Although Gustav Mahler was a famous conductor in Vienna and New York, the music that he wrote was condemned during his lifetime and for many years after his death in 1911. “Pages of dreary emptiness,” sniffed a leading American conductor. Yet today, almost one hundred years later, Mahler has displaced Beethoven as a box-office draw and exerts a unique influence on both popular music and film scores.
Mahler’s coming-of-age began with such 1960s phenomena as Leonard Bernstein’s boxed set of his symphonies and Luchino Visconti’s film Death in Venice, which used Mahler’s music in its sound track. But that was just the first in a series of waves that established Mahler not just as a great composer but also as an oracle with a personal message for every listener. There are now almost two thousand recordings of his music, which has become an irresistible launchpad for young maestros such as Gustavo Dudamel.
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, Einstein, Freud, Kafka, and Joyce—a maker of our modern world.
“Mahler dealt with issues I could recognize,” writes Lebrecht, “with racism, workplace chaos, social conflict, relationship breakdown, alienation, depression, and the limitations of medical knowledge.” Why Mahler? is a book that shows how music can change our lives.
Why Mahler?
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Lebrecht, host of a BBC interview series on the arts, has a keen interest in Gustav Mahler dating back at least to his Mahler Remembered (1988), a collection of remembrances of Mahler by his contemporaries. Here Lebrecht leads readers through the composer’s turbulent personal life, the anti-Semitic European political milieu in which he moved, and the music of his time, concluding with an examination of Mahler’s 10 symphonies (one unfinished) and songs. So, why Mahler? Because he was at the center of seismic shifts in art, psychology, philosophy, politics, and music that still shape today’s world, Lebrecht argues. The author discusses recordings of each symphony and set of songs, and he offers a thoughtful coda to help new listeners find an entry to those points “where the Mahler fortress becomes a private refuge.” --Alan Moores
Review
“Very enjoyable to read, gossipy as well as learned, and it makes the man come to life.”
—The Economist
—The Economist
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37 of 41 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Sycophantic nonsense,
By MartinP "MartinP" (Nijmegen, The Netherlands) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World (Hardcover)
I've read many books on Mahler, and this is by a wide margin the most ridiculous and superfluous of them all. Did Mahler and his symphonies 'change the world'? Of course they didn't, and the closest Lebrecht comes to substantiating this silly claim is the observation that the Gorbatchovs were moved by a performance of the Fifth. The subtitle of this book gives a good idea of the overblown hyperbole with which it is filled. Lebrecht comes up with the weirdest notions about the symphonies in order to make them look relevant to our time: the First is about child death, he says, the Fourth about racism, the Sixth about war, the Seventh about impending ecological disaster. He offers only the skimpiest of underpinnings for these far flung ideas, if any at all. He also seems to forget that Mahler's symphonies don't need any such help.
It gets worse in the biographical section of the book, where the facts are decidedly subordinate to Lebrechts Big Idea about Mahler, i.e., that the composer was influenced to a very great extent by his jewish background. Let me quote one striking example of Lebrecht's method - and absurdity. It is a description of Mahler's and Alma's wedding. The groom, says Lebrecht (misreading Alma), when trying to kneel tripped over his prayer stool and fell flat on his face instead. The priest mocked him for it, gratified to see this little heathen duly floored. Why did Mahler really fall, wonders Lebrecht? He thinks he found the answer on a visit to the wedding location, the Karlskirche in Vienna. Over the high altar is the Hebrew tetragrammaton that symbolizes God. Mahler must have seen it, guesses Lebrecht. It confronted him with his ancestral heritage and the fact that a Jew like he had no business being in a church. Guilt and betrayal overwhelmed him and he had to create a diversion to get his act together again. Says Lebrecht - how very clever! Now for the facts. Mahler didn't fall to the floor at all, he simply knelt on the floor instead of on his prie-dieu, which, given his small stature, was a comical sight and drew some laughs. He cannot possibly have seen the tetragrammaton, as the composer and his wife were not married in the church itself, but in its sacristy, in order to avoid a public happening. It may seem just a detail, but Lebrecht's account of Mahler is riddled with such re-writes, leading up to such absurdities as claiming that Mahler's interest in the word 'ewig' is explained by its similarity to the Hebrew eh-vig and its association with the eternal, wandering Jew. Fact, conjecture, exaggeration and sheer fiction are mixed in a most disturbing way all through, so as to make Alma's memoirs look like a fount of objective fact by comparison. Not, perhaps, surprising from an author who just had a recent book retracted by the publisher due to it's many factual errors. Lebrecht quotes juicy bits from Alma's memoirs several times, by the way, only to add that of course they aren't true. So why quote them? Several times he slips into I-mode and weaves personal anecdote into Mahler's biography of which the relevance usually remains unclear. Sometimes the point seems to be no more than just to say to the reader, 'I knew Anna Mahler'. Peronal sympathies seem to be a strong guide for Lebrecht anyway; the Sixth is about war, because... Tennstedt said so once, during a dinner party. I found it pretty disgraceful to see an author who plays fast and loose with the facts like this criticize La Grange for being tedious and superficial. In the third part of the book Lebrecht shares his personal preferences regarding Mahler on disc. The listing is random, superficial and of course utterly subjective; at times, too, it remains unclear which recording he actually prefers (but why would you care). Statements he makes about the music can look knowledgeable at first glance, but at second glance turn out to be completely meaningless. "Miss the irony of the false-Brahms theme and the first movement fails," he says about the Third. But there is no evidence at all that this is a deliberate quote and there is any irony intended. And if so, how can a fortissimo unison theme played by 8 horns be made to sound ironic? Characterizations of interpretations seem to be guided mostly by the going stereotypes regarding conductors, so that Kubelik = bucolic, Boulez = coolly analytical, Solti = overexcited, et cetera. As elsewhere in the book, nonsense is not avoided. "It comes as close as any record has got to absolute notational accuracy," Lebrecht says about Kaplan's Vienna recording of the Second, and then his vanity prompts him to add: "I know because I was at the sessions." As if one needs to be at the sessions to be able to judge if a recording is true to the score. Didn't a single editor look at this book before it went into print, one wonders? So why Mahler? Lebrecht, in his overblown attempt to elevate Mahler to the status of a post-modern deity, forgets one very simple reason why Mahler is so popular. Listen, for instance, to the embarrassing applause bursting in right after the final pizzicato in Von Eschenbach's Philadelphia recording of the Sixth. This is not an audience shaken to the core by Mahler's devastating message; this is an audience elated after a wild orchestral thrill ride. A friend of mine once said after hearing Mahler's Fifth, "It's a kind of pornography, isn't it?" I think he hit the nail right on the head when it comes to the question why Mahler draws big crowds. And why Lebrecht? Honestly, I couldn't tell you.
61 of 73 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Autobiography Disguised as Scholarship,
This review is from: Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World (Hardcover)
From the very opening title, Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed our World, I was afraid that this going to be a horrid affair. Mr. Lebrecht's overly worshipful title seems intent upon making Mr. Mahler more important than he actually was. Yet, I am a great fan of Mr. Gustav Mahler and thought a more modern biography might contain some useful insights into what some of the latest Mahlerian scholarship has to offer, so be advised I did have some preconceived bias from the beginning. I was also however completely open to being entirely mistaken. I was, sadly, not at all. To call this book a piece of crap is, frankly, an insult to excrement, because at least excrement has some value as any gardner can attest. If you know anything about Mahler's life, then the book is completely worthless, for it is mainly basic details of Mahler's life coupled with an unfathomable moral pretentiousness that is not only off-putting, but is often completely non-sensical. Mr. Lebrecht contends that Mahler's 3rd Symphony is a reflection upon environmental degradation he was witnessing in turn of the twentieth century Europe. And, after all, what else is the 4th but a eloquent and timely treatment of racial inequality. Beyond Mr. Lebrecht's fawning over supposed themes in Mahler's symphonies (themes which I must point out are never burdened by any kind of academic scholarship at all), the work also contains Mr. Lebrecht's opinions upon the state of Mahler discography. Reading his selection of the greatest Mahler recordings I was very struck out how often Mr. Lebrecht seems determined to worship some of the most mediocre recordings upon the most spurious of reasons. He seems quite fond of Mr. Tennstedt's Mahler recordings, indeed, far more than his frankly less seminal contributions would ever suggest in terms of innovative interpretation of Mahler's symphonies. Mr. Duggan from music-web international is an excellent example of how a deeply committed intellectual decides upon the relative merits of recordings. However, my general advice is to read any of Mr. Lebrecht's recommendations and do the exact opposite. Reading this trite and egocentric piece, which contains far more of the author's subjective opinions than any actual scholarship, adds nothing to our understandings of Gustav Mahler. It reveals everything about Mr. Lebrecht's own subjective opinions presented in a completely facile and pompous manner.
40 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Beware---Paul above is not far off the mark though Norman is always worth reading.,
By
This review is from: Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World (Hardcover)
I adore Mahler Remembered Norman Lebrecht's book on Mahler from 20 years ago. I have also loved a lot of his writing, though his writing about being offended by Messiaen's music because of its devout Catholic nature, he being a descendent of Jews killed in the Holocaust gives you a sense of how opinionated and intense he can be. I understand on the one hand obviously but Messiaen also was imprisoned in the war. I wonder----How does he feel about the Mass In B Minor?? or, perhaps.....well, nothing good there lies. Anyway.....this book is indeed a bundle of little pick up sticks at times. A lot of emotion and visceral utterances about Norman's beloved Mahler. His thoughts on Le Grange's books and his defense of Alma's words turns back Mahler scholarship about 50 years. It's all opinion after a while and his opinions about the recordings are almost preposterous. He dismisses Bernstein's recordings with the exception of one, a highly overrated first Resurrection from the early 60's and his picks are often mercurial and peculiar at best. At least he recognizes the brilliance of the Lucerne Abbado series but Tennstedt, while wonderful, was not the be all and end all that Norman makes him out to be. A curio sadly. In his book "Who Killed Classical Music" he also loses the forest for the trees and spends so much time starting fires that by the time you get through the book your fingers are burned, there is no book left and you wonder what his thesis was to begin with. Rob
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