Mahler and His World

From the composer's lifetime to the present day, Gustav Mahler's music has provoked extreme responses from the public and from experts. In this volume, musicologists and historians examine the broader political, social and literary changes reflected in Mahler's music.

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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