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Why Mahler?: How One Man and Ten Symphonies Changed Our World

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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.

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.

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

First,a confession. When I was fifteen or sixteen,I purchased my first record of Mahler. This was his Fifth Symphony.I admit that after some minutes I gave it up. Perhaps my teen years were not suitable for this kind of music or vice-versa.
After many years,in my forties,I tried my luck again. This time I listened to the First and Fifth Symphonies and felt there was something unique with Mahler's music. To such an extent that after some weeks,Mahler has become an obssesion with me and had from then on ranked as the second most favourite composer,the first one still being Beethoven.
I have also bought and read almost all the major works published on Mahler both in English and German.
Now we come the Norman Lebrech's new book,"WHY MAHLER"?
First,this book is a mishmash of journalistic writing, personal reflections,academic quotations,narcissism and other different styles of pulp-fiction styles-all these written in the present tense.
To be honest,I know of no composer or any other artist of Mahler's magnitute who had managed to change the world. The world,volens nolens, is not ruled or governed by artists,thus the pompous sub-title is definitely redundant.
Now,pay attention to the following ideas written in this farcical book;"the Third movement of the First Symphony is the way the world's protests and indifference against infant mortality
rates of 56% !"
The opening of the Third is an implied protest against racial discrimination. Next:the Sixth is Mahler's foretelling of WW1 and WW2 plus the Holocaust. Do you want to know why? Because the German conductor Klaus Tennstedt said so once.
Next,there is a connection between Mahler's hemorrhoids to Lebrecht's gall bladder operation.
But all this is nothing compared to the fact that the author has visited and has seen Mahler's bathtub in Vienna. Therefore: "I could not resist to take a dip"(p.169).
Another item concerns Vienna's anti-Semitism which was rampant during those times when the composer was living there. Here comes another smash sentence: "The appalling prospect of genocide germinates around the Ring of Mahler's Vienna"(p.41). There was never talk about any Holocaust at that time,Mr Lebrecht.
Now let us have a look at page 9,where Lebrecht writes:"...the Third addressed ecological damage and the Fourth proclaimed racial equality."
Really? On he same page,just four lines under,Lebrecht writes :"Mahler never made his meaning explicit. What is best in music is not to be found in the notes and it was up to the musicians and listeners to interpret the meaning behind them".
In other words: the axiomatic approach of Lebrecht in respect to Mahler's symphonies is not only unfounded,full of contradictions made by the author himself, but it is also preposterous.
Still to come is Mahler's wedding which took place at Karlskirche in Vienna,where Mahler,according to Lebrecht has seen the tetragrammaton on the altar and because of this "he sinks to his knees,misses his footing and falls".
This kind of accident has never happened in reality.It is a figment of a fertile imagination.
After leaving Vienna, Mahler "docks at Cherbourg,anticipating pleasure. He stomps up and down the corridor". Based on what written documentation,Mr.Lebrecht?
Mahler is also a kind of miracle medicine for those suffering from testicular cancer. Wow,guess what? His music managed to help cure one flautist by the name of Gareth Davies. How come this works? How come the medical community has been spending trillions of dollars on research to find a cure for this terrible disease but is not acquainted with Mr. Lebrecht's cure? Why Mahler? "Just ask the players".(pp.276-279)Thus, playing Mahler will certainly cause some billions of sick and disease-ridden neurons and cell to either destroy themselves or vanish into thin air.Just ask Norman. He knows best!
Next,Lebrecht declares that other reseachers do not have the faintest idea about Mahler, even the most eminent of them, Baron Henry-Louis de La Grange's,whose books "after a while,the repetition of mundane events becomes tedious and the analysis of character and music is often superficial"(.p.289)
Tagore who is mentioned in the book was never a philosopher,but a poet.
Alma Mahler is another star who fills up many pages of Lebrecht's book. It will take only an ignorant man or woman to take Alma's words seriously, since an endless number of researchers have dismissed her writings long ago as the most non-reliable ones.
One could go on and on but if you think that you will enjoy this book by reading all these jokes and the other rubbish,y ou are mistaken. You had better save your money and spend it on another well-researched book on Mahler. There are so many and wonderful biographies of this great composer.
I am sure that Mahler did not deserve this kind of farcical and pompous rubbish!

Quite honestly, I'm not a huge fan of Lebrecht, but I am a huge admirer of Mahler and those who perform and record Mahler's music. This book is obviously a labor of love for the author. He knows his subject; he knows the music; and he is familiar with many of the characters in the Mahler drama. Yes, Lebrecht interjects himself too often, and perhaps he's guilty of name dropping ("When I had coffee with so-and-so), but that doesn't negate the passion of his writing and his unstinting love of all things Mahler. He makes some odd connections, and some broad, questionable generalizations, but after studying Mahler for over 30 years, I think he has a right to do just that. If you have even a passing interest in the music of Mahler and the times in which he lived, I urge to read this book. As for his recording recommendations - I didn't agree with all of them (but at the end of the day, one's reaction to a performance or performer is not always objective - it can (and usually is) an emotional gut reaction. And contrary to one reviewer here, thanks to Lebrecht, I'm listening to Tennstedt's Mahler now, and I've discovered a very true voice who had a lot to say about Mahler's music.

"... In a speeded-up, homogenized society, he [Mahler] allows us to think that the individual mind can survive. He urges us to see the bigger picture, to listen to the unsaid. He continues the conversation. He makes critics of us all."

I am the first person to admit that I am ill-qualified, on one level, to critique this book (and it was from the libary, thank god). With the exception of the outer movements of the Ninth and the last movevment of the Tenth, I have no affinity with Mahler whatsoever.

Even so, woolly old Norman is long overdue for a shave at Dr Ockham's Razor Emporium.

The maxim 'there is no such thing as a bad book' is almost belied by this publication. Lebrecht has every right to be besotted by Mahler but not to the extent that causation goes out the door. So HOW did Mahler change the world when 99.99% of people do not know who he is, and those that do are divided in their opinions towards him? To attribute today's social concerns - racism, ecology - to Gustav is to draw a very long bow indeed, and anachronistically so. One can only laugh at the fluffy evidence - Gorby & Rita once attended the Fifth, thus triggering Glasnost.

Equally - a wonderful word - I detect a strong anti-smoking message in the Fifth; and the last movement of Six warns mankind to reduce its carbon footprint.

Surely, the more one embeds Mahler in immanence, the more one trivialises his accomplishment. "My kingdon is not of this world."

Adding to the yelps, Lebrecht trotts out his usual pet-likes and dislikes, performance-wise. Ho hum.

All in all, this is junk. If is far more self-indulgent than the Maestro Myth, and that's saying something. Norman would have been more honest to himself and the reader if he had penned something akin to Hans Kung's hagiographical Mozart: Traces of Transcendence).

For those with Mahlerian ears to hear, surely there are much better alternatives in the marketplace.

As a Mahler fan, I find the question "Why is Mahler so popular in the 21st century" an interesting one. I accept that the issue is going to be subjective.

It gradually became clear to me that this book has nothing to do with the 21st century or with the modern world. It is written by an older person, talking to people in their 80s. Rather than getting the input of the many conductors doing their "Mahler cycle", or other younger contemporary artists driving Mahler in the 21st century, we get 236 pages of old-fashioned opinionated views that are out of touch with how we currently think (the book was so poor that I refused to read the end - Lebrecht's opinion on which conductor made the best recordings - in order not to spoil my personal appreciation of all the records I have)

The book does follow the very modern trend of the celebrity culture and selling books based on some far-out theories about the subject.

I hope somebody makes some fun of Lebrecht explaining to him that in the 21st century indeed science would have found a solution for Mahler's problems - but maybe not in the way he thinks. After reading this book you get the impression the solution to his problems would be Viagra.

Maybe one of the reasons Mahler is so popular in the 21st century is the internet - we can all freely exchange information about composers we like. We no longer need critics like Mr Lebrecht. Critics haunted Mahler during his life. Mr Lebrecht might have had positive intentions - but his book really did not help a 21st century audience.

Let's start with the designation "Changed our world." One of the many hyperboles in this short, unsatisfying work. Mahler touched millions of intelligent, sensitive listeners who found themselves in his music. This is a far cry from changing our world. Lebrecht "is in favor of" the social media, so we can't look to him for scholarship. This work is at tne bottom of the heap, in my view. Look to the superior bios by Carr, Franklin and Kennnedy - and for the very serious Mahlerite, the gigantic and microcosmic multi-tome study by Henry Louis de la Grange (rare and expensive) - a work of genius. Unless you're passingly curious about GM, get one of the others works to read. Think of how many tress we could save if we left junk like this unprinted... ;-))

I must report, with due regret, that this work is in many regards a pinch loaf. I say this despite the author's authority and expertise. Here's why I think so.

Lebrecht's command of the epistolary and documentary records of Mahler's life is not in question, and informs the book throughout. Mahler emerges as a deeply idiosyncratic, ambivalent man, a conflicted and often hysterical figure, whose difficulties were compounded by the prejudices and bigotry of his historical time and place. The freight of this characterization amounts chiefly to this: that the contradictions, conflicts, and vexations of Mahler's life inform his art---that the copresence of what seem to be mutually exclusive convictions and ideas that appear in the symphonies appear also in the man, and are products of his historical situation. Since this capacity to confront the listener with the simultaneity of contradictory propositions or moods is a central feature of Mahler's style, this is an interesting thesis, though hardly an original one (even for Lebrecht). I have no gripe with this as a reading of Mahler---indeed, I think there is a good deal of truth to it---but it is not, let me begin by saying, a Mahlerian invention (Mahler's work is an intervention in a tradition, a bold attempt to enlarge a form to cosmic dimensions, but surely the coincidentia oppositorum Lebrecht describes appears, in various forms, in Renaissance art (Shakespeare is a prime example), in Mozart (every joy shadowed by sorrow, no sorrow without a hint of joy, for all the constraints of 18th century classicism), in Romanticism (Keats' "negative capability," the fluctuations between storm and sunshine in Chopin, etc.), and so on. And it is here that my misgivings begin: with Lebrecht's compulsive, omnipresent hyperbole.

Lebrecht's Mahler-worship is like Harold Bloom's of Shakespeare: in trying to make Mahler, one man, the shaping voice of modern consciousness, Lebrecht winds up reducing the complexity of larger human context to which Mahler belonged, the traditions he capped off, and the recontextualizations of tradition he---but not only he---anticipated, or inspired by negative example. Mahler did not invent us or our musical sensibility, even if he speaks to us profoundly. Lebrecht's frothing exuberance sometimes has the effect of making his subject, his project, and his own learning, seem risible.

The problem with *Why Mahler?* is acutely manifest at the level of style. Even if Lebrecht does not go quite as far as Bloom (who claims Shakespeare invented what we think of as "the human"), the tone of his prose testifies against him. In an effort to keep the story gripping, the narrative is written mostly in a livid, slavering present-tense. This grows tiresome, especially when one considers how quotidian so many of the details really are. After a short time, the reader is overstimulated. Readers of this book will recognize how the following might qualify as a parody of Lebrecht's style: "Mahler, whose hemorrhoids are again ablaze, takes a ferocious dump and becomes terribly depressed. He walks the streets sobbing, bleeding from his breeches, his hair wild, and wet from immersion in the toilet. He barks and snarls at passing dogs: the local hounds, still unused to the Mahlerian temper, cringe in terror. A member of the orchestra reports in his diary that Mahler arrives at the opera house that day 'with flashing eyes, toilet paper streaming from his chin and flapping wildly as he shouts instructions and twirls the baton with demoniac intensity.' By the end of the day, Mahler has savagely beaten a violist for failing to observe absolute precision. Throughout the beating, the toilet paper remains fixed to his chin. In this event we see the germ of ideas that will resurface in the tumultuous Sixth Symphony." The chief difference between this parody and the text of much of this book is that the parody is (arguably) funnier.

The stylistic problem reflects, in part, a thematic effort to make Mahler the man---fussy, violent-tempered, often contemptible, and almost comically frail, and thus in a grand tradition that includes his heroes Beethoven and Wagner---the equivalent of the body of work he produced. If the lives of artists prove anything, it is usually that works of seeming universality can emerge from the most pathetic eccentricities. Mahler's work is greater than the man who wrote them. To put the same thought another way: I can listen to the symphonies endlessly, but I don't think I'd have enjoyed having a beer with their composer. I could say the same about Beethoven, or about John Milton, or about Michelangelo (and great as he was and is, Mahler does not belong in the full-dress company of those giants).

Putting aside rabid prose and an oft-overreaching effort to supply links between quotidian minutiae and transcendent achievement, a still graver objection to this work emerges when Lebrecht appears to reach for subject matter he does not command as well as he commands Mahleriana. Exemplary in this regard is Lebrecht's handling of Nietzsche, whose "philosophies" he calls "turgid" (anyone who know Nietzsche's glorious prose knows that the ideas are polarizing, but hardly turgid). Worse still, Lebrecht seems to buy into the cartoon vision of the history of philosophy that sees Nietzsche as an anti-Semite and forerunner of the Third Reich. Certainly Hitler misappropriated Nietzsche's name and work for his own hideous ends, but Nietzsche himself hated anti-Semitism and was, in fact, very hard on the German people. Nietzsche, for all his real faults and contradictions, would not have deemed Mahler an "Untermensch" on account of his Jewish heritage. When Lebrecht depicts Mahler reading Nietzsche for refreshment but then salubriously disposing of him, he does so with barely concealed triumph, as if Mahler's reading tastes are the determinant by which Nietzsche, a titan himself, should be judged.

All of this said, Lebrecht's revealing, if too brief, assessments of the symphonies are engaging and insightful, and there are many passages in this book that capture the imagination. The account of a childhood experience of hearing riotous tavern noise while watching a child's funeral procession informed the composer's First Symphony, for example, is compelling (if also shopworn from retelling).

The book is, then, a bit overzealous, a bit cartoonish, and devolves into unwitting self-parody in its tendentious effort to make Gustav Mahler himself a kind of modern hero. The hero is the art; the man was just a man with a superlative gift, and one longs for more moments of stark but sensitive ethical judgment, such as one finds, for example, in Maynard Solomon's unblinking analyses of Beethoven (whatever we think of Solomon's Freudianism aside). Mahler has a place in the repertory and our world, and has no need of unqualified apologiae any more. His recuperation is complete. What we all stand to benefit from now is still closer study of Mahler's art, both on its own terms and in relation to that of others.

I do not, of course, object to a biography being just that, a life-story. I mean to suggest that a steadier, less fussy authorial voice would better serve those who seek to understand the man and his creations, and that past a certain point, it becomes dangerous to conflate these two. Whoever Mahler was, he wrote what he wrote, and what he wrote was great. That is his gift to us, and it is what commands our interest. For all but the obsessive, the minute details of his life are interesting only insofar as they illumine that contribution and contextualize it. The rest moulders in the grave.

What a shame that a book so full of fascinating, often new detail, interesting opinion, reportage, criticism (not the author's) and observation should be sunk by an absurd, infantile, cloying, patronizing, self-centered, almost unreadable prose style. As if that weren't enough, Lebrecht posits that Mahler has "replaced" Beethoven in cultural and musical importance - and expects after this to be taken seriously. Words fail me. Beethoven invented Mahler and almost made him irrelevant before he was born.

Has anyone noticed that Lebrecht forgot to compare Mahler's string trios and quartets, piano and violin sonatas, and piano and violin concerti to Beethoven's?