Gustav Mahler, Vol. 3: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 1904-1907 [Hardcover]

Henry-Louis De La Grange (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 019315160X | ISBN-13: 978-0193151604 | Publication Date: May 25, 2000 | Edition: First

When the second volume of de La Grange's monumental study of Mahler appeared, it was hailed in The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, and many other publications as an indispensable portrait of the great composer. Here at last is the third volume of this magisterial work.
Ranging from 1904 to 1907, it explores Mahler's final years as administrator, producer, and conductor of the Vienna Opera. It was a time of intense inner struggle, with Mahler's energy and creative powers drained by the competing demands of running the Hofoper and struggling for recognition as a composer. And they were tragic years as well, especially 1907, Mahler's last year in Vienna, when the death of his daughter and the diagnosis of heart disease forced him to leave the Opera. Throughout the book, de La Grange offers true-to-life portraits of Mahler the human being, the family man, and the composer, and he weaves in innumerable testimonies and anecdotes that throw new light on the great composer's complex personality.
The product of forty years of research, here is the definitive study of a musical giant. It is, as The Wall Street Journal said of volume two, "a work of the first importance, one that nobody seriously interested in Mahler can possibly afford to skip."

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In this latest installment of a four-volume biography, de La Grange describes, in his usual voluminous but seldom tedious detail, four crucial years in the life of the great composer/conductor: the last four of his rule at the head of the Vienna State Opera, embracing great triumphs but also a mounting resistance to his often autocratic and undiplomatic ways. This was also the period when the Third and Fourth Symphonies began to make their way in the world, the Fifth was premiered and the Sixth, Seventh and highly unorthodox Eighth were written. The death in childhood of Mahler's beloved elder daughter, Putzi, and the first murmurings of the heart problems that would eventually kill the composer a few years later, were the hammer blows that erased Mahler's wish to continue at the Opera and set the stage for the departure for America and his final years at the New York Philharmonic. The scale of de La Grange's research is phenomenal: no fewer than 20 densely packed pages, for instance, are devoted to Mahler's trailblazing performance of Beethoven's Fidelio. There is more here than anyone but the most devoted Mahlerian would need to know, but de La Grange's work stands as a highly accessible monument to a certain kind of scholarship. Illustrations, music examples and detailed analyses of Symphonies Six, Seven and Eight. (Jan.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

A masterly deployment of every retrievable fact about the driven Austrian composer-conductor of genius (18601911) during these tumultuous years. De La Grange (president, Gustav Mahler Musical Library, Paris) takes up directly from Vol. 2 (1995; Vol. 1, 1973) with Mahlers struggles to reenergize the fractious Hofoperthe Vienna Operathe court-sponsored repertory company he had directed since 1897. Provocative productions are revived via eye-catching descriptions; thumbnail portraits reanimate Viennas singers, musicians, stagefolk, and bureaucrats. Able to compose only during vacations, in this brief span Mahler created the prodigious, forward-looking Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth symphonies, granted elaborate analyses in an appendix. Memoirs and interviews testify how this Napoleon of the baton tirelessly rehearsed his works and others, old and new, contending, Tradition is nothing else than sloppiness. Every performance is chronicled, thanks to the periods florid prolix journalism (often marred by Austrias endemic anti-Semitism), castigating his failures and successes alike. No wonder that, despite prescient champions, Mahler developed a persecution complex, lamenting he would be happy, oh happy to be a shoemaker! The biographer painstakingly reassembles Mahlers paradoxical character, intricate as his art, straightening the record about his relations with colleague and rival Richard Strauss; his problematical marriage to the complex and disconcerting Alma Schindler, 19 years his junior; and the fatal illness in late 1907 of his daughter, Maria, age four and a half. Anecdotes, aphorisms, and letters enliven the narratives progress toward the frustrated directors resignation from the Hofoper. Once Vol. 4 appears (following Mahler to New York to conduct and the diagnosis of the heart condition that led to his death at 50), de La Grange will have spent as long researching Mahlers life as it took to live it. A life-and-times motherlode for the aficionado; a requisite for performing-arts collections; a monument that will endure. (32 b&w photos, not seen) (Oxford Reference Book Society selection) -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1054 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA; First edition (May 25, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 019315160X
• ISBN-13: 978-0193151604
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #949,620 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

25 of 26 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Towers over them all., May 22, 2000

By 

George Grella "Urbane citizen" (Brooklyn) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gustav Mahler, Vol. 3: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 1904-1907 (Hardcover)

Much as Mahler himself towers over Romantic era composer, so does La Grange tower over all other Mahler biographers. Not that Mitchell et. al. don't do a fine job, they do. But for comprehensive detail and deep probing and understanding of Mahler's life and music, La Grange is simply at the highest peaks. This latest installment of his massive series sustains his high standards of research, realiability and readability and for all you devoted Mahlerians out there is a must read. For those curious about Mahler, this is actually not a great place to start; the cost alone to read these three books, so far, on Mahler is a bad investment if you don't yet worship his music! There are many single books that give a good overview of his life as a companion to his music, if not a real guide. For those of you, try Cooke or Kennedy, for the rest, worship here!

46 of 57 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A full life of Mahler?, June 1, 2000

By 

Alan Mason - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gustav Mahler, Vol. 3: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 1904-1907 (Hardcover)

The monumental biography of Mahler by Henri de la Grange has been available in French for some years, and the latest volume to appear in English is part of an ongoing project to make the work available to a wider audience. It is unique in the sheer mass of factual detail it presents, especially as regards contemporary critical reaction to Mahler's works and conducting. There is new material on William Ritter, an early admirer who left some colorful accounts of Herr Mahler in person; a

detailed physical description of Mahler by Alfred Roller, a Hofoper associate; and much other information that will be new and interesting even to long-standing Mahlerites who thought they knew it all.

However, de la Grange's almost exclusive focus on the externals of Mahler's life works to the detriment of the inner life, and this is the major shortcoming of his biography. There is little probing of the wellsprings of the mighty Mahlerian will that powered a colossal productivity, nor of the fierce vitality coexisting with neuroses. Nor, surprisingly, is much explanation offered as to why a tyrannical ascetic like Mahler would suddenly decide to marry someone half his age, a decision that took even his closest friends completely by surprise. Why didn't he stay single, or marry someone his own age, such as the devoted and musical Natalie Bauer-Lechner?

This question is important because it bears on the crucial one: Would Mahler have succeeded in solving the central problem of his last years -- keeping reality at bay in order to maintain the inhuman intensity needed to complete his unique artistic mission -- without the tension generated by this inappropriate (but for him richly symbolic) and largely sexless marriage, for which he, and to some extent also Alma's parents, were guilty? Did he feel this guilt and at a certain level feed on it? de la Grange draws a blank on these questions. Here Alma's book "Gustav Mahler, Memoirs and Letters" is a better source, though one has to read between the lines.

de la Grange clearly dislikes Alma and would minimize her role. He also worships Mahler and will not permit him the slightest fault. Two examples: He cannot conceive that the hero may have had a congenital heart defect, it must have been acquired from throat infections. He omits to mention that Mahler's idolized mother Marie was born lame and with a defective heart. According to Alma, who'd have no reason to make this up, all the children were handicapped by the mother's heart disease; there is also anecdotal evidence provided by Bruno Walter and others. Another example: de la Grange will not admit that the finale to the Seventh may be a miscalculation, however interesting. Thus he advances a tortured argument to turn black into white, and puts himself in the position of an "apologist nervous to the point of obduracy" (Adorno's words). In the process, he

completely ignores evidence that Mahler himself was uncomfortably aware of the problem (see the foreword by Redlich to the Eulenberg pocket score of the Seventh).

Mahler is a Freudian figure if ever there was one, and one can argue that the ideal of the eternal feminine, as symbolized by the composite Alma/Marie, became crucial to Mahler's sense of purpose, a major engine of his drive to create. Toward the end, he was psychologically completely dependent on her, even to the point of spouting nonsense regarding her abilities as a composer -- this, from the stern, inflexible director of the Hofoper! (The sad spectacle of Berlioz and his second wife Marie Recio comes to mind as another example of great-composer weakness.) That he had a mother fixation is attested by many, including Alma and Freud, and this would account for his lack of sexual interest; according to Alma, sex played only a very small part in his life. In any case, artistically the union was a brilliant success, even the marital crisis at the end serving to spur him on to new heights -- witness the Tenth Symphony with its impassioned marginalia addressed to Alma. With perfect timing, death then supervened to carry him off at the peak of his powers.

Although the music has lost none of its power and can speak for itself, there is still an unsatisfied need for a different kind of Mahler biography, one that is better balanced and probes the psychology of the man. For hagiography aside, Mahler's maladjustment was staggering even for his time, the hothouse atmosphere of fin-de-siecle Vienna just barely making his unique kind of greatness tenable. A great tortured artist on the scale of a Gustav Mahler is inconceivable today, our time doesn't allow it; we've been there, done that. He would be cured or killed at once, and in either case silenced. And for you computer game programmers out there, take heart -- in addition to a "Freudian" biography, there may be material here for an oeuvre of another sort perhaps more congenial to our age -- a soft-core computer game called "Let's cuckold Mahler". In any case, the music remains.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing, June 7, 2001

By 

George R. Park (Allen, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gustav Mahler, Vol. 3: Vienna: Triumph and Disillusion, 1904-1907 (Hardcover)

I had read the previous volume 2 of the life of Mahler several years ago and had anxiously awaited the issuance of this, the third in a four part series with high expectations.

I have not been disappointed. The extensive detail, expansive footnoting, and thorough research that went into this work is evident from the very first paragraph.

Highly recommended for any serious Mahler enthuasist.