Mahler and His World

Published by Princeton University Press 2002

Mahler and His World

Edited by: Karen Painter

Volume 13 in the series The Bard Music Festival

https://doi.org/10.1515/9780691218359

Overview
Contents

About this book

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. His advocates have produced countless studies of the composer's 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-siècle 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 German counterpart, Camilla Bork, and by the American Mahler expert Stephen Hefling.

Mahler's symphonies challenged Europeans and Americans to experience music in new ways. Before his decision to move to the United States, the composer knew of the enthusiastic response from America's urban musical audiences. Mahler and His World reproduces reviews of these early performances for the first time, edited by Zoë Lang. The Mahler controversy that polarized Austrians and Germans also unfolds through a series of documents heretofore unavailable in English, edited by Painter and Bettina Varwig, and the terms of the debate are examined by Leon Botstein in the context of the late-twentieth-century Mahler revival.

Author / Editor information

Karen Painter is Associate Professor of Music at Harvard University. She is the recipient of a Berlin Prize and a Humboldt fellowship in Berlin.

Reviews

"[A] valuable addition to the Mahler library."

"The best thing in the [Bard Music] festival could have been enjoyed in the cool quiet of one's study: Ms. Painter's book. . . . The highlight is Mr. Botstein's own essay, a typically virtuosic riff on Theodor W. Adorno's book on Mahler. . . . But the book's other essays--on performance in late-19th-century Central Europe as a political statement on Mahle''s Jewishness, on gender issues and Ms. Painter's own discussion of the mass public gestures in Mahler's big works (especially the 'Symphony of a Thousand) and their connection to socialist cultural policy--are all worth reading. As are the musical analyses and the period reviews."---John Rockwell, The New York Times'

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Preface and Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	xi
PART I. CONTEXT AND IDEOLOGIES
Whose Gustav Mahler? Reception, Interpretation, and History Leon Bostein Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Mahler's Theater: The Performative and the Political in Central Europe, 1890-1910 Charles S. Maier Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	55
Mahler's Jewish Parable Talia Pecker Berio Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	87
A Soldier's Sweetheart's Mother's Tale? Mahler's Gendered Musical Discourse Peter Franklin Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
The Aesthetics of Mass Culture: Mahler's Eighth Symphony and Its Legacy Karen Painter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	127
PART II. ANALYSIS AND AESTHETICS
Musical Lyricism as Self-Exploration: Reflections on Mahler's "Ich bin der Welt abhanden gekommen" Camilla Bork Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	159
" . . . the heart-wrenching sound of farewell": Mahler, Riickert, and the Kindertotenlieder Peter Revers Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	173
In Search of Lost Time: Memory and Mahler's Broken Pastoral Thomas Peattie Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
Aspects of Mahler's Late Style Stephen E. Hefling Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
PART III. MAHLER'S AMERICAN DEBUT
Mahler's American Debut: The Reception of the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, 1904-1906 Zoe Lang Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	227
The American Premiere of Mahler's Fifth Symphony Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	239
Boston Symphony Orchestra Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	240
East Coast Tour Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	253
PART IV. MAHLER'S GERMAN-LANGUAGE GRITIGS
Mahler's German-Language Critics Karen Painter and Bettina Varwig Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Mahler as Conductor Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	272
The First Symphony Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	283
The Fifth Symphony Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	298
The Seventh Symphony Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	316
Das Lied von der Erde Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	332
Obituaries Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	344
The Mahler Amsterdam Festival, 1920 Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	357
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	381
Notes on the Contributors Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	391