Hundreds of the letters that Gustav Mahler addressed to his parents and siblings survive, yet they have remained virtually unknown. Now, for the first time Mahler scholar Stephen McClatchie presents over 500 of these letters in a clear, lively translation in The Mahler Family Letters . Drawn primarily from the Mahler-Rose Collection at the University of Western Ontario, the volume presents a complete, well-rounded view of the family's correspondence. Spanning the mid 1880s through 1910, the letters record the excitement of a young man with a bourgeoning career as a conductor and provide a glimpse into his day-to-day activities rehearsing and conducting operas and concerts in Budapeast and Hamburg, and composing his first symphonies and songs. On the private side, they document his parents' illnesses and deaths and the struggles of his siblings Alois, Justine, Otto, and Emma. The letters also give Mahler's insightful impressions of contemporaries such as Johannes Brahms, Richard Strauss, and Hans von Bulow, as well as his personal feelings about significant events, such as his first big success--the completion of Carl Maria von Weber's Die drei Pintos in 1889. In the fall of 1894, the character of the letters changes when Justine and Emma come to live with Mahler in Hamburg and then Vienna, removing the need to communicate by letter about quotidian matters. At this point, the letters relay noteworthy events such as Mahler's campaign to be named Director of the Vienna Court Opera, his conducting tours throughout Europe, and his courtship of Alma Schindler. The Mahler Family Letters provides a vital, nuanced source of information about Mahler's life, his personality, and his relationships. McClatchie has generously annotated each letter, contextualizing and clarifying contemporary historical references and Mahler family acquaintances, and created an indispensable resource for all Mahlerists, 19th-century musicologists, and historians of 19th-century Germany and Austria.

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. Following Mahler’s 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, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world. Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.

A biography of Gustav Mahler and his family. Describes his youth, his musical career, and his circle of Jewish friends. Pp. 212-558 relate the fate of members of his family and of his friends in the Holocaust.

DIV With National Socialism's arrival in Germany in 1933, Jews dominated music more than virtually any other sector, making it the most important cultural front in the Nazi fight for German identity. This groundbreaking book looks at the Jewish composers and musicians banned by the Third Reich and the consequences for music throughout the rest of the twentieth century. Because Jewish musicians and composers were, by 1933, the principal conveyors of Germany’s historic traditions and the ideals of German culture, the isolation, exile and persecution of Jewish musicians by the Nazis became an act of musical self-mutilation. Michael Haas looks at the actual contribution of Jewish composers in Germany and Austria before 1933, at their increasingly precarious position in Nazi Europe, their forced emigration before and during the war, their ambivalent relationships with their countries of refuge, such as Britain and the United States and their contributions within the radically changed post-war music environment. /div

"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 reveal his troubled state. It was a four-hour consultation with Sigmund Freud in Leiden, Holland, that 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."--BOOK JACKET.

__________________________ 'Fascinating ... Haste paints a portrait of a woman who was born to triumph, not surrender' - Harper's Bazaar 'Written in elegant, lucid prose ... a treasure trove of European cultural riches and scandalous intrigue ... Compelling' - Economist 'Lively, well illustrated and enjoyably juicy' - Miranda Seymour, Financial Times __________________________ The life of an extraordinary artist and intellect: the composer, author and socialite Alma Mahler, whose life spanned one of the most captivating and dramatic periods in history Alma Mahler was once at the epicentre of Vienna's artistic and intellectual life. A talented composer in her own right, she was open, generous, remarkably creative, curious, challenging and zealous in her pursuit of love. Artists, architects, musicians and writers jostled to join her coterie. Gustav Klimt was her first kiss; Gustav Mahler her first husband. But her life was haunted by tragedy, and the support and inspiration that Alma gave to the men she loved came at the heavy price of her own artistic fulfilment. Drawing extensively on previously unpublished diaries and letters, Cate Haste illuminates the passionate spirit of one of history's most complex and charismatic muses, a modern woman with an elemental vitality that could scarcely be contained by her century – who will live forever in the art she created and inspired.

Without an understanding of the conflicts of Mahler's youth one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song cycles of his later years. Available again for a new generation of Mahlerians, Donald Mitchell's famous study of the composer's early life and music was greeted as a major advance on its first appearance in 1958. Revised and updated in the early 1980s, thispaperback edition includes a new introduction by the author to bring this classic work once again to the forefront of Mahler studies. From his birth in Bohemia, then part of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire, to a surveyof his early works, many now lost, Gustav Mahler: The Early Years forms an indispensable prelude to the period of the great compositions. The conflicts which came to mark Mahler's music and personality had their beginningsin his childhood and youth. Without understanding the territorial, social and familial conflicts of this time one cannot truly appreciate the impulses behind the major symphonies and song cycles of his later years. DONALD MITCHELL was born in 1925. Two composers have been central to his writings on music, Gustav Mahler and Benjamin Britten. His three studies of Mahler, The Early Years (1958), The Wunderhorn Years (1975), and Songs and Symphonies of Life and Death (1985), are among the enduring monuments of postwar Mahler literature. He was founder Professor of Music at the University of Sussex (1971-76), was visiting Professor atKing's College, London, and is currently a visiting Professor at the Universities of Sussex and York.