Mahler's 10 symphonies and Das Lied von der Erde are intensely personal statements that have touched wide audiences. This survey examines each of the works, revealing their programmatic and personal aspects, as well as Mahler's musical techniques.

"In the glittering hotbed of turn-of-the-twentieth-century Vienna, one woman's life would define and defy an era ... Gustav Klimt gave Alma her first kiss. Gustav Mahler fell in love with her at first sight and proposed only a few weeks later. Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius abandoned all reason to pursue her. Poet and novelist Franz Werfel described her as "one of the very few magical women that exist." But who was this woman who brought these most...

"The world premiere of Gustav Mahler's Eighth Symphony in Munich in 1910 was the artistic breakthrough for which the composer had yearned all his life, filling Munich's huge Neue Musik-Festhalle on two successive evenings to rapturous and tumultuous applause. Representatives of many European royal houses were in attendance, along with luminaries of literary and musical world. Also in attendance were Alma Mahler, the composer's young wife, and Alma's...

THE ENGLISH DISEASE is a remarkable feat, a story that mixes the Marx brothers and Maimonides, pornographic yoga with Polish paranoia, and the brutality of kindergarten with the beauty of the Kiddush. It's the tale of Charles Belski, an expert in the works of Gustav Mahler, who, like Mahler himself, is talented and neurotic, and a nonpracticing Jew. Belski suffers guilt over his own contribution to the decline of the Jewish religion, especially...

Why Mahler? Why does his music affect us in the way it does? Norman Lebrecht, one of the world's most widely read cultural commentators, has been wrestling obsessively with Mahler for half his life. Pacing out his every footstep from birthplace to grave, scrutinizing his manuscripts, talking to those who knew him, Lebrecht constructs a compelling new portrait of Mahler as a man who lived determinedly outside his own times. Mahler was--along with Picasso,...

Publisher Marketing: GUSTAV MAHLER MEMORIES AND LETTERS MAHLER AS A CONDUCTOR 1910 by Alma Mahler PREFACE I WROTE this book many years ago, and my only reason for doing so was because no one knew Gustav Mahler so well as I and because I did not want the experiences we shared and the expressions of his thought to be crowded out of my own memory by the pressure and hurry of life. It was not originally my intention to have the book published during my...

Conducting Mahler documents the interpretations of Gustav Mahler's compositions by conductors Bernard Haitink, Riccardo Chailly, Riccardo Muti, Claudio Abbado and Simon Rattle. The film includes rehearsals and performances of each of Mahler's ten symphonies at the Mahler Festival in May 1995. Mahler : Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen is based on Mahler's 9th symphony. In this film Riccardo Chailly and biographer Henry-Louis de la Grange analyse...