed unabridged scores reveal vivid orchestration, innovative symphonic structure, rich emotional expression, foreshadowing of 20th-century musical ideas.<br>

Symphonies Nos. 5 and 6 in Full Score - Dover Publications
In these two works, Mahler moved beyond his song-oriented earlier works to take up the challenges of the purely instrumental symphony. The result was two of his most emotionally compelling, most often performed symphonic works. Both are reprinted here from authoritative full-score editions.<br>

Symphony No. 6 in A Minor - Dover Publications
The appearance of this work brings Dover's miniature-score library of the nine Mahler symphonies to near completion; only Symphony No. 7 remains to be published. Dating from the composer's prolific period of 1903-4 and following Mahler's marriage to Alma Schindler by just a year, the draft of this remarkable work--subtitled "Tragic"--is represented by 28 current recordings. The symphony incorporates "portraits" of Alma in the first movement and of children playing in a diabolical Scherzo--a musical prediction, some say, of the tragedy that was to strike the Mahler family within three years.<br>

Symphony No. 7 In Full Score - Dover Publications
One of the composer’s most popular, accessible works, the 7th has neither a "program" or folk-song theme. It is a purely instrumental composition, both hopeful and romantic in feeling. Reprinted from the authoritative German edition of 1909. List of instruments. Glossary of German terms.<br>

Symphony No. 9 In Full Score - Dover Publications
This landmark of 20th-century symphonic writing, one of Mahler’s most popular and admired works, is notable for innovation, poetic drama and the fresh and formidable thinking Mahler brought to its composition. The full orchestral score is reprinted here from authoritative Universal-Edition, Vienna, 1912. New glossary of German terms.<br>

The Ruckert Lieder and Other Orchestral Songs in Full Score - Dover Publications

Three Song Cycles in Vocal Score : Songs of a Wayfarer, Kindertotenlieder and Das Lied Von Der Erde - Dover Publications
In one convenient volume: vocal scores of Mahler’s 3 great song cycles in authoritative editions. Each complete vocal score consists of the original text, the vocal line of the music and a reduction for piano of the full orchestral score.<br>