Mahler's Forgotten Conductor

This book explores musician Heinz Unger’s negotiation of his German Jewish identity throughout his life, beginning with his time in Germany, extending through his exile in 1933, and continuing on to his time in Canada following the Second World War.

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Heinz Unger, born in Berlin, Germany, in 1895, was reared from a young age to follow in his father’s footsteps and become a lawyer. However, after attending a 1915 Munich performance of Gustav Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of the Earth) conducted by Bruno Walter, Unger decided to devote the rest of his life to music and particularly to the dissemination of Gustav Mahler’s music.

This microhistory explores how the double strands of German and Jewish identity converged in Unger’s lifelong struggle to grasp who he was. Critical to this understanding was Mahler’s music – a music that Unger endowed with exceptional meaning and that was central to his Jewish identity. This book sets this exploration of Unger’s “performative ritual” within a biographical tale of a life lived travelling the world in search of a home, a search that took the conductor from his native Germany to the Soviet Union, England, Spain, and, finally, Canada.